A 32-year-old man from Michigan suffered an excruciatingly painful death in a Jail cell last June after being arrested for failing to pay a $772 traffic fine.
A shocking video has emerged of the incident which shows police officers ignoring David Stojcevski’s cries for help, as he is left to die over the course of 17 days, and denied the medications he had been prescribed prior to his incarceration.
His family have filed a suit against the county for his wrongful death.
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According to the suit, medical officers at the jail were informed Stojcevski required Xanax, Klonopin and Oxycodone when they booked him, yet never provided them to him, even after he was found “twitching on the floor” and pleading “for necessary medical care and treatment.”
While the family filed the suit in March, the case only came to light this week after WDIV obtained video of Stojcevski’s last moments.
When Stojcevski began hallucinating — a symptom of benzodiazepine withdrawal — he told officers he felt “all his organs” had been removed and his “arms [had been] shredded,” leaving “10 percent of his heart.” Instead of receiving medical care, the suit claims he was placed on suicide watch, where he was stripped naked for his own safety, and officers looked on via a 24-hour-a-day camera.
There, the suit says, “defendants … monitored, watched and observed David spend the final ten days of his life suffering excruciating benzodiazepine withdrawal symptoms.”
“It’s unconscionable that they let this human being suffer like this,” addiction expert Diane Rockwell told WDIV, describing Stojcevski’s last moments, as he crawled under the cell bed and heaved his last breaths, as being “like an animal [that’s] crawling underneath something to die.”
