Lawsuit: Man With Schizophrenia Starved in Miami-Dade Jail Before Death

By the time he died alone in his Miami-Dade jail cell in the summer of 2021, Randy Heath weighed just 113 pounds. The 39-year-old's severely emaciated body is shown in a series of autopsy photos with a protruding ribcage and collarbone, sunken cheekbones, and atrophied arms and legs, with what appear to be bruises around his body.

"He’s like a skeleton," his mother, Angela Heath, said of the images.

In a wrongful-death lawsuit filed in federal court this week against Miami-Dade County, Heath's mother, Angela Heath, claims guards at the county-run Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center (TGK) allowed her son, who had bipolar and schizophrenia disorders, to languish in the jail's mental health unit before he was found unresponsive in his cell.

The lawsuit alleges that jail employees did not properly feed, monitor, or administer Heath's medication during his roughly nine-month-long incarceration.

"When Heath was booked into TGKCC, he was able to communicate. Despite his medical challenges, he was able to bathe himself, shave, and communicate with the guards," the lawsuit (attached at the bottom of this story) states. "Towards the end of his life, you could see a really harrowing picture of a shell of a person."

His mother's lawyer, Daryl Washington, tells New Times there's "no doubt" that Heath should have been at a dedicated mental health facility instead of jail. Heath's death, he says, was emblematic of casualties resulting from mass incarceration of people with severe psychiatric disease who should be undergoing medical treatment.

"I mean, you put these individuals in jail in these facilities that just don't have the ability to properly treat someone like Randy," the Texas-based civil rights attorney says. "Anybody can see that something was majorly wrong with Randy, and that he was in a situation that required immediate medical attention."

According to a 31-page report from the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner's Office, Heath was last seen alive during a routine check at around 4:15 a.m. on July 18, 2021. But when guards returned to his cell for a second check around 20 minutes later, he was found unresponsive.

Fire rescue responded and pronounced him dead roughly an hour later.

The report found that Heath had died from "food asphyxia" after a large piece of orange blocked his airway, with the contributory cause being pica, an eating disorder in which people compulsively eat things that aren't food. It notes that several foreign materials, including bandages, a mustard packet, and part of a peanut package, were found in his small and large intestines.

Heath, who had been in and out of Miami-Dade jail since 2002 on various charges, was arrested on a burglary charge in October 2019 and re-arrested in April 2020 for allegedly tampering with his ankle monitor. He was booked into TGK's mental-health unit.

As the months went on at the jail, according to the lawsuit, Heath's health slowly deteriorated.

He would remain on the floor of his cell unattended for hours, at one point in his own urine and feces, his family says. Although he was regularly prescribed medication for his mental illnesses, his toxicology report detected no medicine in his system at the time of death.

"Clearly, Heath was suffering and being unattended to well before he allegedly died from food asphyxia," the suit states .

The lawsuit alleges Heath pleaded for help and advised he could not breathe prior to his death, but that the jail did not transport him to a hospital. According to the complaint, pica was never listed as an eating disorder in Heath's medical records.

"The jail personnel were not equipped to deal with Heath, and they failed to take Heath to the hospital where he could have been saved," the lawsuit states.

Before he was incarcerated, Heath, a lifelong Miami resident, worked at International House of Pancakes and lived in a group home for adults with mental illness and substance abuse issues. A former facilitator at the home recalls how Heath, a 5-foot-10-inch man who weighed 204 pounds, "loved to eat."

The Miami-Dade court docket states that on July 9, a little more than a week before Heath's death, a judge ruled that Heath was incompetent and ordered him remanded into the custody of Florida's Department of Children and Families.

In response to a request for comment, Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Juan Diasgranados tells New Times that the department does not comment on pending litigation.

Near Miami International Airport, the secure TGK facility can house up to 1,300 inmates. The jail's ninth-floor psychiatric ward, known as "The Forgotten Floor", was shuttered in 2015 after years of criticism and a federal probe.

After nearly a decade and a half, the county's Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery, a facility aiming to break the homelessness-to-jail cycle, is set to open this fall. With more than 200 beds, the program aims to help people who are homeless, have acute mental illness, and keep winding up in jail due to their illnesses.