John Daulton, 61, survived less than a day after he was booked into Kentucky’s Kenton County Detention Center on May 13, 2023. Arrested for a probation violation, he didn’t cooperate during the intake process and was placed in a segregation cell. After becoming agitated he was put on suicide watch, though he denied being suicidal.

The next day another prisoner, Johnathan Maskiell, 32, who also was on suicide watch, was put in the same cell with Daulton. Maskiell “brutally assaulted” his elderly cellmate, then stomped on his head several times. Daulton suffered brain damage; he lapsed into a coma and died a week later at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

Maskiell was subsequently charged with murder and with being a persistent felony offender; he pleaded guilty but mentally ill and was sentenced to 25 years.

Daulton’s daughter, Tonya Jones, on behalf of his estate, filed suit in federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky in December 2023 against Kenton County and deputy jailers Jared Capps and Kristin Wheher, who made the decision to cell the men together. The complaint further alleged the facility’s policy required jail staff to check on Daulton’s cell every 10 minutes, but they failed to do so 22 times prior to his death. The Defendants were accused of failing to protect Daulton from Maskiell, who was known to have “violent tendencies,” in violation of Daulton’s civil rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. 

On April 19, 2024, the district court granted in part and denied in part the Defendants’ motion to dismiss. It first determined that Daulton, who was jailed on an unadjudicated probation violation, was considered a pretrial detainee rather than a convicted prisoner. That distinction was important, since less-stringent Fourteenth Amendment standards applied. In the Sixth Circuit, that meant Jones had only to prove that her father was intentionally subjected to an objectively unreasonable risk of harm, without also having to prove that the Defendants were subjectively aware of the risk and ignored it.

The district court applied that standard and found that the complaint stated a valid deliberate indifference claim against the jail deputies but not against the county jailer, who was not involved in Daulton’s placement on suicide watch. The claim against Kenton County was allowed to proceed, as the complaint “sufficiently articulate[d] numerous specific policies and practices that plausibly alleged deliberate indifference to the rights of pretrial detainees” by county officials, under Monell v. Dep’t of Soc. Svcs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978).

A state law wrongful death claim against the defendants in their official capacities was dismissed due to sovereign immunity. An identical claim was allowed to proceed against them in their individual capacities, however, as they had not met “their initial burden under Kentucky’s qualified immunity [QI] analysis.” The Defendants’ request for the district court to construe their motion to dismiss as one for summary judgment was denied. See: Jones v. Kenton Cty.,2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 71769 (E.D. Ky.).

Defendants then filed for summary judgment, and the motion was largely granted on June 4, 2025. Capps, the district court said, was entitled to QI because he was performing a discretionary function, rather than a ministerial one over which he had no control. As proof, the district court noted that he had “some discretion” as to cell placements. And if he didn’t, that would undercut Jones’ argument that the jailer made an intentional decision to cell Daulton and Maskiell together. Either way, her deliberate indifference claim against Capps failed.

Her claim against Wheher also failed. “[E]ven absent [QI],” the district court decided, “Jones cannot prove that Maskiell’s actions were a reasonably foreseeable consequence of her omissions on the inmate intake assessment form.” That left only Jones’ Monell claim against the county to proceed. Jones is represented by attorneys Deanna L. Dennison of Dennison & Associates in Covington and Paul J. Hill of his eponymous firm in Union Hill. See: Jones v. Kenton Cty., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 105641 (E.D. Ky.). 

While the suit against the county defendants was pending, new information came out concerning Maskiell: He had been released from an Ohio prison and sent to a halfway house, where he had a psychotic episode that included “hallucinations and multiple breaks from reality.” Maskiell was then taken to the U.C. Medical Center on May 12, 2023, where a nurse recorded that he had a history of schizophrenia and a social worker wrote he was clearly psychotic and said he wanted to “kill everybody.” A doctor, however, “disregarded the intake records and notes,” deciding that Maskiell was pretending and discharging him with only one dose of antipsychotic medication. Two days later, he ended up in the Kenton County Jail, where he murdered Daulton.

Daulton’s estate filed a separate lawsuit against the U.C. Medical Center on November 21, 2024. The complaint alleged violations of the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act because the hospital failed to provide emergency treatment to Maskiell when he presented with a clearly serious psychiatric condition. U.C. Medical Center staff did not stabilize him and discharged him despite symptoms of psychosis, hallucinations and homicidal ideations, and that failure to follow psychiatric standards of care contributed to Maskiell’s subsequent fatal assault on Daulton, the complaint argued. Jones is represented in that suit by Hill and fellow attorney David M. Blank of Covington. PLN will update developments in both suits as they unfold. See: Jones v. Univ. of Cincinnati Med. Ctr., LLC, USDC (S.D. Ohio), Case no. 1:24-cv-00670.  

Additional source: Cincinnati Enquirer

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