DENVER (AP) — A 69-year-old man slowly suffocated to death in a rural Colorado jail after his ribs were broken in an altercation with a deputy and he languished in a cell for a week without medical care, according to a lawsuit announced Thursday.
Michael Burch's 2023 death was ruled a homicide. Prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges against the deputy who used a Taser on Burch and wrestled with him in a Huerfano County jail cell. In making the decision, District Attorney Henry Solano cited self-defense laws.
An autopsy found six of Burch’s right ribs had broken and his right lung collapsed. He wasn’t taken to a hospital but instead was transferred to another cell where he was found dead seven days later.
“The simple act of breathing became so painful as Mr. Burch’s shattered ribs continued to pierce and tear through his organs that his body stopped using his right lung, which shrank to half the normal size,” lawyers for Burch's estate said in the federal lawsuit.
Defendants in the case include the Huerfano County commissioners, sheriff’s office, individual sheriff’s officials, paramedics and the hospital they worked for, as well as nurses and the nonprofit company contracted to provide health care to inmates.
The lawsuit accuses them of causing Burch’s fatal injuries and not doing anything to treat them, violating his constitutional rights.
A lawyer representing the county and sheriff's office, Eric Ziporin, declined to comment. Representatives of the hospital and the health care company declined comment.
One of the family's lawyers, Qusair Mohamedbhai, said Burch's relationship with his children had been strained by his mental health problems, but they had hoped he would have a relationship with his grandchildren. Now they have nightmares about how painful their father's final days must have been.
“This is Gulag-type behavior that simply should not exist anywhere,” he said.
Burch was tackled after he refused to drop a pencil he had been given. A deputy warned him “Drop it or we’ll drop you,” according to body camera footage. Once the Taser was used, Burch rushed toward the deputy and the video, which becomes obscured, shows him going to the ground near a steel bench with his arms held by the deputy. The lawsuit says Burch was tackled into the bench, which broke his ribs.
Burch, a former California prison guard, was arrested on March 25, 2023, after a series of erratic acts, including driving to the home of two strangers and swinging a rubber mallet.
According to the lawsuit, his mental health was not evaluated when he arrived at the jail, although video shows sheriff's official signaling he was mentally unstable by stirring her finger next to her head after he was hit with the Taser and tackled on March 28, 2023.
The inmate screamed and moaned as the deputy used a knee to keep Burch on the ground when he was accused of resisting. Later he appeared calmer as paramedics evaluated him. He said his ribs had been crushed and he wanted to go to the hospital, but family members allege in their lawsuit that the paramedics did not evaluate his chest.
Body camera footage shows one paramedic briefly lifting up Burch's shirt, but the lawsuit said no one listened to his lungs with a stethoscope or took vital signs.
After Burch told a sheriff's captain that he barely survived the night on April 1, 2023, he was seen over video by a contracted nurse in Mississippi, who did not ask to see Burch's chest, the lawsuit said. Instead, it described the interaction as focused on Burch’s mental health.
Three days later, he was found dead on the concrete floor of his cell.
