![]() Ryan said when he woke up, he was in the haze of what felt like a nightmare. The couple was drugged and thought they had been attacked by the bartender and another hotel employee. He said he remembers waking up in the dark room of a clinic with an IV in his arm and a deep cut on his hand that was wrapped in a dressing. I don’t want it.’ So she gave it to me and I drank her drink.” She’s like, ‘Something’s wrong with this drink. “Around our third day there, we were at one of the bars by the pool just kind of having some drinks and kind of getting drunk and partying a little bit with some people there,” Ryan said. In September 2007, the couple left for their honeymoon near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. “I was super happy with her, and I knew I wanted to be with her forever.” Less than two years later, Ryan and Janelle Butterfield married. ![]() Butterfield's mother, Connie Dence, left, says she doesn't believe the jail didn't know her daughter was ill. Janelle Butterfield, right, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia years before she died in the Josephine County Jail. “When she and Dan came back at the end of the summer, I saw them holding hands, and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s something going on here,’” said her aunt Rhonda Butterfield. She met Dan Ryan at a party there, and he hired her to help him paint the outside of his family’s historic hotel in Seward. She moved to Anchorage, Alaska, at the age of 20 to live with her aunt and look for jobs. “And why the hell would they put her with a bunk bed? That’s just - that’s messed up.” A Turning Pointīutterfield grew up in Candor, New York, a tight-knit town north of the Pennsylvania border. That’s a bunch of bull,” said Connie Dence, Butterfield's mother. ![]() ![]() “I do not believe they had no clue that she was ill. She fell through gap after gap in the health care system before landing in a county jail that, records show, failed to keep her safe from herself. Years before she died, Butterfield was diagnosed with schizophrenia. And because we don’t know how to deal with them, they’re dying.” “It shows me we have people who are very sick and the mentally ill in our facilities, and we don’t know how to deal with them. “Especially when we know that half of the folks are dying by suicide, something’s wrong,” said Oregon House Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson, D-Portland. Source: Staff reporting by OPB, KUOW and the Northwest News Network. The vast majority of those were hangings. Over the past decade, suicides were the single most common cause of death in county jails. Over a 10-year span, the average rate in Oregon was 55 in Washington, it was 71. In 2014, the national rate had reached its highest point since 2000 and was 50 suicides per 100,000 inmates. The suicide rate in Oregon and Washington jails also exceeds the national average. It accounts for nearly half of all cases with a known cause of death. Suicide, specifically hanging, is by far the leading single cause of deaths in the region’s jails. Over the past decade, at least 122 people have died by suicide in county jails across Oregon and Washington. Despite decades of concerns about jail suicides and some progress being made, jail leaders and elected officials have failed to take all the necessary steps to curb the problem and protect inmates, an investigation by OPB, KUOW and the Northwest News Network has found. Department of Justice said in a 2010 report.īut the issue hasn’t been put to rest. “The antiquated mindset that ‘inmate suicides cannot be prevented should forever be put to rest,’” the U.S. Butterfield died behind bars at the age of 34. Her lips were purple, her eyes wide open. “All staff respond to 408, possible suicide,” a jail deputy radioed. Her long, dark hair covered the sheet around her neck. She was slouched in the corner of her cell, wearing her jail blues. After 40 days in the Josephine County Jail, Janelle Marie Butterfield looped a white sheet around her neck and tied the other end to the metal bunk bed in cell 408.ĭeputies found her during their hourly rounds, around 8:45 in the morning.
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