Around lunchtime on Monday, Aug. 15, 2016, Madison Bailee Deal called her mother, Lee Anne, from Silverdale Detention Facility in Chattanooga.
Deal, a 26-year-old former high school cheerleader and softball player, had turned herself in the previous Wednesday after a bench warrant had been issued for a probation violation — she had failed to complete the required community service after shoplifting a dog collar for her pet chihuahua at Walmart.
“My chest is hurting,” Deal told her mother in a three-and-a-half minute phone call. “I’m dehydrated. I can’t walk because my kidneys are fucked up. I can barely breathe because my chest is inflamed. It’s really fucking bad. Really bad. I don’t know what to do. …
“I need to go to the fucking hospital and nobody’s listening to me here,” Deal sobbed.
“OK, OK, I’ll see what I can do,” an emotional Lee Anne responded. “Just please keep trying to drink something.”
Twenty-four hours later, Madison Bailee Deal collapsed, unconscious. Two days later she was dead.
Growing up, Bailee Deal was the kind of girl everyone wanted to be friends with, according to her family.
“She was a very kindhearted person,” says her grandmother, Norma O’Neal. “She never talked bad about people. She could always find something good about somebody.” But Deal also had a strong sense of justice, once chasing down much older neighborhood bike thieves in her bare feet.
“She took care of things,” Lee Anne says.
Deal also reinvented herself more than once. When she transferred to public school after attending a private Christian elementary school, Bailee decided she now wanted to be called Madison (although her family still calls her Bailee). Deal played softball for years and made the cheerleading squad at East Ridge High School before deciding she wanted to focus more on her art and outdoors activities like hiking and climbing. By the time she died, Deal’s blond hair had been twisted and plaited into dreadlocks down to her waist.
Deal never drank much, not growing up nor once she reached legal age. She started smoking pot in high school; her parents aren’t quite sure when. But they are sure that when her rival for homecoming court planted a pipe in Deal’s locker in eighth grade and told the principal to get Deal disqualified, Deal was not using marijuana then.
Likewise, her parents don’t know when Deal started taking pills. They say she never abused pot, but then something changed, after one of her best friends died in fall 2013. By April 2014 Deal moved in with O’Neal to try to break free from her oxycodone addiction. She couldn’t afford rehab and didn’t have health insurance, but she did start getting suboxone from a clinic and going to counseling.
“She wanted to get clean,” Lee Anne says.
“She wanted to get away from it all,” her father Bruce adds.
But sobriety didn’t stick, and Deal eventually turned to heroin, like so many others, because it was cheaper and more available than pills. She kept the habit hidden from her family and kept working part-time jobs in the restaurant industry, sometimes traveling to music festivals to sell jewelry she had crafted. And she kept trying to quit drugs, only to start up again.
But by August 2016, her family says, Deal was ready for a fresh start. All she had to do was get her probation violation sorted out, and she’d get sober, for good.
“The last time I saw her alive was that Tuesday night,” says O’Neal. “We went to Walmart and she got ice cream and all this stuff, and she asked me if she could have it, and I said yeah. And I just remember her running around Walmart — seeing her little face and buying her stuff. And that was the last time I saw her alive.”
Deal’s parents have filed a federal wrongful-death lawsuit against Nashville-based CoreCivic, alleging “they knowingly and with deliberate indifference to her constitutional rights denied her reasonable medical treatment for serious and obvious medical conditions, which were actually and constructively known by them as well as lay witnesses, thereby causing her extensive physical and emotional pain, suffering and death.”
Correct Care Solutions, the contractor responsible for the prison’s medical care, is also named as a defendant, as are Hamilton County and several nurses, guards and staff who allegedly ignored or incorrectly treated Deal’s symptoms during the week she was in custody.
The details of Deal’s rapid decline, as described in the lawsuit, make for difficult and gruesome reading. The filing also includes excerpts of phone conversations between Deal and her mother, the full recordings of which were provided to the Scene.
According to the lawsuit, when Deal turned herself in that Wednesday, she was perfectly healthy, except for her heroin problem. By the next day, her chills and nausea from withdrawal were constant, exacerbated by spending 18 hours on a mat on the floor in a holding cell with seven other women before being assigned to a specific “pod” in the prison.
On Friday, Deal told prison staff that she was sick and that she couldn’t stop throwing up. However, the medical intake form completed that morning shows no evidence of her being ill.
“It was a bad mistake to even come here,” Deal tells her mother in a phone call. “I should’ve just ran to the hills. At least I’m in a room with the sun.”
Later Friday night, Deal was attacked by three inmates who mistakenly thought she had tobacco. A medical examination afterward noted bruising and abrasions but still had no mention of Deal’s withdrawal symptoms.
By Saturday Deal was pale and and too weak to eat. A dozen inmates allegedly told prison staff that Deal needed treatment. A nurse finally examined her that afternoon and prescribed Phenergan injections, a drug that decreases nausea; however, Deal told her mother Sunday morning that she had not yet been given any drugs.
At some point on Sunday, Deal was finally given Phenergan. But by that point, Deal couldn’t stop vomiting what inmates described as “black bile” that “smelled like feces.” On Sunday night, she called her mother and said she couldn’t keep anything down, not even Kool-Aid. Whatever shots they were giving her, she said, were not helping.
“It’s not fucking helping at all,” a weak-sounding Deal tells her mother. “I’ve been throwing up for six days straight, and oh my God, I think my blood sugar is about to bottom out, I can’t even stand up.”
That night, Deal was too weak to climb on to the top bunk. On Monday, her skin was ashen, with one inmate describing her as looking like “a zombie.” By the afternoon, she was having trouble breathing. But when one inmate tried to get help, she was allegedly told by a nurse, “If she can shoot up by herself, then she can walk by herself.”
By Tuesday morning, Deal’s skin had turned blue. She told other inmates that she felt like she was dying. Two inmates allegedly had to carry her to the morning pill call at 10:15, yet one nurse wrote up the encounter, “[Deal] stated that she was feeling better and wanted to try to eat lunch. [Inmate] received Phenergan and returned to her dorm to wait on lunch no further complaints or distress.”
An hour later, Deal collapsed. The prison records say emergency personnel were called promptly and that oxygen was administered. Inmates who witnessed the scene say otherwise, according to the lawsuit — that there was a delay before anyone was called, that no treatment was administered, that Deal just lay on a stretcher dying as one inmate shouted at the staff to help her.
Eventually Deal was transferred to Erlanger Hospital. Hospital staff had to cut off all Deal’s beloved dreadlocks — they were encrusted in vomit, with no way to be cleaned. Deal’s family says doctors told them Deal was already brain-dead by this point from lack of oxygen. She died two days later, on Thursday, Aug. 18, 2016.
Although the prison’s medical records state that Deal had “unlabored breathing” and that her lungs sounded “clear” at the time of her collapse, an autopsy shows Deal died of pneumonia contracted from inhaling her own vomit. There were no drugs in her system.
“She always said she would take care of me, she would be the one to take care of me when I got old,” O’Neal says. “She was just a sweet little girl.”
In a response to the lawsuit, CoreCivic denies all allegations of wrongdoing. Amanda Gilchrist, the public affairs manager for the company, also commented in an email, “While we don’t comment on ongoing litigation and medical privacy laws preclude us from providing details concerning the medical treatment of an inmate, we are committed to the safety and well-being of every inmate entrusted to our care at Silverdale and all facilities we manage.”
The lawsuit is seeking $20 million in damages. A trial date has been set for January 2019.
