Brittany Hailer and Joshua Vaughn
Editor’s Note: This investigation was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
Jeff Lagrotteria and Tina Talotta waited 30 minutes before doctors would allow them to enter the hospital room where their cousin Anthony Talotta was barely alive, breathing on a ventilator.
“Because they had to prepare him for us to see him,” Lagrotteria said, referring to his shocking appearance.
Talotta had been living at a group home for men with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities where, after an altercation, a pot of boiling water fell on him and on a worker. Police were called and Talotta was taken to a hospital Sept. 10, 2022, and then to the Allegheny County Jail. His foot had second-degree burns, torn ligaments and fractures.
Eleven days later, the family hadn’t been told anything about what landed Talotta in the hospital, that it was his second hospitalization during his brief incarceration or that he had been treated for an infection on his foot.
When the cousins walked into the ICU on Sept. 21 and saw Talotta, they were stunned at his condition — black and blue blooming up his leg. The doctors didn’t explain how Talotta’s leg had become so infected, but said they were “tending to it.”
The cousins also learned their 57-year-old relative was suffering from septic shock, which had triggered a heart attack.
“We didn’t realize he was basically dead,” Lagrotteria said. Talotta didn’t survive the day.
He was one of 17 people to die while in custody of the jail from March 2020 to September 2022.
Talotta’s story encompasses much of what can go wrong inside Pennsylvania jails. He was released from custody while dying in the hospital and his death was not reported to the Department of Justice or the Department of Corrections by the Allegheny County Jail, as required.
This lack of reporting by Pennsylvania jails is widespread, resulting in severe undercounting of deaths in the commonwealth. PennLive and the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism undertook a six-month investigation to create the first comprehensive database of such deaths in Pennsylvania.
The investigation identified at least 65 deaths in custody across the state last year, only about 40 of which were reported as required.
Some county governments circumvent the requirement to report deaths by releasing jail residents before they die. Some county coroners refuse to provide the names of people who died while in custody of local jails, despite state law that makes that information public.
Most people held in county jails have not been convicted of crimes and are awaiting trial.
Details provided in autopsy records also vary by county, and some death records obtained in the course of the investigation lacked vital information. They did not indicate, for example, that an individual was housed or died in custody, including in Talotta’s case. His report also neglected to say he was found in the jail’s mental health unit, then rushed to a hospital.
This investigation turned up dozens of deaths that weren’t properly reported across Pa., but because of breakdowns in the system, there could be even more. There is nothing in place to ensure these deaths are counted, or even investigated.
The problem extends beyond Pennsylvania. Deaths in county jails across the country are subject to the same haphazard reporting and lack of accountability.
“We have a moral and legal obligation to document and investigate every single death in custody in order to acknowledge the dignity of the person who died, to develop strategies and policies to minimize future deaths in custody, and to hold responsible parties — whether they be individuals or institutions — accountable when they have behaved in a negligent manner,” said Jay Aronson, co-author of the book “Death in Custody: How America Ignores the Truth and What We Can Do about It.”
“Without accurate data, we can’t do any of these things.”
‘Getting to the truth’
The Tallota family filed a federal lawsuit this month, alleging doctors and medical staff at the Allegheny County Jail provided substandard care.
They discovered after Tallota’s death that Wilson Bernales, the responding physician at the jail, had his medical license revoked or suspended in eight states. He also had injected Anthony with Benadryl, a treatment for an allergic reaction, instead of dealing with his life-threatening infection, according to the lawsuit.
According to Alec Wright, an attorney representing Talotta’s family, ambulance workers contacted Bernales, asking for Talotta’s medical history: How did the leg get this bad? What contributed to the cardiac arrest?
In records obtained for this story, EMS reported that jail “medical staff did not provide ambulance workers with any medical records, medical history, medication list or other supporting documentation.” Jail medical staff told EMS that “something went wrong with the printer” at the jail, according to EMS records.
Ambulance workers questioned Bernales in order to understand the reason for Talotta’s medical emergency,
“When asked for clarification what the patient’s symptoms at that time of the medical emergency were, the doctor responded that the patient presented as not responding verbally and was immobile,” EMS reported in the emergency log.
Despite further attempts, “the doctor was unable to provide a clear picture of the patient’s status at the time of the medical emergency.”
The Talotta family found themselves in an alternate reality. Once they entered the hospital room, they had to make end-of-life decisions for their cousin, a man whose IQ hovered somewhere above 60. He had been entrusted to their care after his mother, Lena Talotta, died, leaving a $1 million trust that her son could live on without her guiding hand and vigilance.
“I was shocked that happened to him,” said Tina Talotta. “When Aunt Lena was [dying] she was afraid that something was going to happen to Anthony. I said, ‘I’ll take care of Anthony.’ But my guilt is if I could have taken him in, would this still have happened?”
The Pittsburgh Institute of Nonprofit Journalism first learned of Tallota’s death shortly after it occurred when anonymous sources working in the jail said Talotta had been released from custody before he died.
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner determined Talotta died naturally of a heart attack and, outside of jail and hospital medical records, the story of Talotta’s infection remained hidden until his family’s lawyers requested and obtained additional documents.
Getting to the truth in jail deaths is costly, and many families don’t have the resources to hire attorneys to learn what happened to their loved ones.
In those cases, that means the public doesn’t get to find out the truth, either.
Wright estimates a typical jail death case costs between $15,000 and $30,000 to obtain records, retain forensic medical experts, understand family history, and piece together a narrative of how someone like Anthony Talotta died in custody.
For attorneys like Wright, who practice on a contingency fee, it also costs between $35,000 and $50,000 in attorney hours to determine what really happened. So, the total cost to fully investigate a jail death in order to file a lawsuit can be upwards of $80,000.
The first-ever database
Talotta’s is one of at least 26 jail deaths that weren’t properly reported last year, but were revealed as part of the investigation by PennLive and PINJ to create the first statewide database of jail deaths. The database will be updated as we learn of new deaths.
The database showed the highest number of deaths occurred, not surprisingly, in the largest counties. But it also delivered some surprises as far as counties with higher death rates, which are calculated against the jail’s daily population.
Overall, Philadelphia County logged the most in-custody deaths last year with 10. The county is the largest in the state, and features several jails with an average daily population of more than 4,400 people.
Allegheny County, the state’s second-largest county, also ranked second in deaths along with Bucks County, with six people dying in each county. Allegheny County’s jail population averages around 1,500 daily, while Bucks’ is around 675.
Delaware County, the state’s fifth largest, reported five deaths with an average daily jail population of about 1,450 people.
Nine more counties with populations ranging from 150 to nearly 1,000 had at least two people die in jail last year, and 15 counties reported at least one death.