$3.75 Million Paid by Wisconsin After Mentally Ill Prisoner Dies of Dehydration
by Chuck Sharman
On June 1, 2026, Wisconsin officials gave the final sign-off to an agreement paying $3.75 million to the mother of a state prisoner who died of dehydration at Waupun Correctional Institution (WCI) in 2024. The death of Donald Maier, 62, who was being held in restrictive housing—solitary confinement—was ruled a homicide, and the warden and eight other state Department of Corrections (DOC) officials were arrested and charged.
“It wasn’t just Don Maier’s death that was a horrific tragedy,” Milwaukee attorney Jeff Scott Olson, who represented the dead prisoner’s mother, told the Wisconsin Examiner. “It was the last few days of his life, when his grip on reality drained away to the point that he was unable to communicate his needs, and his life became a living hell.”
That hell was detailed in the complaint that Olson filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin for Jeannette Maier, the prisoner’s mother. Proceeding under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, she accused DOC Secretary Jared Hoy, WCI Warden Randall Hepp and other DOC officials of violating Maier’s civil rights when he suffered a mental health episode in February 2024 and they diverted him from treatment into the prison’s Restrictive Housing Unit (RHU). Held there in conditions like solitary confinement, his diagnosed mental illness quickly worsened. Over the next nine days, he refused to eat and was observed “growling like an animal” while playing in and drinking from the toilet, the complaint recalled. He also “received no medication for his documented medical concerns or for his mental illness.”
The water was turned off when Maier flooded the cell. But no one bothered to tell him when it was turned back on. When he asked for water, guards ignored him. The DOC had a protocol for water shutoffs, but it wasn’t followed in Maier’s case. No one “obtained preapproval from a shift supervisor,” and no one “document the water shut-off.” No one advised either the Health Services Unit or WCI’s security director. No one prepared “an incident report to document the shut-off.” No one instructed staff “to offer drinking water to Mr. Maier, and they themselves did not offer drinking water to [him].” He still didn’t get anything to drink even after a DOC doctor visited his cell and the prisoner begged for “water, water, water, all the water in the world.”
Unsurprisingly, after this cascade of failures, Maier was found unresponsive and pronounced dead on February 22. Hepp and eight other DOC staffers were charged in connection with Maier’s death and the October 2023 death fellow Waupun prisoner Cameron Williams, 24, the complaint noted. In addition to violations of his Eighth Amendment rights, it further alleged violation of his rights under the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U.S.C. § 701, et seq. The parties then proceeded to reach their settlement agreement, with a payout that included costs and fees for Plaintiff’s attorneys. See: Maier v. Hoy, USDC (E.D. Wisc.), Case No. 2:25-cv-00611.
Of those charged in the death, three walked away with only a minor fine, as PLN reported—$500 each for Hepp and former guard Lt. Brandon Fischer, 31, and $250 for former guard Sarah Ransbottom, 36. Charges against another former guard, Sgt. Jeramie Heyward Chalker, 41, were dismissed after Dodge County District Attorney Andrea Will agreed that he was simply “following [the] chain of command” when he falsely filled out logs indicating that he completed rounds inspecting Maier’s cell—which the guard never actually conducted. [See: PLN, June 2025, p.40; and July 2026, p.62.] Charges were also dropped against former guard Andrew Hollfelder, who then appealed his dismissal from the DOC. It was upheld by the state Employment Relations Commission (ERC) in January 2025. See: Hollfelder v. Wisc., ERC Decision No. 40729.
Olson called Maier’s death “completely preventable,” adding that it points to “the urgent need for prison reform, a focus on humane and respectful treatment for all residents of Wisconsin’s correctional facilities, and accountability within the corrections system.”
Additional source: Wisconsin Examiner
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