Inmate attempts suicide at Erie County jail

PERKINS TWP. — An inmate remains in intensive care following a suicide attempt at the Erie County jail on Monday. The hanging comes as the second in as many weeks at the local facility."We want to be very proactive about this," Sheriff Paul Sigsworth said. "We work every day to try to prevent (situations like this), but we're going to see if there are any additional steps we can take."A corrections officer doing a routine check around 10:30 a.m. found that Richard Maclean, 27, of Vermilion, had hung himself using a bed sheet, Sigsworth said. A corrections officer and a jail nurse immediately began performing CPR on Maclean. First-responders then took him to Firelands Regional Medical Center, where his family joined him.Maclean had been in custody since Thursday on a felony theft charge, according to jail records. That charge corresponds to two burglaries in Huron earlier this month.Richard Maclean A meeting in response to both this attempt and an apparent suicide at the jail last week was slated for Tuesday. Sigsworth said representatives from the sheriff's office, the Erie County Health Department, Firelands Counseling and Recovery and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections participated.Among points to be addressed, he said, were practical measures that jail staff could take to prevent additional suicide attempts.Sigsworth said any approach to the issue is expected to acknowledge that the jail's population increasingly includes inmates with mental health-and addiction-related issues.Ninety percent percent of inmates at the local jail deal with drug- and alcohol-related issues, Sigsworth said, citing an estimate used by jail staff. Around 80 percent of inmates deal with mental health issues, he said. Those numbers mean that many inmates experience a combination of both.Sigsworth said a jail inspector through the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections checked out the Erie County jail within the past four months. The jail passed that inspection with 100 percent compliance in essential requirements, he said."Whenever something like this happens, you're always going to self-evaluate," Sigsworth said. "It doesn't hurt to have someone from the outside come in."Maclean was not on suicide watch on Monday, Sigsworth said. Although Maclean was being held in the jail's general population at the time, meaning he could interact with other inmates, Sigsworth said he was alone in a cell when the corrections officer found him.Sigsworth said Maclean left a note.On Dec. 28 another inmate, Ali Ak, 32, died in an apparent suicide. Ak had been in custody on felony charges related to an assault in Maryland for less than a week when a corrections officer found that he, too, had used a bed sheet to hang himself.Ak had been in a medical isolation cell based on issues at the time related to a drug withdrawal, according to Sigsworth.While jail staff have handled attempted suicides in the past, Sigsworth said that apparent suicide was the first in the Erie County jail in approximately 20 years.File Photo, Erie County Jail