SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On July 6, a three-car accident at the 65th Street Expressway and Lemon Hill Road in Sacramento left three people injured, and started a nightmare for the family of Mishila Vickers.
Vickers, 29, was hurt in the crash and hospitalized for about a month, her family says, and three weeks after the crash she was charged with reckless driving.
But Vickers has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, her brother Ryan says, and her illness led her to miss a court date, which led to her arrest in December and landed her in isolation inside the Sacramento County Main Jail despite having no previous criminal record.
Today, Ryan Vickers says, his younger sister is at UC Davis Medical Center in a catatonic state, diagnosed with COVID-19 and has multiple broken ribs. She’s being administered medicine and nourishment through a tube in her nose.
And no one has been able to explain what happened to her, Vickers says.
“I believe something happened inside the jail, something that they are trying to cover up,” said Ryan Vickers, a 31-year-old welder. “I don’t know if it was staff. I don’t know if it was another inmate.
“She didn’t go to the jail with broken ribs, but she left out with broken ribs.”
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Rodney Grassmann declined to comment on what happened to Vickers, referring questions to Sacramento County’s correctional health spokeswoman, Samantha Mott, who cited privacy issues in declining to explain what happened to the inmate.
“We can confirm Mishila Vickers was in custody from December 3, 2021, to February 3, 2022,” Mott wrote in an email. “Any health care an inmate may or may not receive while in custody is protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and cannot be released without signed patient authorization or a court order.”
Mishila Vickers’ mental state appears to have complicated the handling of the case. Her brother says the family tried to bail her out following her arrest, but that sheriff’s officials told them she was not eligible because she was on a so-called 5150 hold used to temporarily detain suspects for psychiatric testing.
Vickers spent her 29th birthday and Christmas in the jail, and her family has been unable to see her since her arrest, her brother said.
Sacramento Superior Court records show that a month after her arrest a judge ordered her mental state evaluated and set a March 3 hearing for doctors to submit their reports.
Guy Danilowitz, the public defender originally assigned to her case, told The Sacramento Bee that he declared a doubt about her mental condition on Jan. 6 after a disturbing visit to her in the jail.
“When I see her on Jan. 4 she’s not doing well, naked, mumbling to herself,” Danilowitz said. “The windows are covered because they say she’s throwing stuff.”
Last week, Danilowitz said, he got a call from sheriff’s officials saying Vickers had been found unresponsive in her cell and taken to UC Davis, where she tested positive for COVID-19 and where routine X-rays showed multiple broken ribs.
“They wanted me to stipulate to her release because they don’t want her on their hands,” Danilowitz said. “That’s what they’re literally telling me, they don’t want to be responsible.”
Danilowitz was relieved from the case last Thursday after the family hired a private attorney, and jail records show she was released from custody the same day.
But she remains hospitalized, and her brother says the family has not been allowed to see her or get answers to what happened to her inside the jail.
“My thought was possibly due to her being resuscitated from her being found in jail that maybe she broke some ribs there,” Vickers said. “That wasn’t the case. The doctor called us and informed us that she was found with a pulse, she was found breathing, so CPR likely wasn’t administered.
“So, the broken ribs came from another cause, and we’re trying to find out what that was. She was in isolation. She was by herself. She was in perfect health. And now the doctors are saying that she’s catatonic, she’s not responding to verbal commands. She’s pretty much just staring out into space.”
On Monday, Vickers said the hospital called him to say doctors wanted to move his sister out of the ICU and conduct tests to investigate “spots on her brain” they had found, he said.
But Vickers said his sister had undergone an MRI after the car accident last summer and checked out fine.
“Now we’re getting ‘spots on the brain,’” he said. “Directly from her leaving the jail and going to the hospital?”
