The following statement was issued March 5, 2025, by the Cleveland-based Cuyahoga County Jail Coalition.
It is with deep frustration and sadness that we are informing you that yet another community member has died in our County Jail.
At around 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 25, Jennifer Wade, 41, was found unresponsive in her cell by guards at the Cuyahoga County Jail. Jennifer’s death is the first at the County Jail to be reported this year and the 30th overall since the crisis that occurred in the summer and fall of 2018 when eight community members died in rapid succession.
In this case, we know from the court docket that Ms. Wade had already been declared incompetent to stand trial as of Oct. 28, 2024, and was ordered by Judge Emily Hagan to undergo a course of psychiatric treatment at Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare under the court psychiatrist’s belief that her competence could be restored. Following that order, Ms. Wade remained incarcerated at the Cuyahoga County Jail until Dec. 12 when, rather than being given a bed at Northcoast, she was taken to the Metrohealth Cleveland Heights Medical Center as an “emergency admission.”
Ms. Wade was then returned to the County Jail on Feb. 13, presumably because her bed was needed by someone else, as her docket from that day specifically stipulates that she may need “follow-up medical care not available at Northcoast Behavioral Health on a semi-regular basis until [her] condition is stabilized.” Twelve days later she was found dead.
What is unclear is why Ms. Wade was even in jail in the first place, given that she was issued a personal bond four days after her arrest. But it is not difficult to read between the lines and piece together a story of how not only our legal system but our county’s behavioral health infrastructure completely failed Jennifer Wade. Her final Facebook post on Sept. 5 read: “I’m tired of Cleveland Clinic putting me in jail.”
On Sept. 5, Jennifer was arrested by Cleveland Clinic Police and charged with “Harassment of Inmate” for an incident that occurred nearly two months earlier. The charge and the arresting department strongly suggest that she was already receiving psychiatric care and was accused of attacking someone else at the hospital. She was then placed in the far more dangerous and inhospitable County Jail for three months before being taken to a different psychiatric facility for two months, with the primary focus of her treatment shifting to restoring her competence to stand trial for something that happened in the other facility. Then she was taken back to the county jail, where she died a week and a half later.
This absurd and cruel series of events is a direct consequence of the inadequate capacity of our local behavioral health services to meet the scale of mental health needs of our community. Jennifer was passed back and forth between the health care and legal systems, because neither could meet her needs.
If this narrative of what took place is incorrect, then the burden of proof is on Cleveland Clinic, Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare, Metrohealth and most of all the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department to explain what actually happened here and why this woman is now dead instead of in treatment.
Medical neglect part of a pattern
Jennifer’s death comes on the heels of an alarming report by The Marshall Project uncovering a pattern of medical neglect by jail staff that contributed to the deaths of Glen Williams Jr. and Fred Maynard last year. The training of jail staff has repeatedly proven inadequate to the task of administering needed accommodations to people at the jail who are suffering from physical and mental health conditions.
]Either the training is inadequate or the staff at the County Jail simply do not care to follow the protocols that could have saved the lives of so many people in their care. This speaks to a deeper culture of negligence that defines our criminal legal system.
While the [Cuyahoga County Executive Chris] Ronayne administration has spoken extensively about their desire to provide comprehensive medical and behavioral health services in their planned [new county jail in] Garfield Heights, “Central Services Campus,” as of yet neither the administration nor the county sheriff’s department has publicly laid out any clear plan of action for protecting and providing for the people still currently incarcerated at the Justice Center [the building housing the county jail].
Furthermore, Jennifer’s case seems to be a clear-cut instance where the shared inadequacy of our county’s mental health resources contributed to her death, suggesting that substantial investment is still needed outside of this new jail project to truly address the problems it will supposedly confront.
The Jail Coalition has maintained that the building has never been the problem and, as always, this tragedy could have been avoided had those responsible for Jennifer’s care treated her with the dignity and attention that all human beings deserve.
We are in touch with her family and will be reaching out again soon with ways to assist them and advocate for the dignity and safety of others at our County Jail.