Jail death investigation, finally public, brings questions

Willa Dean Scholtz and Christopher Michael O'Daniel, posted on Scholtz's Facebook page 12 days before O'Daniel died in the Walker County Jail. According to an autopsy, O'Daniel overdosed on methamphetamine and Oxymorphone, an opioid.
Willa Dean Scholtz and Christopher Michael O'Daniel, posted on Scholtz's Facebook page 12 days before O'Daniel died in the Walker County Jail. According to an autopsy, O'Daniel overdosed on methamphetamine and Oxymorphone, an opioid.
photo The door to Cell No. 8 in the Walker County Jail: the drunk tank, where officers put O'Daniel by himself about five hours before they found him dead on Nov. 19, 2016.

CHICKAMAUGA, Ga. - Around 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 18, a woman called 911 to report a large man in a dirty white tank top and ripped jeans wandering into traffic on 5 Points Road.

"I about hit him," she told a dispatcher. "I mean, he was coming all over the place. Now he's on the side of the road, standing against the side of a pole, hanging onto a pole, going crazy."

A deputy responded to the scene and found Christopher Michael O'Daniel. He was stumbling, the deputy said, and he leaned against the trunk of the patrol car. O'Daniel, 40, asked for a ride to a friend's house.

But the deputy wanted his name and date of birth. He pressed O'Daniel several times and finally got an identity. He reported the information back to dispatch and waited for someone to run his name through a database. Meanwhile, he asked O'Daniel where he came from.

"Over yonder," O'Daniel said.

That isn't very descriptive, the deputy told him. But no bother: A dispatcher cut in, telling the deputy police were looking for O'Daniel in Floyd County, Ga. Five weeks earlier, he skipped a court date for a shoplifting case. (His ex-girlfriend said he stole steak from a grocery store.)

Another deputy picked up O'Daniel and drove him to the Walker County Jail, to be held pending transfer to Floyd County. Corrections Officer Timothy Moore said he met O'Daniel in the sally port and helped him inside. O'Daniel stumbled a bit, but for the most part he could walk on his own.

Near the area for inmate intake, Sgt. Amy Bradley noticed O'Daniel swaying on his feet. Corrections Officer Heather West said he slurred his words and had trouble spelling his last name. But he didn't seem angry.

Moore sat on the bench with O'Daniel and helped him take off his shoes. O'Daniel was capable of doing this himself, he said. But this was just faster. Moore and another officer then helped him to cell No. 8 - the drunk tank, where he could stay by himself, to rest until he was sober.

A couple hours later, around 10:30 p.m., West was retrieving some inmates across the hall. Through a window, she noticed O'Daniel lying on his side. Something was moving, she said. Maybe his leg; maybe his foot.

A couple hours after that, West was back, locking down all cells for the night. She looked through the window again. This time, she said, O'Daniel was lying still.

She told Cpl. Jason Lofty, who went to cell No. 8. O'Daniel was on his stomach, a blanket between him and the concrete. Lofty called out to O'Daniel, he later told a state investigator. Nothing. He nudged him. Nothing. Finally, he turned him over.

O'Daniel felt stiff.

***

The drunk tank is 7 feet long and 4 feet wide, encased in cinder block, with a drain in the back left corner. That way, if an intoxicated inmate throws up, officers can easily wash the cell with a hose.

In O'Daniel's case, he wasn't drunk. A Georgia Bureau of Investigation toxicology report shows his blood-alcohol concentration was 0.03 - well below the legal limit to drive. The report also showed enough methamphetamine and of the painkiller oxymorphone in his system to either block blood flow to his brain or block him from breathing - or both.

After O'Daniel's death, Moore told a GBI investigator officers put him in the drunk tank to isolate him from other inmates. But the investigative file in the case, made public last month, does not indicate whether the drunk tank is considered "administrative separation."

This is important because, according to Walker County Sheriff's Office jail policies, the shift supervisor must create a form that explains why officers are placing any inmate in administrative separation. The form will go to the jail's physician and nurses, and an officer will directly supervise an inmate every 30 minutes.

There is no administrative separation form in the investigative file obtained by the Times Free Press. There is also no log for an officer checking on O'Daniel every 30 minutes. And the GBI's interview summaries with every corrections officer that night do not show anybody checking on O'Daniel other than West, who saw him twice in two hours.

The jail policies also state that an officer is supposed to complete a medical history form with every new inmate, asking them if they have any injuries or illnesses or need any medication. This form is also not in the GBI's investigative file.

Sheriff Steve Wilson, who was out of town last week, did not return calls or an email seeking comment. Capt. Phil Street, who is in charge of the jail, said he was not authorized to speak to the media. Maj. Mike Freeman on Friday said he could not answer a list of questions from the Times Free Press.

"I do not have the GBI case file and I have not reviewed it nor have we met with our county attorney to discuss this incident," he wrote in an email.

Sarah Geraghty, an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights who has led cases alleging jail abuse in other areas of Georgia, could not speak to the specifics of Walker County. But in general, she said, jail officers have to do a basic medical intake.

Officers may learn that an inmate needs medication, or that he or she has, like O'Daniel, ingested something dangerous.

"Usually on an intake form," Geraghty said, "they would have asked if you are on drugs. That is a standard question, and it's an important question to ask."

If officers did ask O'Daniel about any drug use, there is a decent chance he would not have told the truth. For starters, he would be admitting to breaking the law. But according to the officers who spoke with the GBI, he also was not communicating clearly.

One jail policy tells officers not to admit inmates who are at risk for their lives: those who are unconscious, "seriously ill," "seriously injured" or "seriously intoxicated." The policy defines a dangerous level of intoxication as a 0.28 blood-alcohol concentration. The policy does not mention drugs, and it's not clear how an officer is even expected to know if an inmate took a potentially lethal amount of drugs.

Sam Scholtz, a friend of O'Daniel's who was loosely related to him through marriage, believes the jail staff should have known O'Daniel was in trouble.

"They didn't do their job," she said last week. "They didn't do their part. While he was in their care, the proper standards, all of the procedures, were not done correctly."

***

According to the women who loved him, O'Daniel didn't have much when he came into this world. And he didn't leave much behind.

Willa Dean Scholtz, his ex-wife, said O'Daniel's mother was an alcoholic, and his father wasn't around much. O'Daniel told her his mother's boyfriends molested him when he was about 8, and he lived with his grandparents. At some point, he moved from East Ridge to Cedartown, Ga., then to somewhere in Florida to stay with his dad.

He got married in Daytona Beach, he later told Scholtz. But he and his wife's twins died as babies, and their marriage didn't last long. In 1998, when he was 22 years old, O'Daniel was convicted of auto theft. A judge sentenced him to 18 months in prison, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.

During a work detail eight months into his sentence, O'Daniel ran away. Officers in Tennessee found him a month later. His prison stint grew, and at some point he joined the Aryan Brotherhood. Scholtz said O'Daniel only became a white supremacist for prison protection, though even last year he was still writing racist and separatist posts on Facebook.

Scholtz, a neighbor of O'Daniel's mother in Wildwood, Ga., started exchanging letters with him his last couple years in prison. She thought it was a fun hobby, having a pen pal in prison. And when he was released and moved back, they hit it off. The Aryan Brotherhood tattoos turned her off, she said, but she didn't think he was racist, deep down.

She felt sorry for him and believed his childhood gave him no shot at stability. And, anyway, he was funny. He made videos as "Chicken Foot," some sort of redneck anti-hero. He was nice, too. He knew how to make her feel better.

"He could talk the panties off a nun," she said.

Those first couple years were steady. O'Daniel worked factory jobs and came home at night. But at some point, some co-workers gave him pain pills. He started slipping into numbness, causing accidents at work and forgetting how to find his way home.

Then, in September 2012, his mother died. Willa Dean Scholtz said O'Daniel lost grip on his life. He disappeared for about six months.

Their home was never stable after that. He would come and go, apologizing for his absence, promising to be better. And then he would disappear again. In early 2014, through Facebook, he connected with Daphne Coley, an old middle school friend in Cedartown. He visited her, then decided to stay.

Coley and Willa Dean Scholtz gave similar reasons for their attraction to O'Daniel: He was funny, and for the most part he seemed nice. But soon after meeting Coley, he fell apart. They went to a party at a friend's trailer in the woods, Coley said, and someone brought out methamphetamine.

Coley, who had done the drug for about 13 years, figured O'Daniel was experienced. He had been to prison, after all. The first time, they snorted the drug. And almost instantly, she said, O'Daniel became hooked. He stayed up all night, tried to find more dealers. They started smoking the drug and eventually graduated to injection.

Coley said she could handle methamphetamine in moderation. She used it at parties, but she could go months without a taste. She hadn't known anyone to become hooked like O'Daniel did. He became paranoid. He talked fast, talked to himself. He accused her of bugging his phone and paying spies to track him. He imagined people were outside their trailer window throughout the night.

"He had his faults and his flaws," Coley said, "but he was a decent guy. And [meth] just destroyed him. And it destroyed everything that was ever any good about him."

One night, while staying with Coley's mother in Centre, Ala., he broke into a neighbor's camper, trying to find a pound of marijuana. An argument followed, and Coley's mother kicked them out. They were homeless for a while after that, sleeping between two cardboard boxes behind a Cedartown grocery store.

In early October of last year, Scholtz said, O'Daniel called her. He said he had been clean for three weeks, but he needed a place to stay. He walked from Rome to Summerville and slept on a bench outside, and his ex-wife agreed to pick him up. She found him with holes in the soles of his brown boots, and she brought him to her home in LaFayette.

For about six weeks, she said, O'Daniel seemed like the man she married 10 years ago. She believes he was clean the whole time. She didn't let him close a door to be alone, even in the bathroom. In mid-November, though, he asked to remarry her. She told him to slow down, and he threatened to kill himself.

On the afternoon of Nov. 16, they watched a movie in bed and she went to sleep. When she woke up, O'Daniel was gone. And so was her lock box, which contained oxymorphone, a pain medication.

She didn't hear from him again.

In the months since, Scholtz has struggled to figure out what she wants to happen from his death. They'd been divorced for two years, so she doesn't see a claim in a lawsuit. She has said that on the day he went to jail, O'Daniel was walking to a friend's house to trade the pills for some methamphetamine. But there is no clear criminal case against anyone for what happened, be it a junkie or an officer.

Scholtz has settled on his shoes.

Her son had given him a fresh pair of gray and orange Nikes, size 11, to replace his holed boots. She doesn't know what happened to them. She's not sure if he was wearing them when he entered the jail. But she wants to find them.

"Maybe I just need to see them," she said last week. "I don't know."

Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-75706476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.

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