No one came to help when Dina “Latrell” Kirven collapsed at the Oklahoma County Detention Center. 

He laid on the floor of his cell not moving for hours before dying of an overdose of fentanyl, methamphetamine and PCP. 

Kirven, 26, had just come from the hospital when he was booked into Oklahoma County Detention Center after wrecking a stolen car in April 2023. Hospital workers checked him for injuries after the crash and gave him Narcan before police took him to jail, where detention officers left him unattended in a holding cell. Detention officers didn’t check on Kirven for six hours, state inspectors later found.

Kirven’s mother, Volare Scott, said her son was struggling with mental illness and should have been more closely monitored at the jail. 

“He could have been saved,” she said through tears. 

State law requires detention officers at jails to visually check on prisoners at least once an hour. But staffing shortages at the Oklahoma County jail mean sight checks are routinely missed. Detention officers are pulled away for other duties or fabricate sight check logs, said Mark Opgrande, a spokesperson for the jail. At least 45 detainees have died at the facility since 2020, according to data compiled by The Frontier. Three other detainees died the same month as Kirven.

A 2023 grand jury found chronic understaffing at the jail and that many detainee deaths were preventable. 

State inspectors cite the jail for inadequate staffing

The jail has failed to meet state standards in nine Oklahoma State Department of Health inspections over the past four years. Inspectors cited the jail for missed sight checks in six of the inspections and insufficient staffing five times since 2020. State rules require jails to have enough staff to supervise and keep detainees secure. 

The Oklahoma County jail has funding for 320 employees. But the jail now has 263 employees, the lowest number since the Oklahoma County Criminal Justice Authority took over operations from the county sheriff in 2020.

The jail’s Chief Executive Officer Brandi Garner said a staffing analysis conducted by the National Institute of Corrections suggests closer to 500 workers are needed to properly run the jail.

The jail doesn’t have adequate funding from the county to hire enough staff or properly pay employees, Garner said. The starting pay for detention officers is $41,500 a year, the highest it has been since 2020. But Garner believes it should be at least $50,000 a year to cover the cost of living. 

Oklahoma County jail staff turned jail inspectors away twice on surprise visits this summer. A jail employee told inspectors there was not enough staff present to support the inspection process, records show. Garner said it requires between 10 and 15 jail staff to gather records and unlock doors throughout the facility for the inspectors. 

“I don’t have 15 people that I can just pull off of whatever they’re doing,” Garner said. “To me, the safety and security of this facility is more important.” 

The Health Department issued an order in July demanding the jail let inspectors in for an unannounced visit. The jail could face fines or other penalties for failing to comply.   

Two weeks later, the public trust that runs the jail filed a lawsuit against the Health Department claiming the surprise inspections were unlawful. State law requires the Health Department to inspect all city and county detention facilities at least once a year. The Health Department has argued that state law gives it the power to conduct inspections at any time. 

“It makes us question what the jail had to hide,” said Cherisse Baker, a member of the jail activist group The People’s Council for Justice Reform. 

Spread thin, jail staff struggle to meet basic needs 

Oklahoma County jail staff members told inspectors in 2021 that understaffing contributed to late meal deliveries, lack of medical care and poor sanitation. 

Detention officers missed 104 sight checks over three days, often because they were roaming other floors, assisting medical staff or doing a trash run, according to one 2022 inspection report. 

During one shift in April 2022, there were only eight detention officers to cover seven floors housing 1,528 inmates, according to one state inspection report. One of the officers also worked as a shift commander. 

Roughly a fourth of the housing pods held detainees who required increased supervision with sight checks every 15 or 30 minutes, including for suicide watch or illness. 

Former detention officer Ben Zimmerman described the Oklahoma County jail as “overwhelming” when he worked there from 2019 to 2023.

Zimmerman applied to work at the jail after he graduated high school. After three days of training, he was supervising 350 inmates on his own, he said.

“They were just trying to get bodies in there, just to make sure the basic things were getting done,” Zimmerman said. “I feel like they didn’t really prepare us enough for what was in there.”

The jail has since increased training for detention officers to eight weeks, Garner said. 

There was supposed to be an officer assigned to each of the four housing pods on each floor, with an additional officer who checks in periodically throughout the shift, Zimmerman said. But that rarely happened because the jail was so short-staffed. 

He worked 12-hour shifts. And sometimes longer if no one came to relieve him, he said. Zimmerman said he worked 18 hours straight one day because another detention officer had to take an inmate to the hospital.

Without constant supervision, Zimmerman said detainees would get into fights and find ways to smuggle in drugs, such as by using a rope made of bed sheets to pull a trash bag from outside the jail’s walls into a cell.

“A lot of things got away from us because we just couldn’t keep an eye on everybody at the same time,” Zimmerman said. “It’s just too difficult with the staff levels we had.”

Zimmerman said he quit his job at the jail in 2023 to move closer to friends in Washington state.

Solving the jail staffing crisis on a tight budget

Garner, who became CEO of the jail in 2023, said she implemented measures to improve working conditions for current staff and attract new members, but recruitment and retainment efforts remain difficult.

The duties of a detention officer can be physically and mentally taxing. It requires a certain type of applicant to handle the job, Garner said, but many find the salary offered isn’t worth the heavy workload or long hours. 

Oklahoma County currently budgets around $33 million a year to run the jail. County Commissioner Brian Maughan said the county budget is tight, leaving little room for additional funding for the jail. Maughan said commissioners ended the previous fiscal year with a meager $787 surplus from its $126-million budget.

Oklahoma County is the only county in the state without a dedicated sales tax to fund jail operations. Additional funding would have to be approved by voters. It would cost the county about $300,000 to hold an election, Maughan said.  

“We just do the best we can with what we have,” Maughan said. 

The jail’s history of abuse and deaths also repels new applicants. People want to be proud of where they work, Garner said.

The jail has added longevity pay and bonuses to entice potential hires and revamped training for detention officers. Garner hopes to have 50 cadets in training in September. 

The jail has also begun training around 20 contract workers from VieMed Healthcare Staffing LLC whose sole task will be to conduct sight checks on detainees.  Garner hopes this will alleviate some of the workload for detention officers. 

The jail has also added QR codes to the doors of each housing pod for detention officers to scan before and after sight checks so shift supervisors will be able to tell if a check was conducted properly. The system can also alert supervisors when a sight check is overdue or has not been completed.

“It’s just a matter of chipping away at it little by little, taking one bite out of this giant elephant at a time,” Garner said.

A mother seeks answers and justice

Kirven’s mother last spoke to her son on the phone two days before he died. She planned to drive from her home in Georgia to Oklahoma to pick him up soon.

“He kept saying…I’ll be home soon, Mama,” Scott said.

Scott said a jail administrator told her that he would report jail staff who were working when Kirven died to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office. The jail reports all detainee deaths to the District Attorney’s Office, which decides if any criminal charges should be filed, a jail spokesperson wrote to The Frontier.  

At least two detention officers were terminated over Kirven’s death, but no criminal charges have been filed, the spokesperson said. 

Scott made the 14-hour drive from Georgia three times to speak at the Oklahoma County jail trust meetings, where she asked for answers and justice. She said she’s gotten neither. 

Exhausted, she repeated her message at a jail trust meeting in October. 

“I get it that they were understaffed, but that’s not our problem,” Scott said. “That’s not my dead child’s problem.”

Outside the 13-story jail, a garden is filled with dozens of stones surrounded by colorful plastic flowers — one for each person who died at the jail over the past four years. One bears the name Latrell Kirven.

Scott misses her son every day. At 6-feet-6 inches tall, Kirven towered over his mother and would wrap her in tight hugs and call her “lady.” He wrote rap music and was left-handed. He was known as a flirt and would speak Spanish to pick up girls. He was kind, Scott said.

“I was coming to get him,” Scott shook her head. “And because of the neglect, I had nothing to come and get but my child’s body.”