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In 2016, corrections nurse Camille Valberg made national news after an inmate at the Clackamas County Jail, Bryan Perry, died on her watch.
Perry was an Army veteran who’d been awarded a Purple Heart, and the final minutes of his life were caught by jail cameras.
“At the apparent direction of Nurse Valberg, jail staff did not begin sustained CPR or call 911 until approximately five minutes after Mr. Perry appears to stop moving in the video,” a judge later concluded in a subsequent wrongful death lawsuit.
The lawsuit was later settled, but by then Valberg had found another job—in Multnomah County’s troubled jails.
The result is another wrongful death lawsuit, filed in September 2020 in federal court in Portland.
Media covered the lawsuit at the time, but did not disclose Valberg’s name. It turned up in the lawsuit on July 2, 2021, and has not been reported since then.
The suit now alleges Valberg was negligent in the care of another inmate, Jason Forrest, who fatally overdosed in 2020 in a Portland jail, and that Multnomah County should be held liable for hiring her in the first place. Last week, attorneys for Forrest’s estate released hundreds of pages of documents they’ve obtained in discovery that they say prove their allegations.
Valberg and the county say she did nothing wrong. Valberg says she thought Forrest was suffering an asthma attack and had no way of knowing he was actually dying of an overdose, despite extensive notes in his medical record that he was a heavy drug user. She did not respond to a request for comment.
The allegations against Valberg were laid out in additional detail in a response to the county’s motion for summary judgment filed April 5.
Valberg and her Clackamas County employer, the jail contractor Corizon Health, had parted ways in 2017, the year after Perry’s death, and not on amicable terms, the legal filing says. When Valberg applied to do the same job for Multnomah County shortly thereafter, her former supervisor, Nadia Petrov, recommended against hiring her. So did a Multnomah County hiring manager who reviewed Valberg’s application, according to records obtained in discovery by Forrest’s lawyers.
But Valberg’s nursing license was in good standing, so, in 2018, the county hired her anyway.
A year later, at 5:45 pm at Multnomah County Inverness Jail on July 25, 2019, Jason Forrest told a deputy he couldn’t breathe and needed a nurse. He was carrying an asthma inhaler. The deputy called for help, and Valberg responded. But despite Forrest showing signs of an overdose—slowed heart rate, shallow breathing, and graying lips—Valberg didn’t take his vitals, according to the subsequent legal complaint.
Even after more nurses arrived, no one administered Narcan until paramedics arrived more than 15 minutes later, the complaint continues, despite a deputy asking if the dying inmate needed the drug and other inmates saying he was overdosing. By the time paramedics took over, Forrest couldn’t be revived.
In 2020, attorneys representing Forrest’s estate filed a $10 million wrongful death lawsuit in federal court, and named the county and Mike Reese, the state’s director of prisons who was sheriff at the time, as defendants.
But at the time, lawyers had limited information about Forrest’s death. Valberg was not named in the original complaint. Since, they’ve accumulated a trove of evidence they say points to the county’s culpability, and added Valberg and other county employees to the lawsuit in July 2021.
On Friday, attorneys published hundreds of pages of discovery in an effort to convince a U.S. District Court judge to quash the county’s request to dismiss their claims.
In a legal brief accompanying the documents, lawyers laid out their case that Valberg and two other nurses who responded that night were “deliberately indifferent” and the failure to administer Narcan was “inexcusable.”
“Each of these nurses watched Jason suffer the classic symptoms of an opioid overdose and not one of them gave him Narcan, the overdose-reversing drug that was within arm’s reach. Instead, they watched him slowly die,” the brief argues.
Plus, the lawyers argue, the county should be held liable for failing to adequately train staff and for hiring Valberg in the first place.
Both Reese and the county declined to comment.
In a disposition, however, Reese, expressed bafflement that the county had hired Valberg over objections by its own staff. “I have no idea why they would make that decision,” he said.
The county, in legal filings, has denied any wrongdoing. The county corrections medical director at the time said he didn’t believe Narcan would have saved Forrest’s life, and Valberg and the other nurses on the scene said they believed Forrest was having an asthma attack. They couldn’t have known he was overdosing, they say, because he didn’t admit that day to having taken illicit drugs. (He’d previously reported heavy drug use to nurses, which were included in his medical record.)
Valberg and the county ultimately parted ways in September 2020, after the county put her on administrative leave following allegations she’d made a series of racist remarks, according to a county report included in the legal filings.
She told a co-worker she’d been recruited into the Proud Boys. Shortly before Forrest’s death, she wrote to her supervisor: “The stress here is becoming less and less worth it. Fire me. Hire a black nurse.” The county investigated and ultimately concluded she’d engaged in discriminatory behavior.
Forrest, 37, was Black. He was in jail because his wife had reported him for a parole violation—she hoped it would get him away from the drugs that were destroying his life and their marriage, she said in a deposition.
Instead, it did the opposite. Inverness Jail was awash in drugs.
An investigation into Forrest’s death uncovered a sophisticated drug smuggling operation that had been operating under the jail’s nose for months. It was described in a Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office report obtained by Forrest’s lawyers.
Several times a week, dealers inside would make calls on recorded jail phones for “drops” of meth and heroin, which would be delivered, wrapped in electric tape and accompanied by syringes, under a pile of railroad ties at the corner of the Inverness property. Inmates who were members of the jail’s work crew would then insert the packets into their anus and walk them into the jail. “Everyone pays for it with commissary, with bags of chips or whatever else,” an inmate told attorneys.
Ultimately, investigators concluded, there were “so many people dealing heroin and meth inside the same dorm” that it wasn’t possible to know who gave Forrest the drugs that killed him.