3 People Died of Thirst in a Texas County Jail in Under 2 Years
A woman with severe mental illness died of dehydration in a Texas jail despite having ready access to water. A local TV station found that she was one of at least three people who died that way in one county within a two-year period.
In April 2021, Georgia Baldwin called a police spokesman in Arlington, Texas, and made bizarre statements such as, “The Governor of Mississippi needs to blow you away.”
According to a federal lawsuit filed against the jail by her sons last year, Baldwin was clearly in the throes of a severe mental health episode. “When a detective with the Arlington Police Department researched Ms. Baldwin, the address listed on her driver’s license was to a homeless shelter,” the lawsuit states. “The detective also located four Lubbock Police Department reports from 2018” in which officers found her “apparently not mentally sound and/or coherent.”
Despite a detective recognizing that Baldwin was unwell, the lawsuit claims, she was arrested for making a terroristic threat to a peace officer—a felony charge—and sent to jail in Tarrant County, Texas. Six weeks later, in June, a psychiatrist determined Baldwin was “incompetent and thus unable to stand trial,” the lawsuit states, and she was ordered to jail “for a competency restoration program for no more than 60 days of a 120-day commitment,” after which she would serve out the rest of the time in a state hospital.
Instead, according to the lawsuit, “Tarrant County chose to continue incarcerating Ms. Baldwin in a small cell, where she could not see through a window or view other human beings,” remaining there from July 27 until her death on September 14, 2021. (WFAA, the Dallas ABC affiliate, reported this week that “the wait times for a state hospital bed are anywhere from 200 days to almost a year-and-a-half.”)
When Baldwin died, the medical examiner determined the cause was “severe hypernatremia”—high levels of sodium in the blood typically resulting from dehydration.
Baldwin’s death is tragic and was seemingly preventable. But as WFAA reported this week, she was one of at least three inmates with severe mental illness to die of dehydration in Tarrant County’s custody over a two-year period.
Authorities arrested Abdullahi Mohamed in June 2020 for allegedly threatening a relative with a knife; Mohamed was manic and bipolar, and he had spent time in a state hospital. Nine days later, jailers at the Tarrant County Jail found him unresponsive in his cell, and he died soon after. And in December 2021, Edgar Villatoro Alvarez was booked into jail on a DWI charge and other charges after having been hospitalized for a bipolar episode the previous month. After he died in February 2022, a jailer wrote in
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