Alan R. Thibodeau

Alan R. Thibodeau was a 51-year-old single father and resident of Prince William County, Virginia. He lived with his elderly parents as their primary caregiver, according to a lawsuit filed by his family. Decades earlier, he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar type, which he controlled with medications. In 2021, he began to wean himself off his medications and in 2022 checked himself into a Virgina hospital, reporting delusions. He was discharged days later and soon went missing. On February 14, 2022, he was found sleeping in spare bedroom in a home in Bamberg, South Carolina; Thibodeau told law enforcement he had wanted “to have a place to stay and to keep warm.” He was arrested and transferred to the Bamberg County Detention Center. He was determined to be unable to stand trial and was committed to a psychiatric hospital, but was never transferred there. While at the jail, Thibodeau was “administered zero mental health medications for his open and obvious mental health condition,” according to the lawsuit. In the coming months, his mental health rapidly declined. He regularly refused meals, and the health provider at the jail failed to document assessments of him and to refer him for a mental health evaluation, according to the lawsuit. On July 10, 2022, he was found unresponsive and transported to a hospital. He weighed just over 100 pounds, a significant drop from 178 pounds in November 2021. Doctors found him in heart failure, circulatory failure, liver failure, kidney failure and respiratory failure, according to the lawsuit. Thibodeau also had maggots on his skin, open wounds, was severely dehydrated and in septic shock. He died on July 23, 2022. The autopsy report noted signs of emaciation and determined his cause of death to be multi-system organ failure. James B. Moore III, the lawyer for Thibodeau’s family, told the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab that Thibodeau had a “really strong support group and family." But when Thibodeau was incarcerated, “this wasn’t even in the realm of possibility in their mind that this could be going on.” “This was so, so preventable,” he added. The lawsuit alleged that “had Mr. Thibodeau been provided with adequate hydration, nourishment, and medical intervention, his severe, open, and obvious physical decompensation and ultimate death would have been prevented.”

Law firm Evans Moore LLC, represented brother, Alan's brother Edwin Thibodeau, who filed a lawsuit against the county and a nurse at the jail. Attorney JAMES B. MOORE III

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