Baby Jordan came into this world shivering on a thin mattress across from a toilet inside a dirty Denver County jail cell on July 31, 2018.
His mother, Diana Sanchez, 26, is now suing Denver city and county officials after she says she was left screaming in agony for hours over a year ago, with no anesthesia, no doctors, no family, or anyone at all to aid her in her delivery.
The then-pregnant mom had been taken into custody two weeks earlier for identity theft-related charges, according to the Denver County Sheriff’s Department.
Recently-released surveillance video shows Sanchez’s now one-year-old son being born at 10.44am that day, nearly six hours after his mother told a jailhouse guard she was going into labor.
The guard reportedly refused to come to Sanchez’s aid when her water broke an hour after she alerted him.
Moments later, Jordan took his first breath before a male nurse, who had been watching Sanchez from outside the jail cell, walked in and picked up her naked child.
‘(He) picks up the baby as though he’s never seen one in his life,’ Sanchez’s attorney Mari Newman told KDVR. ‘I mean, the lack of any sort of compassion is astounding.’
Up until that instant, Sanchez said the jail’s staff had declined to call an ambulance for her.
‘I felt helpless. Nobody was helping me. There were so many people there and nobody lifted a finger basically,’ the new mom said days after the incident. ‘That pain, it’s just, it’s indescribable. What hurts me more is the fact that nobody cared.’
Sanchez and her attorneys filed a lawsuit on Wednesday claiming that the jail’s staff knew she was giving birth, but made a conscious decision not to take her to the hospital after she was booked because it was ‘inconvenient’.
‘This suit is brought to hold to account the officials who cruelly chose convenience over compassion,’ the lawsuit stated.
County jail staff members Rachime Herch, Nina Chacon, Alexandra Wherry, Michael Hart, Tysen Garcia, and Justin Albee are also named in the suit in addition to the city and county of Denver and the Denver Health Medical Center.
A Denver County Sheriff spokeswoman said Sheriff Patrick Firman ‘immediately ordered Internal Affairs to conduct a review to understand what happened’ after Sanchez delivered her baby.
Investigators determined their deputies ‘took the appropriate actions under the circumstances and followed the relevant policies and procedures,’ the spokeswoman said.
Since the incident, the sheriff’s department said it has clarified its policy to the staff so that an ambulance will be called when an inmate is in labor.
Denver Health declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Sanchez has a probation revocation hearing scheduled to take place at 1.30pm on September 12, Denver County Court records show.
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