By Matthew Spina
The Buffalo News
The inmate’s face was a mess.
Here’s how a patrol deputy described Tony Martin after he was pummeled by another inmate Saturday in the Erie County Holding Center:
“Martin had blood gushing from his nose and was spitting blood from his mouth. His head was heavily bandaged with gauze wrapped around his face and head,” the deputy wrote. “His face was swollen and his right eye was swollen partially shut.”
X-rays would reveal that Martin had a broken orbital eye socket, a broken jaw and other facial fractures.
But as Martin stood bleeding, the Holding Center staff would not call an ambulance. They expected the patrol deputy, Robert W. Kolmetz, to get him to Erie County Medical Center in his patrol car.
“Martin had obviously been assaulted and was bleeding and in my opinion needed to be transported by ambulance for his safety because of head injuries,” Kolmetz wrote in a report. “Holding Center staff stated that no ambulance would be called, and that I could call an ambulance or do the transport in my vehicle.”
Other deputies familiar with the incident said Kolmetz argued with a jail lieutenant. What if a complication arose during the drive to ECMC? he asked. Further, patrol cars are to be taken out of service and decontaminated once they are occupied by someone emanating blood or fluids. Kolmetz then appealed to higher-ups in the Sheriff’s Office Patrol Division. Finally, a patrol sergeant authorized an ambulance, and Kolmetz rode along with Martin to ECMC, his report said.
The deputy also reported that jail personnel wouldn’t tell him how Martin was injured. A jail lieutenant would tell him only that the inmate was in “an altercation,” the report said.
Martin, 51, goes by several aliases and is being held on drug-related charges and a count of resisting arrest. He eventually told detectives that an inmate jumped him as he broke up a fight.
That’s also how Sheriff Timothy B. Howard’s Jail Management Division reported the event to the State Commission of Correction -- as inmate-on-inmate violence.
But why not promptly summon an ambulance?
Undersheriff Richard T. Donovan said the jail’s medical personnel determined that Martin did not need one.
“They felt he was stabilized enough, and the injuries were not life-threatening enough where an ambulance was necessary,” Donovan said. “And the decision was made between the patrol officer and the Jail Management Division to call an ambulance.”
Donovan also said that while Kolmetz lamented a lack of information, he was assigned to bring Martin to the hospital. Other personnel were to conduct the criminal investigation into the assault.
But the decision to call an ambulance did not go easily.
Here’s an entry from a dispatcher’s chronology: “HC [Holding Center] is being uncooperative and are refusing to give patrol any info. Inmate has obviously been assaulted by somebody. HC is demanding that patrol just do the transport. Patrol refused and we had to [request] the ambulance because the HC would not call.”
Dr. Anthony J. Billittier IV, the county health commissioner, supervises the medical staff at both the Holding Center and the county Correctional Facility in Alden. He says the jail’s medical personnel made the right call by deeming no ambulance necessary.
“When a layperson sees somebody with lots of bandages and a nosebleed, they think that they need an ambulance,” Billittier said. “But you have to ask yourself, what does an ambulance add?”
He said the inmate was walking and alert. His bandages were dry and not blood-soaked. He did not need a stretcher or care en route to ECMC.
“An ambulance would have added nothing to his care,” said Billittier, who also works in ECMC’s emergency room.
Nor does an ambulance save the labors of a deputy who could be doing other things, he said. A deputy must still supervise the inmate on the trip to the hospital and the stay there.
The State Commission of Correction, which regulates local jails, does not have a guideline that would have mandated the Holding Center call an ambulance for Martin. Spokesman John M. Caher said the commission expects that the “standard of care in the community” be observed; in other words, common sense should prevail.
Medical transports from the jail create a sore point for road patrol deputies. During Erie County’s mid-decade budget crisis, sheriff’s officials assigned about a dozen road deputies to a “transport unit,” in part to spare them from layoffs.
With the budget crisis long passed, road deputies would like to see those transport deputies return to patrol duties and then let jail deputies -- though already stressed by required overtime -- take over all medical transports.
Further, the transport unit is not always at work. On many nights and weekends, patrol deputies are summoned off the road for “med runs,” further stretching the force.
Donovan said that no inmate has yet been charged in the beating and that Martin is on the mend.
The Jail Management Division’s report to the state portrays it as another case of inmate-on-inmate violence that went unobserved by jail deputies. A jail deputy reported finding Martin bleeding in a hallway after the fight. The U.S. Justice Department lamented in its report on Erie County’s jails that guards either condone inmate-on-inmate violence or look the other way.
“It’s a jail environment where the highest priorities have to be placed on custody, care and control,” said Jordan Gerow, a chairman of the Erie County Prisoners’ Rights Coalition. “Whether it’s guard-on-inmate violence or inmate-on-inmate violence, it is very troubling to hear about. It further underscores the case that the Justice Department has made in the past and I am sure will be making in ongoing mediation with the county.
“Obviously, whatever they are doing,” he said of the jail’s supervisors, “it is not enough.”
Copyright 2010 The Buffalo News