TRAGIC ACCIDENT OR INDIFFERENCE?
Unsettling Questions About Homeless Woman Who Died In Jail After Being Tossed From ER
IT’S A STORY OF GUTWRENCHING PROPORTIONS: A 29-year-old homeless mother in pain dies in a St. Louis jail cell minutes after being locked up for refusing to leave a hospital.
Anna Brown had visited St. Mary’s Health Center in Richmond Heights, Mo., complaining of pain in her legs. Hospital personnel who treated her could find nothing wrong and told police that she refused to leave. “My legs don’t work!” she screamed as she exited an exam. The mom to two young children was arrested and taken to jail, where she died minutes later.
It was Brown’s third trip within a week to a hospital for leg pain. Police escorted her out of one hospital and then arrested her at another. Apparently medical staff thought she was “drug seeking,” making up or exaggerating symptoms in order to receive narcotic pain relievers. Arresting officers dragged her out of a squad car and carried her into a cell because she said she was in too much pain to walk. A videotape shows her crying out in pain inside the small holding cell. Just 15 minutes later, she was dead.
An autopsy revealed that Brown died of blood clots that formed in her legs and then traveled to her lungs. No drugs were found in her system. A subsequent investigation concluded that St. Mary’s did not violate federal emergency laws requiring patients be treated despite ability to pay.
But Brown’s treatment has raised unsettling questions about whether her status as a homeless black woman led healthcare workers to dismiss her complaints. “If the police killed my daughter, I want to know,” Brown’s mother, Dorothy Davis, told the St. Lous Post-Dispatch which broke the story. “If the hospital is at fault, I want to know. I want to be able to tell her children why their mother isn’t here.”
Brown’s death was the culmination of a year of tragedy that began when a tornado destroyed her St. Louis home on New Year’s Eve 2010. She was forced to move, then lost her job at a sandwich shop which set off a calamitous collapse of her financial wellbeing. She then lost custody of her two children who were sent to live with her mother; Authorities would not allow her to stay in the same household. Up until the time of her death, Brown spent nearly five months bouncing from homeless shelter to shelter.
There is speculation that Brown was suffering from mental illness. But in videotape of her sitting in the back of a police car, she appears lucid and resolute. It’s an indictment of our society that no one would help her in her last months alive, or believe her in her last moments.
“People assume things because of they way they talk or the way they live or the things they do,” Brown’s sister Krystle told the Post-Dispatch. “My sister is not here today because people passed judgement.”
