Courtesy of Colleen Lord

Connecticut lawmakers agreed to pay a $3.75 million settlement to the estate of Carl “Robby” Talbot, a West Haven man whose death within New Haven’s Correctional Center on March 21, 2019, was ruled a homicide by the state’s Deputy Chief Medical Examiner. 

The tentative agreement was made during a Judiciary Committee hearing last month.

“I didn’t have the opportunity to talk. But I brought a picture of my son, so that people could just see [it] and humanize him,” Colleen Lord, Robby Talbot’s mother, told the News.

The case’s original complaint was filed by Lord and Robert Francis Talbot Jr. — Talbot’s parents and the co-administrators of his estate — on Feb. 28, 2022. It alleges that Talbot, who was both physically and mentally ill, was subjected to “excessive,” “unreasonable” and “significant force,” and denied “necessary, appropriate and required medical care” by correctional officers, leading to his death. 

The complaint also alleges that internal reports detailing the circumstances that led to Talbot’s death were falsified. Documents submitted in 2019 affirmed that legally-mandated routine checks of an inmate under restraint took place for Talbot. Yet, an initial internal investigation executed by the Department of Corrections in February 2021 discovered that these checklists were forged after the fact.

According to Commissioner of Corrections Angel Quiros, the individuals involved in the fabrication are still unknown.

“You have my full commitment for my remaining term as Commissioner that I [will] try to do everything possible to ensure this does not happen again,” Quiros said during the hearing. A new internal investigation will be launched into the falsification of the reports this year. 

“The details in the Lord v. Padro case are deeply disturbing,” wrote Sen. John Kissel, who was present at the Judiciary Committee hearing, in a press release. “A man lost his life while in state custody, and to this day, there are still unanswered questions about what happened, why it happened and how we can be certain that it will not happen again.”

Talbot died 36 hours after his return to prison

Robby Talbot had been remanded to New Haven’s Correctional Center the evening of March 19, 2019 for a parole violation. The morning of his death, he was being temporarily housed in the prison’s medical center, allegedly awaiting an assessment by a physician for mental health and detoxification concerns.

Talbot, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as an adolescent, struggled with substance abuse issues and schizoaffective symptoms caused by his condition. He also suffered from obstructive sleep apnea and asthma, and consequently relied upon inhalers, Ventolin and a BiPAP, or CPAP, machine to aid with his breathing difficulties.

According to Lord and Talbot Jr.’s complaint, Talbot had also been prescribed methadone to treat his addiction issues. However, this medication was allegedly not provided to Talbot at the center.

“He did not get any treatment. He did not get his methadone, he did not get any of his psychiatric medication,” said Lord. “They did not give him his BiPAP machine, and they put him in a solitary cell. One of the guards saw that he needed to be seen by a psychiatric doctor because he was going into withdrawal, which triggered his mania and [started a] psychotic break.”

Around 6:30 a.m., Talbot began to experience a severe mental health episode. Officers entered Talbot’s unit to intervene and remove him to shower, a directive with which Talbot complied. 

But when he refused to exit the shower, Lieutenant Carlos Padro doused Talbot twice with pepper spray and kicked him. By 7:23 a.m., footage of the incident showed Talbot had been pepper-sprayed two more times and restrained by a “pig pile” — when multiple correctional officers place their full or partial body weight on an inmate to install their “in-cell restraints.” 

By 8:45 a.m., the new sergeant on duty noticed Talbot was quiet and still in his cell. A Code White was activated and resuscitation efforts undertaken. Talbot was transported to Yale New Haven Hospital, where he was pronounced dead by 9:40 a.m., approximately 36 hours after he had returned to the New Haven Correctional Center.

Ending the “culture of violence”

Barbara Fair, who heads the New Haven criminal justice organization Stop Solitary CT, first met Lord in 2019 after organizing a vigil in Talbot’s memory outside of the New Haven Correctional Center. Since then, Lord has participated in rallies, press conferences and other prison reform advocacy events organized by Stop Solitary.

Lord has specifically striven to reverse the stigma regarding mental illness, and to provide crisis intervention training to correctional officers. The recent settlement stipulates that Lord provide a video and deliver in-person training that incorporates the footage of Talbot’s death, to showcase the tangible human cost of excessive force. 

“I want to remind officers that they have a duty to intervene, and they need to maintain their humanity in their jobs,” Lord said. “I can’t imagine the kind of pressure they [have to go through], but that’s where the training comes in, so they can recognize people going through mental health issues, like my son.”

Fair pointed to the emotional toll the lengthy legal process took on Lord. She also voiced frustration that Padro was the only correctional officer prosecuted for his involvement in Talbot’s death, despite other officers not intervening when Padro kicked and pepper-sprayed him.

“What kind of a message does that send to people that are incarcerated?” Fair said. “And also for the correctional officers — [they] think that they can continue this culture of violence against incarcerated people and not have to suffer consequences.”

Fair compared Talbot’s case to the 2018 death of J’Allen Jones, who was incarcerated at Garner Correctional Institution. After Jones refused to comply with a strip search, multiple correctional officers pepper-sprayed him in the face, punched him and forced onto a bed over a nearly half-hour period. The correctional officers and a nearby nurse did not administer CPR or call 9-1-1 for seven minutes after Jones fell unconscious.

Shortly after Jones’ death, his family filed a lawsuit against correctional officers and a nurse who were in Jones’ vicinity when he became unresponsive. The lawsuit — which has faced delays over the past six-and-a-half years, including recent legal battles over whether the video of Jones’s death can be released to the public — is scheduled to go to trial on May 6.

Jones’ death preceded Talbot’s by a year, and both men’s deaths were filmed, Fair noted. She compared the two legal battles, emphasizing that Talbot and Lord are white while Jones and his family are Black.

“I feel people can hear the tears of a white woman. They don’t hear those tears when a Black woman cries,” Fair said. “It was an uphill battle for [Lord] to get any kind of justice, and it just makes me concerned about, will J’Allen’s mom get any justice in the end?”

Talbot leaves a legacy

Lord hopes to use the settlement sum to establish a family foundation, which would distribute local and national grants related to mental health treatment.

For Lord, a key concern is Connecticut’s dearth of mental health beds and treatment avenues. She contends that Talbot, who allegedly visited emergency rooms seeking support thirty-nine times and was refused admission and treatment, is indicative of this endemic issue.

“Robby never hurt anybody in his life. [And] he fell through everything. He fell through all the safety nets,” Lord said. “He started to self-medicate because he would tell me it made him feel normal. It was very dangerous and I didn’t approve of it, but I always took care of him.”

She hopes for several of these mental health treatment grants to go to New Haven.

“Robby loved New Haven. He couldn’t really work — he was on psychiatric disability — but he would sometimes sell flowers on the street,” Lord said. “He would cut roses until late at night before Valentine’s Day.”

The Judiciary Committee met on Valentine’s Day nearly six years after his death.