MINNEAPOLIS — A lawsuit filed in Minneapolis federal court accuses Dakota County jail officials and a private medical company of neglect and deliberate indifference in the case of a man who suffered a life-threatening diabetic coma.
Caleb Duffy was booked into the Dakota County Jail on July 4, 2022, after an alleged domestic disturbance.
A day and a half later, he would leave the jail barely alive.
“You see someone in distress, you help them,” said Brian Duffy, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of his son.
What happened during Caleb’s time in jail his father calls torture.
Jail surveillance video shows Caleb wallowing in a padded cell in his own blood, urine and feces – begging repeatedly for help.
“This went on for hours and it’s all recorded,” said Ryan Vettleson, Duffy’s attorney.
Jail paperwork shows jail staff had been told Caleb suffered from Type 1 diabetes and major mental illness – usually controlled with insulin and the drug Gabapentin.
But records indicate he didn’t get the medications that night.
By early the next morning, he was pacing in his cell yelling that he was “dying.” Records show Caleb's blood sugar spiked dangerously to 531.
For reference, Mayo Clinic says normal blood sugar readings are between 80 and 130. The jail’s own medical guidelines say anything over 450 requires staff to contact a medical provider.
“He could die,” Caleb’s father told KARE 11. “If his blood sugar gets to 400, you don’t play around with it – either you’re taking action right away or we’re going to go to the hospital.”
But Caleb wasn’t hospitalized. He was given insulin at the jail, but his blood sugar readings remained high. And records show he wasn’t given any Gabapentin for his mental illness.
Instead, he was put in a padded cell on suicide watch when Caleb began “slamming his head against the cement” and threatening to “hit his head until he dies.”
Over the next day his condition would get even worse - Vomiting repeatedly. Slamming his head on the doors and walls.
There were blood marks all over the floor of his cell.
Caleb’s blood sugar would again soar to more than 500. Eventually it was so elevated the glucose meter just read “high.”
“Just call 911. That’s all they had to do. How they can be present and around something like that and not doing anything?” Caleb’s father asked. “We got the wrong people there.”
By the time jail staffers did call for an ambulance a day later – on July 6th – Caleb was in terrible shape.
“What was his condition when he arrived at the hospital?” KARE 11 asked.
“They told me he wasn’t going to make it. He was going to die,” Brian Duffy said.
The hospital determined Caleb was in severe diabetic ketoacidosis with a blood glucose level over 1,000. He would survive, but only after days in a coma.
Duffy filed a lawsuit Thursday against Dakota County, its guards, and the jail medical provider Advanced Correctional Healthcare (ACH).
“The corrections officers and jail medical staff treated him as something less than human,” said family attorney Ryan Vettleson.
Citing the pending lawsuit, Dakota County Sheriff Joe Leko declined comment, although the County said the case is under internal review.
A spokesperson for ACH said the company had not received the lawsuit yet – but stressed the complaint is only an “unproven allegation.”
KARE 11’s “Cruel and Unusual” investigation revealed how another jail medical provider – MEND – ignored detainees' pleas for help, leading to serious injury or death.
Dakota County replaced MEND with ACH, which claims to be the nation’s largest correctional healthcare company.
KARE 11 investigated and found ACH also has a contract with the Anoka County Jail - where there were three recent inmate deaths - and at Itasca County Jail where the company is being sued in another inmate death.
In a whistleblower lawsuit filed earlier this year, former ACH nurses allege that the company put “patients in danger of serious injury or death due to their failures and refusals to properly care for those patients.”
“This isn’t an isolated incident,” said attorney Vettleson. “The more light we can shed on that, hopefully the more change that prompts.”
His father says Caleb still bears the trauma of his cries for help being ignored. Brian Duffy says he hopes the company and jail will listen now.
“We can’t have that happening in jails,” Duffy told KARE 11. “Everybody that goes in for making a mistake should walk out with that mistake and learn from it - not be tortured.”
The initial domestic assault case that landed Caleb in jail was eventually dismissed.