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On March 1, Skye Baskin was arrested in the midst of a mental health crisis and taken to Douglas County Jail. Within two months, he was dead.
What happened in those intervening weeks is not entirely clear. But today, Oregon State Hospital released a federal inspection report faulting the hospital’s treatment of a patient from Douglas County Jail who was pronounced dead shortly after arrival. The circumstances outlined in that report match what people familiar with Baskin’s fate, including his attorney, say happened to him.
Baskin’s death raises questions about the quality of health care at the jail in Roseburg, which has had a spike in inmate deaths in recent years similar to that in Multnomah County.
“It’s complete mistreatment,” says Baskins’ public defender, Angelina Hollingsworth, who says the jail has a pattern of denying inmates appropriate medical care. Disability Rights Oregon has since opened an investigation into Baskin’s death. Douglas County Jail did not respond to a request for comment.
Last month, Douglas County Circuit Judge Robert Johnson ordered Baskin sent to Oregon State Hospital. Jail records show he was discharged April 19. The exact date of his transport is not clear. Neither is what happened next.
Hollingsworth says Baskin was dead, or nearly so, even before he arrived at the hospital.
Douglas County has publicly announced the names of the four people who died in its custody since the beginning of 2023. It didn’t announce Baskin’s.
Neither did Oregon State Hospital, which did, however, announce April 29 that federal inspectors had arrived at the hospital to investigate a patient who’d died “shortly after arrival.”
Today, the hospital released the inspector’s report, which faults the hospital for its disorganized response to that unnamed patient’s death. A source close to the situation says that patient was Baskin. Oregon State Hospital declined to answer WW’s questions about the incident, citing patient privacy laws.
According to the inspector’s report, staff didn’t respond appropriately or immediately call a physician when it was apparent the patient was unresponsive.
The patient arrived at the facility on April 18, according to the report. The patient’s “condition was not assessed,” although the deputies who dropped the patient off told a nurse that the patient “would need a wheelchair because [they were] ‘catatonic’ and at times ‘flops around like a fish’” and that it was “normal behavior.” The patient was handcuffed, although deputies said it wasn’t necessary because the patient wasn’t aggressive.
The patient “opened their eyes and moved a little,” one nurse said, according to the inspector’s report. There were no further signs of life. Another staff member said the patient “was more limp than would have been expected.” There was an eight-minute period between the patient exiting the transport van and a nurse checking the patient’s pulse, and the patient was later pronounced dead.
Inspectors from the federal Medicaid regulator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, concluded in their report that nurses “failed to conduct appropriate and timely assessment and vital signs,” and “the hospital’s failures to ensure appropriate patient assessment and organized response to medical emergencies created an unsafe [environment] that likely contributed to harm and death of one patient and created the likelihood of harm to other patients.”
While officials would not confirm the patient was Baskin, his circumstances match those described in the report.
Baskin’s final months illustrate the consequences of Oregon’s statewide strategy of sending people with severe mental illness not to hospital but to jail.
It’s not clear when Baskin arrived in Oregon. According to Hollingsworth, who got in touch with his family, Baskin was a normal kid: had a job, had a girlfriend. But then, very quickly, his life went off the rails. He’d been in weekly contact with his sister in Georgia—and then he disappeared.
In March, an Oregon state trooper found Baskin wandering the lanes of Interstate 5 near Roseburg as traffic swerved around him. He was clearly experiencing a psychiatric crisis. A police report says he was in a “daze or fog.” Hollingsworth says he has wearing a wrist band from a local hospital.
The trooper tried to talk to Baskin. He didn’t respond. The trooper grabbed his wrist. Baskin pulled away and balled his fist, according to the report. The trooper told him he was under arrest. Baskin still didn’t cooperate. The trooper tackled him and, with the help of a bystander, bundled him into the back of the patrol car and took him to Douglas County Jail.
He was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Three days later, his Miranda rights were read to him by a court official, speaking through an iPad. Baskin sat on a cot, apparently unresponsive.
It was Baskin’s second stint in the facility in three days. He’d been arrested Feb. 28 and released without charges. He was found by police in a Sutherlin Dutch Bros parking lot “asking people to box,” Hollingsworth says.
Now, however, he wasn’t talking, not even to Hollingsworth. She visited him in jail, where staff assured her he was fine. “This is just him, it’s not a big deal,” Hollingsworth said she was told.
Concerned, Hollingsworth filed a motion to have him hospitalized on April 14 and, six days later, his court case was “suspended” by a judge pending Baskins’ “restoration to competency.”
Jails in Oregon can’t restore someone to competency. But Baskin stayed there anyway. The state-run psychiatric hospital is perpetually full, and there’s not enough residential beds in local communities. So people with psychosis too severe to stand trail, like Baskin, sit in jail and wait.
The state is being sued by disability rights advocates as a result. To fix the problem, the state has begun releasing people early from Oregon State Hospital to make room for more patients. But the problem hasn’t gone away.
Baskin would stay in jail for another month as administrators tried to figure out a place other than the hospital to put him.
They couldn’t, and Hollingsworth eventually demanded Baskin be released. That’s when a judge ordered him sent to the state psychiatric hospital.
The first public acknowledgement that Baskin had died was in a Douglas County courtroom on April 29, over a week after his passing, where a prosecutor announced the charges against him would be dropped.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the patient’s pulse wasn’t checked for 69 minutes. In fact, the patient spent around 14 minutes waiting outside in a transport van. Then, there was an eight-minute period between the patient exiting the transport van and nurses taking the patient’s pulse. WW regrets the error.