A lawsuit blames Lehigh County and its jail medical provider for failing to prevent an inmate\u2019s death by suicide.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit says 50-year-old Cheryl L. Phillips died by suicide on Dec. 3, 2022, after a forced drug detox in Lehigh County Jail. <\/p>\n
Attorneys for Lehigh County<\/a> and its jail healthcare provider, PrimeCare Medical<\/a> of Harrisburg, didn\u2019t immediately respond to messages seeking comment for this story.<\/p>\n Phillips was denied methadone after she was incarcerated on Nov. 15, 2022, for violating parole on two minor drug offenses. She vomited for days due to drug withdrawal symptoms and was treated at St. Luke\u2019s Hospital on Nov. 22, 2022, for bleeding in her esophagus, the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n She continued to suffer detox symptoms including a racing pulse and dizziness when she threw herself over a second-tier landing on Nov. 30, 2022, hit the cement floor below and suffered a severe head injury, the suit says.<\/p>\n She died from her head injuries three days later in Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township, the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n The lawsuit was filed by Phillips\u2019 daughter. The eight-count suit seeks unspecified damages for wrongful death and professional negligence.<\/p>\n The lawsuit doesn\u2019t list an address for Phillips. One court docket entry for her recent drug case doesn\u2019t list an address for her, but a separate entry says she lived in Allentown.<\/p>\n A notice of intent to sue was filed Nov. 24, 2024, in Lehigh County Court by Easton attorneys Adam Meshkov and John R. Vivian Jr.<\/p>\n Their lawsuit was filed in Lehigh County on Jan. 20, 2026, then moved to federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A lawsuit blames Lehigh County and its jail medical provider for failing to prevent an inmate\u2019s death by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120],"class_list":["post-109151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}