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CLEVELAND, Ohio — The family of a Cuyahoga County Jail inmate who died of a combination of medication settled their lawsuit against the county and MetroHealth Medical Center for $500,000. MetroHealth agreed to pay $300,000 and Cuyahoga County $200,000 to Mark Turner’s family, county and hospital officials said. Cuyahoga County Council must sign off on the settlement for it to become official. Turner’s family accused MetroHealth officials of negligence and county jail officers of failing to make required checks on Turner before he fell unconscious and died on Nov. 1, 2022. Neither Cuyahoga County nor MetroHealth officials commented on the lawsuit. Turner, 32, was the second inmate to die that day and one of five inmates who died in 2022. MetroHealth took over handling all health care at the jail in 2019 after a string of nine inmate deaths in an 11-month span. Turner had been jailed for about three days on charges of violating parole, public indecency and obstructing official business. MetroHealth doctors who worked at the jail prescribed him chlordiazepoxide, buprenorphine, dicyclomine and doxepin. That combination required medical officials to closely monitor him because it could have “life-threatening effects,” the lawsuit said. The lawsuit said doctors failed to keep a close watch on Turner and corrections officers failed to make required 15-minute checks on inmates. By the time anyone checked on him, he’d been dead for “many hours,” according to the lawsuit. The Cuyahoga County medical examiner found he died from acute intoxication caused by the medication prescribed to him while at the jail.
