Suit Claims Jail Treatment Caused Miscarriage

A 29-year-old woman arrested in a drug bust last March filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Orange County Jail officials and the Buena Park police, claiming that mistreatment by them caused the death of her unborn child.

Michele Rene Holtan, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, claimed that officials at both the Buena Park city jail and the Orange County Jail ignored several pleas at different times that she was bleeding and in pain.

Holtan also asserted that she was forced to wait 15 hours to get medical attention at the County Jail despite a doctor’s order that her condition be monitored by jail medical personnel.

Spokesmen for Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates and the Buena Park police said they could not comment on the lawsuit without looking into it further.

“It’s been impossible to talk about (it) without crying up to now,” said Holtan, a mother of three who now lives in Long Beach. “I was so scared; it was a nightmare.”

Holtan and four others were arrested at a Buena Park home she shared with her boyfriend, John D. Eich, and his grandmother on March 20, 1986, during a drug raid.

She claimed that despite being in maternity clothes--and almost five months pregnant--she was shoved up against a wall by one of several arresting officers from Buena Park.

Holtan was held on an outstanding warrant for failure to pay a traffic ticket, and no charges relating to narcotics were ever filed against her, according to her attorney, Harry Lerner.

At the Buena Park city jail, Holtan said, she was put into a separate cell from the others and began to suffer from vaginal bleeding.

“I screamed for 10 minutes for someone to help me,” Holtan said in an interview Monday. She claimed that a jailer finally brought her a sanitary napkin.

It was several hours later, Holtan said, before she and the others were taken in a van to the Orange County Jail. She claimed that she had to wait in the van, which was cold, with no jacket and only light clothing. Then she had to stand in line at the jail to see the first floor screening nurse. The total waiting time was about an hour, her suit claimed.

“I kept telling them while I was standing in line that I was bleeding and that something was wrong, but they just said, ‘It won’t be long now.’ ”

Holtan said that once she did get in to the first floor screening nurse, the nurse ordered her taken immediately to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana.

At Western, she said, she was attended to by nurses and a doctor, who told her after administering tests that the baby was in good health.

She said the doctor wrote out orders for her care and gave it to the Buena Park police officer accompanying her. The suit claims that the doctor ordered her to stay on her back, with her feet elevated, and that her bleeding be monitored by the jail medical staff.

Orders Not Followed

“The doctor was obviously under the impression that she would be receiving immediate medical attention when she got back to the jail,” Lerner said.

But Holtan asserts in her suit that the doctor’s orders were not followed. She claims that she was not taken to the jail medical ward, but to the booking area, where she remained for the next 15 hours.

“I tried to tell the jailers that my bleeding had to be monitored, but it was like, nobody believed me. It was so different from the hospital, where they were really concerned about me,” she said.

Most of that 15 hours was spent standing up, she said, because the floor was too cold and hard for her to lie down.

It was at 1 a.m., on March 22, that Holtan was admitted to the jail medical ward, her lawsuit claims. She said she told them she was in pain, and was seen once by a nurse and once by a doctor.

It was that afternoon, she said, when her bleeding became profuse and the staff sent her to UCI Medical Center in the City of Orange. She was told after a short time there that she had miscarried.

Not Returned to Jail

Holtan claimed that she was released on her own recognizance on the speeding ticket warrant at the jail section and not returned to the Orange County Jail, even though she was in jail-issue clothing and did not have her personal effects.

“She should have been given immediate medical attention the minute she began bleeding at the Buena Park jail,” Lerner said.

But Terry Branum, spokesman for the Buena Park police, said that is indeed his department’s policy.

“We have paramedics in and out of there all the time,” Branum said. “The minute anyone complains about a medical problem, we have someone see them immediately.”

Eich, who was sentenced to state prison on a subsequent burglary conviction, also is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Lerner said he was the father of the unborn child.

In the suit filed against Gates, the county, and the City of Buena Park, Holtan alleges that her civil rights were violated, and she seeks punitive damages of $1 million.