RICHMOND, Ky. (LEX 18) — The family of a man found dead in the Madison County Detention Center says they've got questions about how he ended up dead.
He was accused of smashing a truck into a store and leading police on a chase. His wife believes he was having a mental breakdown and needed help.
For a woman who said she was trying to get her husband help, the last few months have been a nightmare.
"Shocked, heartbroken, speechless," said Sarah York.
York is trying to figure out why her husband, Jordan Hall, ended up dead in a jail cell in Madison County. She said he had been showing signs of mental illness in the early part of the year at their home in Texas. She said he has family in Kentucky and she thought he could get help there.
"I took him there to his dad's and dropped him off and I was like, 'Please just get some help so that maybe we can make all this work,' I hadn't given up on him. I just didn't know how to help him here," York said.
She said that was March 16. 13 days later, things had clearly spiraled.
"All of a sudden, last thing I'm knowing is his aunt is sending me footage on where he was went completely off the wall," York said.
Police said Hall stole a truck, smashed it into a Dan's Discount shop in Richmond, stole a gun from inside, and led police on a high-speed chase that ended with a crash on I-75. Facing charges ranging from burglary, to fleeing and evading, and wanton endangerment of a police officer, he wound up in the Madison County Detention Center. There, York believes, whatever was driving his behavior wasn't addressed.
"The day he got arrested, I was calling up there saying he needs help. He needs to see a psychiatrist. He needs a psych evaluation. This is not the man that I know," she said.
York said Hall was being held in solitary confinement. Last month, while in the jail, he was accused of assaulting a corrections officer and disarming a police officer.
"I really, truly believe that he was going through a psychosis where he thought that there was people dressed up as police. He was starting to think that everybody was not who they said they were," she said.
York said she had trouble getting mail to Hall and she said it wasn't clear if he was ever given a psychological evaluation, however she says a jail official told her a psychologist did talk with him. Then, came the phone call.
"I got a call yesterday that he was dead. They said that he hung himself," she said.
Now, she and his extended family are trying to figure out what will come next.
"He doesn't even get to have a real funeral because we can't afford for him to be driven from Kentucky to Texas and so they're having to cremate him," York said.
York has questions for the people at the jail.
"If he was in solitary confinement, how did he have access to anything to kill himself, to hang himself?" she said.
Now, she and the rest of his family are trying to understand how this could have happened and what led to the spiral that ended in a Madison County jail cell.
"The man that did all those things, was a psychosis. It had to have been. That's not at all the man that I know," York said.
Madison County Coroner Jimmy Cornelison told LEX 18 he hasn't yet made an official determination on Hall's cause of death. His body has been sent to Frankfort for a toxicology test.
