At approximately 6 a.m. on the morning of his death two years ago, the 32-year-old Foard had rated the abdominal pain from which he was suffering at ten on a scale of ten when he was seen by Sierra Snooks, a nurse at the La Plata County Detention Facility in Durango, where he had recently been incarcerated. But, according to a lawsuit filed today, July 21, neither Snooks nor fellow nurse Ashley Box, who worked the evening shift, sent him to a nearby hospital or consulted with a doctor even after he began to regurgitate vomit dark with old and coagulated blood — material known as coffee-ground emesis.
His vomiting alarmed staff at the jail, but mostly because of its messiness. At one point, as seen in a harrowing video that accompanies the lawsuit, Randall Clark, a sergeant with the facility, instructed Foard to "try to hit that drain" in the floor of the cell he occupied at the time because guards "can't keep switching you out to clean." He'd already been moved twice after vomit had befouled a previous pair of cells.
Foard obediently complied with this order, scooping blood into the drain on an occasion when he missed it. But he also seemed to understand that without medical care, he was doomed.
After fifteen hours of agony, Foard died from peritonitis due to a perforated duodenal ulcer — a cause that killed plenty of people in the Old West but is easily treatable in the 21st century. And because the cell was equipped with a camera that fed live images to monitors in Clark's office, his jailers watched it occur.
The complaint is being pressed in United States District Court for the District of Colorado by Denver's Holland, Holland Edwards & Grossman, LLC, on behalf of Foard's mother and father, Susan Gizinski and Jim Foard. Defendants include Snooks, Box, Clark and four other employees of the La Plata County Detention Facility, plus La Plata County Sheriff Sean Smith, La Plata's Board of County Commissioners and Southern Health Partners (SHP), the Tennessee-based firm under contract to provide medical care to jail inmates.
In a joint statement, Foard's parents explain that "we are bringing this lawsuit in an effort to hold those responsible for our son's death accountable. We believe it is important for everyone to hear and see the horrific ordeal that Danny went through. And we are hoping this suit will bring about serious changes to the way inmates are treated at the La Plata County jail, by the medical staff and the Sheriff's Department as well."
Dan Weiss, one of the attorneys working on the case, admits to being haunted by the images in the video, which captures the last two or so hours of Foard's life.
"Danny Foard understood what was happening to him," he contends, "because he knew he wasn't going to get any help. The pain and the recognition of one's death because no one will listen to you causes me to lose sleep at night."
John Holland, Weiss's colleague, is equally disturbed by the episodes that preceded Foard's passing. "We live in a difficult time in which our rights are less secure than they once were," he says. "But the 8th Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. The founding fathers recognized that people in jail cannot be treated with cruelty, and the cruelty of this case is what I find so troubling."
A native of Maryland, Foard excelled at school, loved playing the guitar and enjoyed outdoor activities, the lawsuit notes. But he also struggled with addiction in his youth, and while he was able to stay clean for several years after moving to Durango in 2018, he ultimately fell victim to his habit again. In 2023, he was arrested on what Weiss describes as "low-level drug possession."
On August 11 of that year, upon his booking into La Plata County jail on a failure-to-appear warrant, Foard told the crew on hand that he was hooked on fentanyl pills. As a result, he was placed in the medical observation section of the facility for detoxification monitoring.
The complaint describes Foard's initial time in the unit as "largely uneventful," marked by vomiting and diarrhea considered typical of withdrawal. These symptoms subsequently abated, but his vitals remained abnormal — his heart rate and respiration were elevated, and he had high blood pressure — before he collapsed multiple times during an August 15 body scan that was part of the program. But Clark is said to have mouthed to a colleague that he thought Foard was "faking," and Box determined that he was stable enough to be transferred to the jail's general-population area.
Daniel Foard seen playing guitar at his brother Ryan's wedding.
Foard family via Holland, Holland Edwards & Grossman, LLC
The guards and deputies had no training to properly evaluate Foard's condition, but there were no medical professionals to spare thanks to Southern Health Partners' staffing structure, according to the lawsuit. A 2024 City of Durango release puts the maximum capacity of the jail at 260 beds, with a cap on inmates in the 170-190 range. Yet SHP assigns a single nurse to care for the entire population at any given time over a twelve-hour period; Snooks worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on August 16, with Box coming on to fill the 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. slot.
In the case of a medical emergency, jail employees are empowered to contact an ambulance service or dial 911. Otherwise, nurses are instructed to call an off-site medical director, who Weiss says are "sometimes doctors and sometimes not. And they are often medical directors for multiple jails in addition to having their own private practice."
Weiss sees this system as wholly inadequate at preserving the health of inmates. The lawsuit cites a slew of previous court cases from around the country in which individuals died at facilities managed by SHP that used the remote-doctor model. But the approach is certainly good for the bottom line, and the complaint argues this was the most important factor for La Plata County when contracting with a health-care company.
In 2016, SHP was chosen over a competitor whose bid for annual services was more than $250,000 higher and had its deal with the county renewed without competition in 2023 for reasons La Plata County Sheriff's Office Detentions Division Commander Ed Aber spelled out in an email: "I have done some informal cost comparisons with other service providers that meet medical needs in other Colorado Jails, and our contracted price is significantly lower," he wrote.
At about 7 a.m. on the 16th, Foard was put into HC4, or holding room four, in the booking area. He was moved to holding room five in the 6 p.m. range because HC4 was "so filthy with vomit," the lawsuit maintains; Foard was switched to holding cell six just forty minutes later for the same reason.
Holland and Weiss think HC6 was the facility's "suicide cell," since it was outfitted with audio and video capabilities that allowed jailers to keep an eye on prisoners who showed signs of wanting to harm themselves. But Weiss doubts that they opted for the cell because of its monitoring capability.
"I'll bet you the reason they put him in there was more about the drain than the camera," he says.
The video below shows selected sequences from Foard's time in HC6, which he entered by crawling. His death is not depicted.
Box walked by Foard's cell and heard him yelling (his cries included "Nurse!," "Help!" and "I need to go to the hospital!"), but she didn't take his vitals or otherwise examine him, the lawsuit alleges. When later asked by a Colorado Bureau of Investigation interviewer why she took so long to react to his pleas, she stated that "she had too many other job duties as the lone SHP nurse" on hand that evening, including "'med pass' and 'housing checks."
She finally looked in on Foard at 9:49 p.m. But by then, he was already dead, lying on the floor near pools of his bloody vomit.
After Foard's death, the CBI quizzed other jail employees in addition to Box, and Weiss found the tone of the answers as a whole to be "morally repugnant. There was a casual attitude to what happened and their willingness to pretend that this was normal withdrawal when it clearly wasn't. To me, this case is one of the greatest illustrations of deliberate indifference you'll ever find."
To Holland, "delegating untrained deputies to monitor someone with ten-out-of-ten stomach pain is shocking and intolerable. So this problem is at the individual level — but it's also at the level of the county and the healthcare company, which, to save money, set up a system where they keep 150-200 inmates behind bars who better not get seriously sick, because they're too short-staffed to do anything about it."
Among the goals for Foard's parents is systemic improvement.
"Just basic training in having compassion for others would be a great start," they state. "But adding more staff is critical, too. More medical staff and a physician on-site would be beneficial, along with proper training. If Deputies are going to continue being used to monitor sick inmates, they must be trained, also. These elementary steps would have saved our son’s life."
Still, they continue, "this case isn’t only about legal proceedings. It is also about restoring balance, about bringing our family the peace and closure we have been seeking. It’s about honoring Danny in the way he deserves, ensuring that his legacy remains intact, free from the weight of uncertainty and hardship. Moving past this chapter does not mean forgetting — it means being able to cherish his memory without the constant burden of knowing about what happened to him in that jail and everyone pretending it was fine.... As parents, we are compelled to seek Justice on behalf of our beloved son."
Ted Holteen, public and governmental affairs manager for La Plata County, offers this response to the lawsuit: "The County has not analyzed the allegations made in the complaint. The County does not make public comment on active litigation."
Westword has also reached out to La Plata County and Southern Health Partners for comment about the lawsuit. Click to read The Estate of Daniel Foard v. Southern Health Partners, Inc., et al.
