Jail didn't know prisioner was tasered the night before?!?!?

Jail didn't know Hyde was Tasered Prisoners' mental, health conditions not necessarily passed on to corrections staff: official

PAUL MCLEOD
The Daily News

Corrections officials likely were not aware Howard Hyde had schizophrenia or that he had been Tasered the day before his death.

These are some of the revelations released yesterday by corrections officials after they completed an internal review of the hours and moments leading up to the 45-year-old man's death last Thursday.

Hyde arrived at the Burnside jail last Wednesday afternoon. Early that morning he had been arrested and charged with assaulting his common-law wife, Tasered by Halifax Regional Police, hospitalized and then released.None of this, nor that Hyde was schizophrenic, was formally relayed to jail guards."Our staff essentially knew what they had to know," said Fred Honsberger, executive director of correctional services with the Justice Department.

Only anecdotallyHonsberger said staff would have known Hyde had come from hospital, but if they had heard about the Tasering or schizophrenia, it would only have been anecdotally.Honsberger said staff wouldn't be told about things like that "unless it had a bearing on the dealings we had with the offender. Say, for instance, a person had a broken arm and it was just taken out of the cast or something, and they had come from the hospital. Our staff would know that. They would know that arm is very vulnerable."

Health workers at the jail examined Hyde and had him placed in health cells - single cells adjacent to the health-care area to allow a subject to be observed more closely. Honsberger said keeping a prisoner transferred from hospital in a health cell is not uncommon. Honsberger said Hyde spent much of the night pacing in his cell, though he did lie down at some points.In the morning, Hyde was escorted to the admissions area when he began to resist."

The level of resistance he showed was, I suppose, typical of offenders sometimes when they don't want to go somewhere," said Honsberger.Hyde was handcuffed and calmed down temporarily. But as he was being brought to a holding cell, he began to struggle again. He was wrestled to the ground."He was already cuffed, so it was just an issue of calming him down and keeping him from flailing around," said Honsberger.Then Hyde suddenly stopped resisting and staff called for medical attention.

Honsberger couldn't say what state Hyde was in."It's hard to say whether he was conscious or not, quite frankly," he said. "When the behaviour becomes abnormal, the staff don't wait too long, they move fairly quickly. So the health-care staff were called right away when his behaviour changed."Health-care staff arrived within 90 seconds and began CPR until paramedics arrived to take Hyde to the Dartmouth general Hospital.

He was pronounced dead there.

The internal review concluded staff followed proper procedures.

The RCMP continue to investigate the incident.Hyde's widow, Karen Ellet, says the shock of the death is just hitting her now. She wants to look into ideas such as mental health courts and identifiable bracelets for people with mental illness, to ensure no one else gets into the same situation as her husband."It hasn't even had time to set in," said Ellet. "But it's my hope, it's my wish, that things will change from here on."

pmcleod@hfxnews.ca
27/11/07