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Indian
bureau is faulted in teen's death
Cindy Sohappy
died in a cell at Chemawa school in 2003
BY
CHRISTOPHER LEE
The Washington Post
July 27,
2006
WASHINGTON --
The failure of Bureau of Indian Affairs officials to act on
long-standing safety concerns at an Indian boarding school in Salem
was a "significant factor" in the death of a 16-year-old student,
federal investigators said in a report made public last week.
Interior
Department Inspector General Earl Devaney found that a "historical
pattern of inaction and disregard for human health and safety"
contributed to the death of Cindy Gilbert Sohappy in a detention
cell at the Chemawa Indian School in Salem on Dec. 6, 2003.
Ted Mack, the
acting school supervisor at Chemawa, said Wednesday that he could
not comment on the report and referred all inquiries to Nedra
Darling, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in
Washington, D.C.
Darling told
the Statesman Journal on Wednesday that she should not comment.
Devaney found
that inaction by officials in the BIA's Office of Indian Education
Programs and Office of Law Enforcement Services "resulted in the
failure to maintain a safe environment at the detention facility
and, ultimately, became a significant factor in Sohappy's death,"
according to the report, obtained by The Washington Post through a
Freedom of Information Act request.
Sohappy, a
first-year student at the school, died of acute alcohol poisoning
several hours after a staff member saw several students trying to
help Gilbert walk near a campus dormitory, the report said. Sohappy
had been taken initially to the student services center, where her
blood-alcohol level registered 0.192 -- more than twice Oregon's
standard for drunken driving. A security officer escorted her to a
holding facility and placed her on a mattress.
A surveillance
camera videotape showed that Sohappy, who had been unsteady on her
feet and who had slurred speech and bloodshot eyes, stopped moving
about an hour later, according to the report. Almost two more hours
went by before a residential-living assistant entered the cell to
check on Sohappy and found that she was not breathing.
Emergency
personnel were summoned, but Sohappy had died.
The inspector
general found that Chemawa school staff members had not received
training for detaining students or monitoring intoxicated students.
But the
problems went beyond that. BIA officials had not acted on annual
inspection reports by the Indian Health Service dating to 1996 that
cited the need to develop emergency medical screening at the school,
the inspector general's report said.
The report
also warned that school officials were using the detention cells
unlawfully and in violation of BIA policy by holding as many as 240
students per year without documenting charges, in some cases for the
purpose of letting drunken students detoxify.
"BIA officials
had long been alerted to the potential liabilities associated with
the detention facility and were provided clear recommendations to
correct the deficiencies," the report says. "The recommendations,
however, were never acted upon."
Shane Wolfe,
an Interior spokesman, said that the inspector general's report was
"helpful" and had led to new training sessions for staffers at BIA
schools.
"The
Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) take very
seriously the health and safety of the 48,000 students we educate in
our 184 BIA-funded schools," Wolfe said.
Statesman
Journal reporter Capi Lynn contributed to this story.
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