Milwaukee County Settles Jail Dehydration Death for $6.75 Million
After trial: The settlement was paid: $5 million by Milwaukee County and $1.75 million by Armor Correctional Health Services, finalized in March 2019 and made public that May. There was no appeal; the lawsuit was dismissed as part of the settlement. Three jail staff members were criminally charged over the water shutoff and the investigation that followed, and all three were convicted.
Won by Budge & Heipt, PLLC.
Terrill Thomas, a 38-year-old Milwaukee man with a history of bipolar disorder, died of dehydration in the Milwaukee County Jail in April 2016 after a jail lieutenant ordered the water to his cell shut off for a week as punishment for flooding a previous cell. He lost 34 pounds before he was found dead on April 24, 2016. His estate sued Milwaukee County and the jail's medical contractor, Armor Correctional Health Services, in federal court, and the case settled in March 2019 for $6.75 million, split $5 million from the county and $1.75 million from Armor. The money was divided among Thomas's six children, several of them minors.
What happened
Terrill Thomas was booked into the Milwaukee County Jail on April 14, 2016, after an incident at a Potawatomi casino in which he fired a gun. He was 38 years old and had a history of bipolar disorder. Within his first days in custody he flooded his cell by stuffing a mattress into the toilet, and jail staff moved him to a different cell.
A jail lieutenant, Kashka Meadors, ordered a correctional officer to shut off the water supply to that new cell as punishment. The water was never turned back on. For seven days Thomas had no water to drink, not even with his meals, and was served nutraloaf, a bland food loaf used for disciplinary rations. Other inmates later said they tried to warn guards that he was in distress.
Thomas lost 34 pounds, about a tenth of his body weight, during that week. He was found dead in his cell on April 24, 2016. Armor Correctional Health Services, the private company contracted to provide medical care at the jail, had staff assigned to the unit who did not intervene before his death.
Thomas's estate sued Milwaukee County and Armor in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, case number 2:17-cv-01128, raising federal civil rights claims along with state law claims. Edwin Budge and Erik Heipt, working with Milwaukee attorney James End, represented Thomas's six children, several of them minors. Sheriff David Clarke, who ran the jail at the time of Thomas's death, had already resigned by the time the case settled and denied any wrongdoing.
The case settled in March 2019 for $6.75 million: $5 million from Milwaukee County and $1.75 million from Armor Correctional Health Services. Budge said the settlement reflected the county's callous disregard for Thomas's life and the magnitude of his suffering. The family's lawyers called it the largest jail death settlement in Wisconsin history. Heipt, who has represented families in jail death cases for two decades, said he had yet to find a contract medical provider willing to put inmate health ahead of its own profit.
Three jail employees were criminally charged over the incident, either for shutting off the water or for giving false statements to investigators afterward, and all three were convicted. The settlement became public in May 2019, and the lawsuit was dismissed the same month.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.NPR via KCUR, May 29, 2019: confirms the $6.75 million total, names Edwin Budge as the family's lawyer, and details the seven-day water shutoff and Thomas's death
- 2.Insurance Journal, May 30, 2019: confirms the settlement, names Milwaukee County and Armor Correctional Health Services as the paying defendants, and the case's dismissal in May 2019
- 3.FOX6 Milwaukee: confirms the exact $5 million (county) and $1.75 million (Armor) breakdown of the $6.75 million settlement and the March 2019 finalization date
- 4.Fox News (AP), May 2019: names Erik Heipt and James End as the family's attorneys and confirms the settlement distribution among Thomas's six children
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All Budge & Heipt, PLLC proven verdicts →A federal jury in Spokane awarded $26.75 million to the estate of Cindy Lou Hill, a 55-year-old woman who died of a perforated intestine in the Spokane County Jail after NaphCare staff attributed her symptoms to heroin withdrawal, though the Ninth Circuit vacated the $24 million punitive portion in 2025 and the case was dismissed on remand.
Javier Tapia was 42 when a blood clot went unaddressed for weeks during his 2018 incarceration at the Pierce County Jail in Tacoma, Washington, leading to gangrene and the amputation of his leg below the knee. Tapia sued Pierce County and its jail medical contractor, NaphCare, Inc., alleging deliberate indifference to his medical needs under the Fourteenth Amendment. Pierce County settled separately for $1 million and was dismissed before trial. In April 2025, after a jury trial in Seattle, a federal jury found NaphCare liable and awarded Tapia $5 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in punitive damages, a total of $25 million. The district court denied NaphCare's post-trial motions, and NaphCare has appealed to the Ninth Circuit.
Joshua McLemore, 29, died on August 10, 2021, after 20 days locked alone in a padded isolation cell at the Jackson County Jail in Brownstown, Indiana, where he had been booked during a psychotic episode linked to untreated schizophrenia. He lost about 45 pounds and, according to the federal complaint, slept roughly 15 hours in total over those three weeks before jail staff sent him to a hospital; he was transferred to a Cincinnati hospital and died there of multiple organ failure. His aunt sued Jackson County, the sheriff and jail staff in federal court on behalf of his estate, and in December 2023 the county's $7.25 million settlement was made public, reported as the largest known payout over a jail death in Indiana. Separate claims against the jail's outsourced medical provider were not part of that settlement.
Larry Price Jr. spent just over a year in the Sebastian County, Arkansas jail awaiting trial on a terroristic threatening charge he could not make $1,000 bail on, and was found dead in his cell on August 29, 2021. He weighed 185 pounds when he was booked, and paramedics who responded to his death estimated his weight at about 90 pounds; the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory listed the cause of death as acute dehydration and malnutrition. His family's federal lawsuit alleged that Sebastian County and its jail medical contractor, Turn Key Health Clinics, LLC, ignored his deteriorating mental and physical condition, including discontinuing his psychiatric medication and failing to intervene as he ate and drank less over months in custody. Represented by Erik Heipt and Edwin Budge of Budge & Heipt, the family settled with both defendants in 2024 for $6 million, split evenly between the county and Turn Key. The county prosecutor filed no criminal charges over the death, and the case settled before trial with no ruling on liability.
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