$2.75 Million Settlement After a Diabetic Died Without Insulin in George County Jail
After trial: Settlement accepted May 27, 2022 and certified as a judgment on May 31, 2022. The county pays $2,500,000 from its general fund and its insurer $250,000, due in full by August 1, 2022, and the county admits no fault.
Won by Wetzel Law Firm.
William Joel Dixon, 28, an insulin-dependent diabetic, was held in the George County Regional Correctional Facility in Lucedale in September 2014. For seven days he got no insulin. The jail nurse, Carmon Sue Brannan, dismissed his worsening condition as methamphetamine withdrawal. He died on September 24, 2014 of diabetic ketoacidosis. Brannan was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years. In June 2022 George County agreed to pay his estate, his mother and his children $2,750,000.
What happened
William Joel Dixon was 28 and an insulin-dependent diabetic. In September 2014 he was held at the George County Regional Correctional Facility in Lucedale, Mississippi.
For seven days he received no insulin. He asked for help repeatedly. The jail nurse, Carmon Sue Brannan, ignored him and blamed his symptoms on methamphetamine withdrawal. What he had was diabetic ketoacidosis, the condition that develops when a diabetic goes without insulin. He died on September 24, 2014.
The neglect was treated as a crime. Brannan was prosecuted for manslaughter, convicted, and sentenced to 15 years in prison for causing his death.
The civil case was filed on September 22, 2017 by his mother, Donna Dixon, on behalf of his estate and his two children, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi against George County, the City of Lucedale and Brannan. It alleged that Brannan called him a faker who was detoxing, that the jail refused him a doctor for seven days, and that nobody called emergency medical providers after he was found unconscious in the shower. The City of Lucedale was dismissed.
The estate at first rejected the county's attempt to settle, which would have sent the case to an August 2022 jury trial before Judge Sul Ozerden. On May 27, 2022 the county's lawyers told the Board of Supervisors the estate had accepted $2,750,000: $2,500,000 from the county, more than half of its $4,300,000 general fund, and $250,000 from its insurer, to be paid in full by August 1. The federal court certified the judgment on May 31. The county admits no fault, and the judgment requires it to write the Dixon family a letter of apology.
Garner Wetzel of the Wetzel Law Firm in Gulfport was co-counsel for the estate. "William Joel Dixon was taken from this Earth at no fault of his own entirely too early, leaving two adolescent children without a father," he told WKRG. "There's no judgement, there's no jury verdict, there's no way to bring back their father."
A nurse's criminal conviction for the same neglect is unusual corroboration for a civil result. Here it is on the record: the medical failure that the county paid for was one a jury had already found to be manslaughter.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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