Nurse sued over Portland jail overdose death faced earlier suit over fatal OD at different jail, records allege
By Maxine Bernstein | The Oregonian/OregonLive
The lead nurse accused in a lawsuit of failing to administer Narcan to a man who died of a drug overdose suffered at Multnomah County’s Inverness Jail had a history of problems at an earlier job, wasn’t fully forthcoming about her past on her work application and was subsequently fired for making on-the-job racist remarks, new records allege.
Camille Valberg is a defendant in a $10 million civil rights suit filed by the family of Richard Jason Forrest, 37, of Portland. Forrest died in custody in July 2019 from an overdose after using methamphetamine and heroin smuggled into the Northeast Portland jail.
The suit alleges that men on work crews would pick up packages of drugs left on or near the jail property to bring back with them to jail and that the county failed to maintain a safe jail or provide immediate medical attention.
At the time of Forrest’s death, Valberg faced a separate civil suit in the November 2016 overdose death of a Clackamas County jail prisoner, Bryan Perry. That suit alleged that at her direction, the jail staff didn’t begin sustained CPR or call 911 until about five minutes after Perry appeared to stop moving and color had left his body.
A federal judge later allowed the Clackamas County case to proceed against Valberg after ruling that a reasonable juror could find that “Valberg’s inaction” during what appeared to be “an obvious medical emergency amounted to deliberate indifference.” That case has since settled for undisclosed terms.
The lawyers representing Forrest’s estate argue in their federal suit that Multnomah County should never have hired Valberg to work in one of its jails.
Her supervisor at the Clackamas County Jail had told Multnomah County that Valberg lacked attention to detail, often spent her energy on “unnecessary things,” got into conflicts with others and “lacked some essential skills to work in corrections,” attorney Joseph E. Piucci wrote in the new court filings.
“Multnomah County knew or should have known that Nurse Valberg lacked the appropriate skills, competency, diligence, or compassion necessary to perform the duties of her job as a corrections health nurse,” he wrote, in response to the county’s motion to dismiss the case. “This was true at the time of her hiring in May of 2018, and became progressively more obvious over the course of 2019.”
The county, in turn, has urged a federal judge to throw out the case stemming from Forrest’s death. The allegations that the county improperly hired Valberg aren’t relevant, Deputy County Attorney B. Andrew Jones wrote in a court filing. Valberg and other nurses also weren’t aware that Forrest had used drugs in custody, Jones wrote.
“Potential workplace friction due to political views or romantic involvement with co-workers does not make Ms. Valberg a danger to patients, nor support a reasonable inference of such,” Jones wrote. “There is no evidence to draw the requisite causal link between Nurse Valberg’s hiring/retention and Mr. Forrest’s death. The allegations … have no bearing whatsoever on Ms. Valberg’s provision of care.”
Forrest ingested, inhaled or injected the drugs in the jail and was overheard telling jail deputies that day, “I can’t breathe,” according to the suit. Forrest collapsed soon after Valberg responded, but Valberg didn’t attempt to get his vital signs or conduct any physical assessment of Forrest and instead tried to look for an inhaler, according to court records.
When other nurses arrived with five unexpired doses of Narcan in an emergency medical cart, none administered the overdose reversal drug, although Forrest was turning blue, the records say. Only when Portland fire medics arrive did they administer the drug, but it was too late, according to Piucci.
Forrest was taken by ambulance to Adventist Health Portland, where he was pronounced dead.
The filings note that since Multnomah County moved to dismiss the suit, six prisoners in county custody died between May 2, 2023, and Aug. 1, 2023, and a seventh died in October. Of the seven, two didn’t involve the use of drugs in custody, according to Piucci’s filing.
The county, the suit alleges, failed to respond to past deaths in custody and recommendations by the county corrections deputies’ association to install body scanners to prevent drug smuggling and future inmate overdoses, Piucci wrote in the suit.
In response, the county said then-Sheriff Mike Reese sought more information about how body scanners performed in other jails before buying them. The sheriff’s office didn’t buy body scanners until fiscal 2020 and then it took some time for installation and training, according to the county’s lawyer. Jones called it “speculative” that a body scanner would have detected the drugs that Forrest had ingested in custody.
The county also has argued that Narcan wouldn’t have saved Forrest’s life, that nurses didn’t know he had ingested any drugs in jail and that they responded as if he was having a breathing problem due to his history of asthma. Forrest, according to the county, had his inhaler raised as Valberg entered his dorm and she attributed his breathing difficulties to his asthma.
The new court records allege that the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office did a background check on Valberg and cautioned county hiring staff that Valberg hadn’t been “fully truthful” because she failed to disclose that she had been in custody on domestic violence-related allegations before she applied.
Though the charges were dismissed, she didn’t divulge all the times she had been held in jail, the sheriff’s office reported, according to Piucci’s filing. The background check had requested notice of any “incarcerations.”
Ultimately, the manager for hiring at the downtown Portland jail rejected Valberg and generally recommended against hiring her, but the county health department decided to hire her to work at the Inverness Jail, according to the new records.
In his deposition in the case, Reese found the circumstances of Valberg’s hiring “deeply troubling,” noting her “concerning” failure to acknowledge her prior incarcerations and equally concerning negative review from her previous supervisor.
But most troubling was the corrections health department’s split decision – rejecting her for hiring at the downtown jail but hiring her to work at Inverness Jail, Reese said. “I have no idea why they would make that decision,” he told lawyers during his deposition.
Valberg ultimately was fired in September 2020 over an ongoing pattern of “race-based discriminatory conduct,” according to the court records.
Five days before the overdose death of Forrest, a Black man, Valberg wrote to her manager, “The stress here is becoming less and less worth it. Fire me. Hire a black nurse. At least maybe she’ll/he’ll get treated better.”
Eighteen witnesses interviewed shared that Valberg made racist remarks while at work in the Inverness Jail, denigrated Black co-workers and inmates and claimed the county was engaged in “reverse racism,” according to the new filings.
She also confronted a Filipino nurse about his immigration status and denigrated an LGBTQ medication aide, according to the filings.
The then-county corrections health manager, a Black man, said in a deposition that Valberg’s “inflammatory racial comments,” coupled with her alleged affinity for the far-right group Proud Boys, made him fear for his and his family’s safety, according to an excerpt from his deposition.
Valberg had described to a co-worker that she had gone through a vetting process to meet with a member of the Proud Boys after contacting the “main guy” on Facebook, according to the court records.
The county initially was going to suspend Valberg for two weeks but other staff challenged that move, and instead the county issued her a termination letter on Sept. 18, 2020, according to court records.
Separately, Valberg had engaged in a sexual relationship with a sheriff’s corrections deputy and twice petitioned the county for a stalking protective order against the deputy’s wife, also an employee of the sheriff’s office, the records allege.
Forrest’s widow and family , who referred to Forrest by his middle name Jason, are pursing the case against the county to try to prevent future deaths in custody, she and their attorney said.
“Losing my husband has devastated me and my children,” said Chrystal Forrest. “How many more people need to die before Multnomah County takes responsibility?”
