A state Department of Mental Health patient suffocated to death earlier this year at the bottom of a dogpile of agency employees who failed to follow the department’s training on physically restraining patients.
At least three of the employees involved in the death of 35-year-old William Avant had not been trained properly, according to an ongoing probe by state health regulators reviewed by The State as part of the newspaper’s weeks-long investigation into Avant’s death.
Avant, a Georgetown, S.C., native who had been in Mental Health’s inpatient care for more a dozen years, was killed on Jan. 22 when Mental Health staffers improperly pinned him face down on a Columbia hospital floor and lay atop his back for four minutes, preventing his diaphragm from expanding to deliver oxygen to vital organs. Hospital staffers failed to check Avant’s breathing as he died beneath them, records show.
Their actions were explicitly prohibited — in red, all-capital letters — in the department’s training manual, raising questions about the agency’s management of employees, including training, and how well Mental Health cares for its 100,000 patients, including 1,500 inpatients who are some of the state’s most vulnerable residents.
Richland County Coroner Gary Watts ruled Avant’s death a homicide, noting that the hospital employees’ actions directly caused Avant’s death, which has not been reported previously.
Should have been practicing to hold his breath. I got up to 3 min out of boredom.
Luke Howard
You don't need training not to suffocate someone. What are they 3 yos?
Daniel Smith
Definitely a deliberate kill
Christopher Lopez
What kind of patient care do you expect when we're becoming Mexico?
Austin Gutierrez
4 minutes? Planned and executed.
James Baker
Oh well bet he was a sex offender.
Nathaniel Edwards
...
Nicholas Martin
90% chance they were obese black nurses.
Adrian Miller
this is the future you chose, boomers
Grayson Cox
mental hospitals are horrible places run by evil people who take jobs their intentionally to feel empowered and abuse people in positions of little or no power (patients) and it is very common that normal people be labeled as insane or unable to make choices for themselves or dangerous to themselves or others, when they are in fact not, so that they can hold people there and drug and torture (physically and psychologically) for their own cruel enjoyment.
Joshua Torres
*take jobs there
Jacob Richardson
Try doing it without any air in your lungs since he had it smashed out of him under all the weight.
Ryan Baker
How many of my fellow SC anons wanna bet it was in a Trident facility?
Kayden Collins
niggers
Ethan Long
Bet it was a group of niggers who had been trained significantly more than standard. Failing each time. Only to get allowed to work without training due to costs.
Parker Morris
Maybe they are part of the nigger quota that the state hospital had to have.
It was deliberate but for some reason courts want to keep making excuses for people who commit murder.
Dominic Wood
He looks pedo
Daniel Price
I work at a mental health hospital that is governed by DOC and my company had to take over directly due to this same issue. DOC workers were not trained to handle mental health patients, multiple issues arose over time and so my company stepped in and took over.
Now the hospital I work in is handled by my pansy ass company where we can't do anything to these guys. They flip out, throw something, hit someone, we can't do anything. Physical restraint is only used in the most dire of situations.
Not to mention I only work in the kitchen (I refuse to work security as that essentially makes you a CO and ethically and morally I object to that) and the training we got to handle incidents with patients is more than sub par compared to the others.
It's tricky working this field where there's a huge sigma between employees and patients. Patients are viewed as human garbage automatically by the employees and it's hard for them to get around that to treating the patients like the human beings they are.
Nicholas Lee
Atascedero?
Adam Parker
No, east coast
Nolan Long
Important
Wyatt Price
It sounds like your company is good and you sound like a good person. I much rather have gone to a mental hospital with you and your employer in charge than the shithole I went once (forced and framed against will as dangerous, even though I could prove I wasn't) But things are okay now. I worry about others that experience that.
Jace Myers
he looks like a fucking hodor
Samuel Bell
Here's a friendly reminder that a person can get "committed" to a mental institute just because family members tell the authorities "something"; you don't need to even commit a crime to be held there. Also, you have no actual sentence to be waited out like in prison. If the people there don't think you've gotten "better" by their own definition, they can and will hold you there for the REST OF YOUR LIFE, and there is literally nothing you can do about it. Because you haven't been accused of any crime, you don't have any legal defense or right to a lawyer/representation. They can force medications on you, force "therapy" on you, and there is nothing you can do about it. If they were to actually beat you and torture you, you'd be powerless because they would tell any authorities that those bruises and cuts were actually self-inflicted or sustained because you were struggling.
About the only thing they cannot legally do is kill you, but as you can see from the OP, there are simple ways to get around it.
Anyone who voluntarily chooses any position of authority (police, politicians, upper-management) are guaranteed to be sociopaths who are doing so to abuse those lower than them and stroke their own egos. The world would be a much better place if political office and other power roles were temporary positions that every citizen were required to take for a few years of their life, like a short military draft. You want to vote? Great, but first you have to serve as a congressman for two years.
Blake Butler
one does not even have to be some hyped and specially trained medical staffer to not be a motherfucking miscreant and not check anyone for vital signs who is pinned, choked, crushed or otherwise injured or incapacitated… heck no fucking one fucking mouthbreathers
Matthew Mitchell
not relativizing the facht the dead cunt was locked up in a mental ward nor taking into account any justification at all, just the fackt they failed to do their job then again what the fuck am i doing on the internet again… damn juice
Joshua Fisher
atheisms cry for psiquiatric is ciense. psiquiatric is pesudo-sience and a scam this the origin of shitty SJeWs
