A Hood County grand jury has indicted jail nurse Rachel Sanders Miller in the April death of inmate Michael Turner Jr., charging her with failing to obtain medical care after being alerted that he was in distress.
Turner’s daughter, Sara Youngblood, said her father had recently moved in with her family in Granbury and was trying to rebuild their relationship when she urged him to turn himself in for a parole violation.
“I had been dying to meet him, literally my whole life,” Youngblood said, Fox 4 KDFW reported. “He met my kids, those were his grandbabies.”
She added that after he surrendered to the Hood County Sheriff’s Office, “that was the last time she saw him.”
“He needed help, and nobody helped him,” Youngblood said.
The Texas Rangers investigated the death. Details of Turner’s medical emergency have not been released.
Krish Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, called the criminal indictment of jail medical staff highly unusual.
“We had, what, 136 custody deaths reported this year,” Gundu said, per Fox 4. “And I don’t think we’ve seen that happen in any of those deaths so far.”
Youngblood said the family has still received no official explanation of what happened.
“I know that inmates are looked at like a lesser part of the human race,” she said, Fox 4 reported. “But he was a really, really good person.”
