Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) filed manslaughter charges on March 7, 2025, against a former nurse at the Beltrami County Jail in the 2018 death of detainee Hardel Sherrell. His mother previously collected a $2.6 million settlement from a suit filed over the death. She also successfully advocated for adoption of a 2019 law named after her son that tightened rules for mental health treatment in state jails.

Sherrell, 27, was booked into the lockup in August 2018 in apparent good health, but he was soon found complaining of numbness while lying on the cell floor. Vital signs indicated hypertension for which he was not medicated. Six days later, he was found on the floor again. This time he was surrounded by his own feces, screaming for help. Jailers finally sent him to a hospital, where doctors suspected Guillain-Barré syndrome, an auto-immune disorder, and discharged him with orders to return immediately if his weakness got worse or if he had difficulty standing.

Back at the jail on September 1, 2018, Sherrell went limp and fell face-first on the cell floor, where he was left for five hours unattended by staff with jail medical provider MEnD Correctional Care, LLC. The firm’s nursing director, Michelle Skroch, also failed to check on the detainee for several hours after her shift began the next day. When she finally went to his cell, she took no vital signs but instead began to berate him with orders to “get up and walk” because “there was nothing wrong with him and he could get up and walk if he wanted to,” according to the criminal complaint later filed against her.

Even when a doctor instructed her to watch Sherrell and make sure he was seen by a neurologist, Skroch continued to tell jail guards there was nothing wrong with the detainee. They obligingly abandoned him on the cell floor to defecate and urinate on himself while the nurse screamed accusations that he was faking his symptoms.

Jail surveillance video captured Sherrell relying on guards’ help to bathe and get in his wheelchair as his head and legs wobbled uncontrollably. Yet Skroch noted that he was improving in her final report before leaving the jail. In fact, she still had taken no vital signs nor passed along his discharge orders. Three hours later, Sherrell was found dead on the floor, lying in his own excrement. An autopsy blamed pneumonia and untreated Guillain-Barré syndrome.

On behalf of Sherrell’s minor children and his mother, Del Shea Perry, Minneapolis attorney Zorislav R. Leyderman filed suit in federal court for the District of Minnesota, accusing the County and its jail medical contractor of violating his civil rights with their fatal neglect to his obviously serious medical needs. Additional claims against Sanford Health, which operated the Fargo, North Dakota hospital where Sherrell was treated, were settled confidentially in November 2021. The remaining parties then reached a settlement in February 2023, with the County paying $500,000 and MEnD another $2.1 million, inclusive of costs and fees for Leyderman. See: Perry v. Beltrami Cty., USDC (D. Minn.), Case No. 0:19-cv-02580.

$2.3 Million for James Lynas’ Death in the Shelburne County Jail

By that time, MEnD had also agreed to pay $1 million of a $2.3 million settlement reached in February 2021 in a suit filed against the firm and Shelburne County by the family of James Lynas, 31. Booked into the county lockup on a DWI charge, he warned jailers and MEnD staff that withdrawal had left him suicidal. Yet he was ignored for nine days until he fatally hanged himself in November 2017. Guards later admitted that they didn’t enter his cell to conduct required checks and peered instead from a distance on a catwalk that provided only a partially obstructed view inside. Lynas’ estate was represented in the suit by attorneys with Robins Kaplan LLP in Minneapolis. See: Lynas v. Stang, USDC (D. Minn.), Case No. 0:18-cv-02301.

The payouts apparently dealt a death blow to MEnD, as the contractor filed for bankruptcy court protection in December 2022. Having once held contracts at 40 jails in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois, MEnD had no operations left by the time it reached a settlement in Sherell’s case. Its founder, Dr. Todd Leonard, had lost his medical license, which was suspended indefinitely by the state Board of Medical Practice effective March 2022. He was also fined $30,000. The Board said that what happened to Sherrell “should never have occurred. And it must never be allowed to happen again.” Still, it reinstated Leonard’s license in November 2023.

A month later, in December 2023, the state Board of Nursing revoked Skroch’s license, following the recommendation of an Administrative Law Judge who blasted the nurse’s “careless disregard” for Sherrell, which was “heightened by the fact that because he was in custody, Licensee was (Sherrell’s) only means of obtaining the medical care he required.” The criminal complaint later filed against her said that Skroch’s “failure to provide medical care exacerbated [Sherrell’s] condition and ultimately resulted in his death.”

Meanwhile, Perry became a vocal advocate to state lawmakers for passage of HF 4923. When it was adopted in 2021, the “Hardel Sherrell Act” promised to ensure that needed healthcare and mental health care was provided to detainees in state jails. That year there were eight deaths. Perry later recalled that she was “pretty hopeful that the numbers [were] going to go down.”

“But instead, they went up,” she said, noting there were 13 deaths in state jails in 2022 and 20 in 2023. “I’m just outraged, and I don’t understand why.”  

Additional sources: Fargo Valley News, KARE, Minnesota Star-Tribune, MPR News

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