For six days, Cheree Byrd pleaded to corrections officers from an upstate New York jail cell that her water broke and that she was going into labor and that she needed to be transported to the hospital to give birth to a premature baby.
But the corrections officers did not believe the 35-year-old Black woman who had been arrested for misdemeanor petit theft, dismissing her complaints while calling her a liar, giving her some Tylenol and a tampon instead of transporting her to the hospital.
“My baby’s coming out,” Byrd repeatedly yelled to jail staff who ignored her. Other inmates also called for help, but to no avail.
Byrd ended up giving birth to a baby girl named Ayanna Byrd inside her cell, which was when she was finally transported to the hospital, but the baby was pronounced dead an hour later. Now, the case is haunting the county and its taxpayers.
Last month, Byrd was awarded a $100,000 settlement after a state investigation determined corrections officers, nurses and doctors at the Onondaga County Justice System – which was named “one of the worst jails in New York State” by the State Commission of Correction – were negligent.
The Commission of Correction was also the agency that determined Baby Ayanna would have likely survived had the jail staff listened to Byrd’s complaints.
According to the heavily redacted 15-page report:
The Medical Review Board has found that medical care and treatment of Byrd during her incarceration was both deficient and negligent and may have led to her child’s death.
The Board has found that Byrd was not properly assessed nor timely transferred to a hospital over the course of 6 days during which she made multiple reports of being in labor.
The Board opines that had Ms. Byrd been provided with proper medical care, the baby’s premature birth and death could have been prevented.
The lawsuit filed by Byrd accused corrections officers, nurses and a doctor of several violations, including denial of basic human needs, depravation of rights, wrongful death, medical malpractice, negligence as well as violating the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
“Despite (i) Ms. Byrd’s audible screams of pain, (ii) her visible significant bleeding, and (iii) the constant requests for medical attention, the Deputy Defendants continued to ignore Ms. Byrd and refused to provide necessary and appropriate medical care to ensure the safe delivery of Ms. Byrd’s child and/or avoid any potentially life-threatening complications for Ms. Byrd,” the claim states.
‘Implicit Bias’
Byrd, who was diagnosed with mental illness at the age of 12, was jailed on July 1, 2022 on a warrant for petit larceny, a misdemeanor that usually stems from a shoplifting arrest.
But she was unable to afford the $5,000 bond and would remain locked up for more than a month until she gave birth to her daughter on Aug. 2, 2022.
During her incarceration, Byrd informed jail staff repeatedly that she was about 20 to 21 weeks pregnant. Her mother also called the jail several times to inform corrections officers her daughter was pregnant and suffered from mental illness.
Her mother also informed jail staff that there may be complications with her pregnancy due to premature births which had affected other women in their family.
But the jail staff failed to heed her warnings.
On July 27, Byrd’s water broke which would have been the 25th week of her pregnancy and should have been a warning to jail medical staff that she needed immediate medical attention because there is a much higher risk of death and serious health issues for babies born within 28 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Mayo Clinic.
But jail staff continued to ignore her even though three other inmates in her pod repeatedly tried to alert officers that Byrd was going into labor.
“The Medical Review Board finds that over the course of six days Byrd made multiple complaints that her water had broken and baby’s head was in the birth canal, however there was no documentation that a physician was ever notified beyond the report made on 7/27/22,” states the investigative report from the state Commission of Correction.
“The Board questions whether the repeated dismissing of Byrd’s complaints by the medical staff was due to implicit bias of a person with Serious and Persistent Mental Illness, whereby attributing her reports of being in labor as a behavior.”
It was only after her baby died that her misdemeanor charge was dismissed.
‘Significant Bleeding’
The lawsuit was filed in state court in 2023, listing the county, and sheriff’s office as defendants as well as a pair of private companies contracted to provide medical services to inmates: NaphCare Inc. and Proactive Health Care Medicine.
Also listed as defendants are deputies Marjorie Cooley, Patricia Kay-Tharp, Charmain Mason, Rochelle Irving, Jane DeMarco; nurses Susan Sheridan, Lisa Cyr, Paul Marzullo, Billie-Jo Sakran, Marni Fineberg; and Dr. Christina Yambo.
They are all accused of ignoring Byrd’s pleas for help as well as those pleas from her cellmates, the claim states.
Defendants’ employees were deliberately indifferent to these multiple requests to provide any medical attention to Ms. Byrd as she struggled with complications from a premature birth. Instead, Defendants’ employees informed the women incarcerated with Ms. Byrd that her request for medical attention should be ignored.
For example, one detention officer told the women “that [Ms. Byrd] is crazy. She’s always complaining. Nothing’s wrong with her.” Another detention officer rejected one of the women’s urgent requests to help Ms. Byrd and said that he would only call an ambulance “once [he] saw a baby.”
During this time, Ms. Byrd began visibly and significantly bleeding due to complications with the birth. Ms. Byrd and other women informed Defendants’ employees of Ms. Byrd’s significant bleeding and again urged Defendants’ employees to provide immediate medical attention to Ms. Byrd.
NaphCare was replaced as a health care provider in December 2022 after another scathing report from the state Commission of Correction about an inmate suicide. And the company that replaced it, Wellpath, was replaced by another company in 2024 after another inmate died of a “medical episode.”
The jail which is operated by the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office is now contracting with CFG Health Systems, another company that has a history of wrongful death lawsuits against it.
Last year, the family of a man who died of a drug overdose in the jail filed a lawsuit because corrections officers failed to adequately check on him for three days when they were required to do so every 15 minutes.
In 2018, the New York Commission of Correction issued its report citing the jail as one of the worst in the state, citing overcrowding issues as well as a class action lawsuit filed against it in 2016.
“The complaint alleged that 16 and 17-year-old inmates at the Onondaga County Justice Center were routinely subjected to the imposition of solitary confinement in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and were thereafter denied minimal education instruction and special education guaranteed by state law,” the report states.
