Regina Radcliff was booked into the Montgomery County Jail on December 20, 2024, and almost immediately began experiencing opioid withdrawal. According to the complaint, nurse practitioner Mary Dambacher ordered some medications but allegedly failed to administer a withdrawal protocol — specifically the Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale — to assess Radcliff's condition. Over the next two days, Radcliff's health allegedly deteriorated rapidly. Despite visible signs of distress, the complaint alleges neither Dambacher nor correctional officers arranged hospitalization or meaningful monitoring. On December 22, the complaint alleges, severe dehydration caused Radcliff to go into cardiac arrest. She was transported to Memorial Hospital in Springfield and pronounced dead the following day.
Charlene Cripe, as administrator of Radcliff's estate, sued Montgomery County, Sheriff Tyson Holshouser, and Advanced Correctional Healthcare under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, along with state claims under the Illinois Survival Act and the Illinois Wrongful Death Act. The complaint alleged that ACH maintained a policy of systematically denying necessary medical treatment to inmates at facilities where it was contracted, including refusing to summon emergency medical services for detainees clearly experiencing a medical emergency, and that the sheriff failed to train correctional staff to recognize drug overdoses and withdrawal.
U.S. District Judge Jonathan E. Hawley found that the Monell allegations against both ACH and Sheriff Holshouser were sufficient to proceed — the complaint included detailed factual allegations about ACH's alleged practices across multiple facilities and specific failures at the Montgomery County Jail — but dismissed Counts I and III without prejudice. The court found that Count I, nominally a Monell claim against Holshouser, read instead as a Fourteenth Amendment individual-capacity claim, and that Count III, which combined Holshouser and ACH together, failed to make clear which policies and customs were attributable to which defendant. Plaintiff has until May 18, 2026, to file a Second Amended Complaint separating those theories.
On the state-law wrongful death claim against Dambacher, the court denied dismissal. Dambacher had argued that the Illinois Healing Arts Malpractice Act required Cripe to attach a physician's certificate of merit to the complaint. The court held that under Seventh Circuit precedent, a federal complaint cannot be dismissed for lacking that affidavit at the pleading stage, and directed Cripe to produce the required affidavit when she discloses her expert reports.