Editor’s note: This story references suicide. If you or a loved one is in crisis, resources are available here.
SEATTLE — Family members of a man who died by suicide in the downtown Seattle jail are suing King County for $5 million over a death they say could have been prevented.
Allen Duane McNutt, 59, was the fourth person to die by suicide in the jail in 2022, a rate experts described at the time as extreme. The following year, civil liberties advocates accused the jail of violating a longstanding agreement to provide adequate medical care.
Since 2022, the jail has made structural changes in cells to prevent suicides and restarted group programming to decrease isolation. In the past two years, there have been two deaths but no suicides at the jail.
McNutt was suicidal when he was booked into the Seattle jail, according to the lawsuit filed last week in King County Superior Court. He was arrested in a stolen vehicle case and on a separate bench warrant for allegedly stealing less than $2,000 worth of items from a Maple Valley shed in 2019.
McNutt was initially put in a special psychiatric unit for a day before he was cleared for general population and placed in an infirmary unit to detox from alcohol where he was able to hang himself.
A corrections officer later reported that McNutt had been banging on the window of his unit to get her attention but she didn’t respond, according to the lawsuit.
McNutt’s sons, Ryan and Michal McNutt, “want to prevent this from happening to other families in the future,” attorney Ian Leifer told The Seattle Times on Wednesday.
“They always thought that their father was safe in jail, and that wasn’t the case here,” he said.
Half a year after McNutt died, the ACLU of Washington filed a lawsuit against King County arguing jail conditions had deteriorated so much that the county was violating a legal agreement to protect the health and safety of incarcerated people.
One of the major issues has been severe understaffing. The jail limited misdemeanor bookings at the outset of the pandemic to prevent the spread of COVID-19 but kept that policy in place long after other COVID-19 restrictions were lifted because it had so few corrections officers to run the jail.
In 2022, the jail was down by about 100 officers, a fifth of the workforce. As of Wednesday, it was down 56 officers, according to the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention.
The jail has undergone a series of changes to prevent suicides over the past two years. Officials retrofitted 900 bunks, installed jump barriers and replaced sheets with tear-resistant fabric. It also restarted group therapy and in-person visitation and launched a program this year to dispense computer tablets to people inside the jail.
“We are saddened to have anyone in our care lose their life,” jail spokesperson Noah Haglund said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “We are committed to providing individuals with the behavioral health services, secure environment, and other supports they need to reduce the likelihood of self-harm. We examine each individual circumstance for potential ways to improve conditions for people in our care.”
The jail’s improvements around suicide prevention are “moving in the right direction, obviously. But continuing to make sure that there’s objective psych evaluations is one of the key issues,” Leifer said. “And making sure you do everything possible to help these people when they are in jail and they have been arrested.”
Tensions between the city and county over the lack of misdemeanor bookings and the downtown jail’s capacity reached a breaking point this year, and Seattle officials started arranging for new options.
In August, the Seattle City Council approved an agreement with the South Correctional Entity, a jail in Des Moines that has caused safety concerns, to take more misdemeanor bookings, though several logistical obstacles remain.
In September, the city renegotiated its contract with the county jail to allow up to 135 people at any given time to be booked for misdemeanors.
The city had been paying $20 million a year for 200 beds in the Seattle jail but since the pandemic began could only access 70 to 80 at a time.
Before the pandemic, King County held an average daily population of more than 1,000 people in its downtown Seattle jail. That number plummeted in 2020 under booking restrictions but returned to prepandemic levels two years later.
Now that the county is trying to balance more of its population between its Seattle jail and its Kent facility, the Seattle jail’s average daily population has hovered under 900 people so far this year. The overall daily population of the two jails is still lower than prepandemic numbers, from more than 1,900 in early 2020 to around 1,400 as of October.
