New video of the moments leading up to Kenneth R. Durrah’s death in the Campbell County Detention Center raises questions about jail guards’ use of certain restraint practices to subdue individuals in their custody.
The video of the 2022 incident — obtained recently by WyoFile and the Gillette News Record through a public records request — shows for the first time what happened in the hours before Durrah died naked, strapped to a restraint chair. The recording shows Durrah ingesting suspected methamphetamine, scuffling with guards, being pinned face-down on a cell floor, complaining that he can’t breathe, being forcibly stripped, strapped to a restraint chair, pleading for help and ultimately dying.
Independent law enforcement and medical experts who’ve seen the footage suggest guards failed to adhere to known best practices and long-standing federal guidance for restraining an individual. The U.S. Department of Justice, they note, has long warned that prolonged use of belly-down restraints can be lethal, especially for people like Durrah under the influence of drugs.
After reviewing the footage those experts also questioned the autopsy’s official conclusion that Durrah’s death was not “restraint related.” Experts maintain that the high level of methamphetamine, detected by a post-mortem toxicology test, likely played a significant role in Durrah’s death, but several who spoke to WyoFile said that they would not rule out the use of restraints as a contributing factor.
“I counted over five minutes with weight on his back, and we know for sure that [position] can be, in the right circumstances, deadly,” EMS educator, paramedic and restraint expert Eric Jaeger said. “So I definitely think that he suffered significant harm.”
Campbell County Sheriff Scott Matheny and Jail Captain Kevin Theis both stand by how guards handled the incident, citing situationally appropriate use of officer discretion to explain the prolonged use of physical restraints and the decision not to call for emergency medical care sooner.
“[Durrah] made the decision to bring the stuff in,” Matheny said. “He made the decision to take the stuff. He made the decision to do all that, and this is what happens. It’s unfortunate that that happened. But it wasn’t the decisions [of the jail]. He made those decisions.”
Final hours
The video, which largely corroborates the narrative and timeline produced by the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation about 15 months after the death, adds significant detail about the final moments of Durrah’s life.
The nearly three-hour video begins in the early hours of Dec. 1, 2022 with Durrah — who’d been held in the Campbell County Detention Center for about a week — complaining of chest pains. He was then taken from his cell to booking where he was cleared by two EMTs. (Both responders later declined to cooperate with DCI investigators under the guidance of Campbell County Health’s legal counsel.)
While in a booking cell, after being medically cleared, Durrah appeared to hold something up to the cell-door window, then put the object in his mouth. Guards suspected it was a bag of meth, though that isn’t clear in the video, and the bag, or remnants of it, were not listed by DCI as evidence collected from the scene.
Guards entered the cell, pushed Durrah against the back wall and commanded him not to swallow whatever he put in his mouth.
Durrah pushed through the cell door out into the booking area.
Several guards forced Durrah to the floor, cuffed his hands behind his back and restrained him there, face down. The officers carried him to a padded booking cell where four guards again pinned Durrah on his belly to the ground, this time for several minutes. One guard kneeled on Durrah’s head and hip while another kneeled on his back. Two other guards restrained his legs, sometimes kneeling on his lower legs and ankles.
Using trauma shears, guards cut Durrah’s orange jumpsuit from his body.
While pinned, Durrah periodically strained and resisted. He complained that he could not breathe. Durrah pleaded with guards to listen to him about “DCI investigators” but the audio is hard to make out. He moaned and screamed repeatedly.
“I don’t care what you have to say,” one deputy yelled at Durrah. “Just shut up.”
Durrah replied inaudibly.
Guards yelled at him again to “shut up.”
Four guards lifted Durrah from the ground and placed him in a restraint chair. A guard tightened a strap across his waist then another removed the handcuffs. Officers placed straps across his arms and chest. They retightened the straps.
“I can’t breathe,” Durrah said.
“You can breathe, buddy. You’re talking,” one officer responded.
Durrah complained, “it’s too tight, please.”
Then he pleaded, “I’m dying, help.”
The deputies told him he was breathing fine. They did not adjust any straps.
The doorway of the cell partly obscures the video of Durrah in the chair, but he can be heard moaning and seen struggling to move his legs. The longer he spent in the restraint chair the less he moved.
Jail staff found him unresponsive roughly 35-40 minutes after he was left alone, restrained and naked in the booking cell. They called EMTs and struggled to remove Durrah from the restraint chair to begin CPR.
He was pronounced dead at Campbell County Health’s hospital soon after.
Leaving a mark
Weston County Attorney Michael Stulken, who was appointed special prosecutor, reviewed DCI’s investigation and decided in March not to seek criminal charges against anyone involved.
In his letter explaining the decision, Stulken wrote that the autopsy report was of considerable significance to his decision-making.
The autopsy report says, “at the postmortem examination, no significant blunt force traumatic injuries were found to suggest he had been injured during the efforts to contain his aggressiveness.” Experts, however, say ruling out restraints as a cause of death cannot be determined from a post-mortem examination alone because lethal restraints don’t always leave a mark.
“People are held down on their belly or have their breathing impaired — especially when they are highly, highly stressed metabolically — it’s more of a diffuse pressure on the body,” said Brooks Walsh, an emergency physician who specializes in cardiology, resuscitation and preventing lethal restraints.
That diffuse pressure won’t necessarily leave specific bruises or abrasions, which is why public access to the video is critical to understanding how and why Durrah died, Walsh said.
Thomas Bennett, the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy, said he was not provided video before determining Durrah’s death was not restraint related, and he agreed that the absence of bruising, or lines of restraint, “doesn’t rule out compression, because you can compress something, obviously, and not bruise it.”
But in his autopsy report, Bennett said, “it is my opinion that he did not die of respiratory complications of being restrained, but rather that he was overstimulated by the drugs, irrespective of the restraints.”
When Walsh and two other experts reviewed the video, all three concluded that the roughly five minutes Durrah was face down with guards’ weight on his back contributed to his death.
Even though Durrah can still be heard vocalizing while pinned to the cell floor, Walsh and Jaeger, the paramedic, explained the 5-foot-6, 142-pound man likely couldn’t breathe well enough to clear carbon dioxide from his system, leading to a lethal lactic acid build-up in his system, or acidosis.
Bennett agreed that Durrah’s vocalizations would not rule out the possibility of positional asphyxia, or put more simply, being in a position that prevented him from breathing adequately. “That’s a very good point,” he said, adding that post-mortem blood tests would not be conclusive because CPR, which deputies performed on Durrah, also produces elevated levels of lactic acid.
Upon finally reviewing the videos obtained by WyoFile and the Gillette News Record, Bennett said “the most evidence is pointing to us calling this a methamphetamine overdose.” When asked if the extended time Durrah spent restrained on his belly contributed to his death, Bennett said it was too hard to see in the video if and how guards were applying their body weight.
“We don’t know exactly where they placed their knees,” Bennett said. “Because I saw them on the buttocks. I saw them on arms. I saw them, it could have been on the back, but it was so shielded I couldn’t see.”
Numerous public officials in Iowa and Montana, where Bennett previously did forensic pathology, have raised concerns about his work, but he defends his record.
Best restraint practices
As far back as 1995, the U.S. Department of Justice warned that law enforcement restraining people on their bellies with pressure on their backs for prolonged periods can lead to death.
Through “analysis of in-custody deaths, we discovered evidence that unexplained in-custody deaths are caused more often than is generally known by a little-known phenomenon called positional asphyxia,” the DOJ bulletin states.
“A person lying on his stomach has trouble breathing when pressure is applied to his back. The remedy seems relatively simple: get the pressure off his back,” the bulletin reads. “However, during a violent struggle between an officer or officers and a suspect, the solution is not as simple as it may sound. Often, the situation is compounded by a vicious cycle of suspect resistance and officer restraint.”
The risk that belly-down restraints could lead to death is even higher for alcohol and drug users — especially people on cocaine and meth — the DOJ found.
To avoid positional asphyxia, the DOJ recommended to law enforcement: “As soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach.”
Contrary to those recommendations, Durrah was held in the prone position twice. First for close to a minute while deputies cuffed him, but instead of immediately placing him in an upright position, they moved him to a cell and placed him on his belly again so they could strip him naked. He remained pinned to the ground by multiple deputies for close to five minutes before they strapped him to a restraint chair.
“Unless there’s something we don’t know, but just looking at the video, there was really no need for him to be left naked,” said retired sheriff Gary Raney, a national expert on jail deaths and use of force.
In Durrah’s case, even if he hid drugs in his jail coveralls, he wouldn’t have been able to access them completely immobilized in a restraint chair, Raney said.
No matter what, “nobody should be left naked,” Raney said. “All it is, is humiliating and degrading.” Even if someone is suicidal, staff might take off jail coveralls and replace them with a suicide-resistant garment, Raney said.
The deputies’ decision to not immediately transfer Durrah to a restraint chair and instead cut off his orange jumpsuit led to him being pinned under the weight of multiple deputies for five minutes.
Theis, the Campbell County jail captain, said the decision to remove Durrah’s clothing was justified based on him having already concealed drugs on him when he was taken from his cell to booking that night.
“It’s a strip search is what it is,” said Undersheriff Quentin Reynolds. “They’re trying to make sure that he doesn’t have any more contraband.”
Theis said that it’s rare to cut off an inmate’s clothing, and estimated that it happens in the neighborhood of six to eight times a year, mostly as a protective measure with suicidal inmates. When guards do remove an inmate’s clothing, once that person has calmed down, they usually provide a smock — a protective gown that covers the inmate but can’t easily be used to harm themselves.
There was a delay in bringing the restraint chair because the one closest, which is seen in the video, did not have all of the straps guards wanted, Theis said.
The jail’s restraint chair policy doesn’t specify the amount of time that it should take to strap an inmate into it, but does clarify that it should take “only the necessary amount of force needed to bring the situation safely and effectively under control.”
“Just to the point where you’re comfortable you have control to move to the next step,” Theis said of restraining inmates prior to putting them into the chair. “It took them a while to get him stripped down because he was continuously resisting.”
Cautious with his criticism because the only information he has is what he could see in the video, Raney suggested staff struggled to restrain Durrah because they didn’t have a strong command of the restraints they were using.
“I don’t know enough details, but it looks like the application of their force techniques was not very good,” Raney said of the five minutes Durrah was pinned on his belly. “Like, they weren’t very experienced or practiced or trained or something. Because there were things that they could have done that I think would have been a little bit more successful without having to put so much pressure on his torso.”
The Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy instructs officers “to place one knee on or near the individual’s hip and the other knee on the side of the head,” according to face-down stabilization training materials obtained by WyoFile. “The officer’s hips should be low and balanced. Most of the officer’s weight is placed on the individual’s hip, however more weight may be distributed to the side of the head as is reasonable.”
When deputies put Durrah in the face-down restraint, they kneeled on his head and hip, as well as his back.
The video also raised questions for Raney about whether pressure from the restraint chair’s waist belt continued to inhibit Durrah’s breathing.
“One of the deputies who put across the waist belt on the restraint chair pulls it very hard,” Raney observed.
Because the video blurs out the area around Durrah’s genitals, Raney said it was hard to tell whether the waist belt was too high and up across his abdomen near his diaphragm, where it could restrain breathing.
“Regardless, there’s really no need to cinch the waist belt that tight,” Raney said.
Sheriff’s response
In standing by the jail’s handling of the incident, Matheny said that jail officers exercised their discretion in handling the situation and that he approved of their decisions throughout.
DCI’s review of the incident took more than a year, which complicated internal sheriff’s office reviews of the incident and how it was handled, he said.
Although sheriff’s office leaders review use-of-force instances and high-speed chases when officers are involved, Matheny said there was not a formal review of videos of the incident with Durrah.
There have likewise been no policy changes made in response to the incident, Theis said. He did, however, talk with the jail workers involved before they began their next shift the night after the incident.
“We didn’t necessarily cover any rights or wrongs, we just kind of debriefed, talked about it, see where everybody’s at, make sure that they’re comfortable to go back on the floor, see if we needed to give some more time off or not,” he said.
Theis said that with a DCI investigation underway at the time, they were careful not to color the statements made by officers involved.
“We wanted to make sure they’re keeping their statements true to the investigation and what they told them,” he said. “By reviewing it, it may put different things in their minds. I wanted to make sure I didn’t interfere with that.”
Theis said he had mostly told jail workers they had handled the situation well and encouraged them to move forward in a positive way.
Per policy, guards are to check on inmates four times per hour after strapping them into a restraint chair, monitoring the person’s health and whether the restraints are affecting circulation, breathing or otherwise causing distress. Video showed guards looking into the cell while Durrah was in the chair, with the final check coming when guards realized he had stopped breathing.
Then it took deputies two minutes to get Durrah out of the chair before they began chest compressions.
As to whether guards should have called for an ambulance sooner, Theis said, “when I have time to think about it, a year later, we probably should have done that.” But the jail captain isn’t sure he would have made that decision in the moment. “I can’t say I would have called them back either.”
From the perspective of managing the jail, Reynolds, the undersheriff, said it’s important for officers to make decisions based on their assessment of a given situation, including matters of health — a common variable in an environment where so many prisoners have recent histories of alcohol and drug use.
“What percentage of our clientele comes through the back door under the influence of drugs or alcohol?” Reynolds said. “And we don’t know or we can’t determine how recently they ingested that, the quantity or dosage.”
Jail officers have the discretion to decide whether to allow someone into the jail based on health, just as they can decide whether to call an ambulance based on the health of someone already in the jail.
Medical checks are routine as part of the booking process, Theis said, which involves reviewing medical history and a vitals check with jail nursing staff, with a goal of doing so within 12 hours of arrival.
“We have people come in under the influence all of the time under varying capacities,” Theis said. “We’re not sure why we didn’t call EMS again but we’re always used to seeing and dealing with people, and they put on big shows.
“Sometimes it’s hard to weed them out based on their ability to act, whether they’re convincing or not, or if we just know they’re just being disruptive to be disruptive because they don’t want to be in jail that day,” Theis said.
Of the eight detention officers on shift that night, three had fewer than two years of experience and four had worked about three to four years, according to employment dates provided by the sheriff’s office. The shift sergeant on duty had worked more than 20 years with the agency.
Matheny said that relative inexperience in the jail from some of the officers involved did not negatively factor into their response that night.
“Some were affected more so than others based on their career and something like that had never happened in their work environment,” Theis said. “It is kind of traumatizing the first time you encounter death in the job.”
The jail, an entry-level start to many careers in the sheriff’s office, has struggled to maintain its staff in recent years. The agency has raised starting pay and lowered age requirements in an effort to broaden and retain its employee pool.
“To get people, recruit people to come into this job, it’s tough,” Matheny said. “And when something like this comes to light, it just makes it difficult to get people to come to work. This is an important job. Somebody’s got to do it. We take it serious. We have to protect those people in the jail and we have to protect the community, and it makes that difficult.”
‘Good questions’
In Wyoming, it’s up to the elected county sheriff to decide the degree of scrutiny county jail deaths receive. A sheriff may request an external investigation from DCI or another law enforcement agency, conduct an internal review or do nothing.
When DCI is asked to investigate, the state agency focuses exclusively on criminal wrongdoing. Whether officers adhered to local protocol or DOJ guidelines are not questions DCI seeks to answer.
“Our role is strictly to conduct an investigation, gather the facts and present it to a prosecutor,” DCI Director Ronnie Jones said.
“It’s not our role to come in and say, ‘you know, you guys aren’t following best practices, or you guys violated one of your policies and procedures.’ Or ‘here’s what you need to do to be better moving forward.’ That’s not our role.”
Because of DCI’s explicit focus “on whether a crime was committed based on existing statutes,” Jones said, “I recognize … there can be [an] appearance that there’s gaps in our investigations,” when policies and procedures, or the lack thereof, go unaddressed.
Jones added, those are the questions local law enforcement should examine during their own internal review of an incident after the criminal investigation is complete, which Campbell County has not done.
It took more than a year for the DCI report to land on a special prosecutor’s desk. That period included a roughly eight-month gap in documented updates. Documented progress of the investigation resumed the day after another inmate, Dennis Green, died by suicide inside a Campbell County Courthouse holding cell.
“It was 100% our fault. We did not get it done as quickly as we should have,” Jones said of the delay in the Durrah investigation, acknowledging that “unfortunately, has put the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office in a tough spot.”
For more than a year while Durrah’s death was under investigation, the details of the case were off limits to his family, journalists and the public. And while DCI didn’t examine Campbell County’s protocols for use of force and medical emergencies, or how they stack up against best practices, “they’re good questions to be asking,” Jones said. “I think they’re good questions for the public to be asking.”
The post Video of Campbell County jail death calls restraint and medical protocols into question appeared first on WyoFile .