Pregnant Inmates Baby Dies After Jail Staffers Allegedly Stopped At Starbucks Instead of Going To Hospital

A pregnant prisoner who claimed that her unborn child died because staff members from a California jail stopped at a Starbucks on the way to the hospital has been permitted to receive a payout in the amount of $480,000.

According to minutes of the meeting, the Board of Supervisors of Orange County gave its unanimous approval to the proposed settlement on Tuesday for the incident that occurred in 2016 involving the delayed transfer of Sandra Quinones to a hospital. 

In April of 2020, Quinones submitted a formal complaint to Orange County, California, saying that the county was responsible for the wrongful death of her kid as well as the infliction of mental distress.

According to the complaint, Quinones’ water broke on March 28, 2016, when she was incarcerated in the Orange County prison. She was six months pregnant at the time.

According to the complaint, she pressed the call button in her cell for a period of two hours but received no answer. According to the report, employees at the detention facility neglected to call an ambulance for the woman and instead took her to the hospital on a “non-emergency basis.”

She argued that the defendants acted with “deliberate indifference” toward her health concerns, including making a pit stop at a Starbucks on the way to the hospital instead of transporting her there straightaway.

According to the lawsuit, Quinones and her infant were taken to the hospital, where her baby later passed away.

According to NBC News, in October 2020, the court made the decision to dismiss the action with prejudice on the grounds that her claims were time-barred according to California’s two-year statute of limitations and that she did not provide adequate evidence to substantiate her allegations.

She said that the event occurred in March 2016, but she didn’t file the complaint until almost three and a half years later on September 9, 2019, when she was included to a separate civil action case that was being brought against the county.