Suicide Policies To Tighten Jailed Man Hangs Himself
Whitman County officials plan to “ratchet down” their suicide-prevention procedures after a 22-year-old Pullman man hanged himself Thursday.
County officials refused to publicly identify the victim but sources confirmed he was Andrei Zouev, a former Washington State University student and Kazakhstan national arrested Wednesday for having several firearms, including two assault rifles, without an alien firearms license.
Zouev was being held in a regular cell, not the jail’s camera-equipped cell for potential suicides, even though Pullman police told jailers that Zouev might be suicidal upon being released from jail.
“They did not think he might be a suicide threat while in jail,” said Capt. Robert Ingalls, the jail commander. “That’s why he was not placed in that room with the camera.”
Because the camera-equipped room has only a sink, toilet and bed, jailers are hesitant to put inmates in the Spartan cell if there’s “just a hint” they might commit suicide, Ingalls said.
“With 20-20 hindsight, of course, we wish we had,” he said. Moreover, the jail is going to revisit its written procedures for dealing with potential suicides. “Of course, we’re going to look at them with a magnifying glass now,” Ingalls said. “What we’ll probably do is ratchet down the trip point where we use that cell. Because it has such limitations on it, we hesitate to use it unless we are confident or we feel there’s a strong chance the prisoner will commit suicide. I think what we’re going to end up with is if there’s any suspicion at all they’ll go there because we sure don’t want to go through this again.”
Sheriff Steve Tomson said his office will be investigating both the suicide and the administrative procedures used to decide where Zouev was to be held.
“I can tell you straight up, based on the information that the corrections officers were given at the time of the book, their actions were reasonable,” he said. “The case came into the corrections staff as a pretty routine thing.”
Zouev graduated last August from WSU with a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences. His student status expired Nov. 30.
On Tuesday, Pullman police received a tip that Zouev had several weapons without an alien license, a Class C felony. On Wednesday, police executed a search warrant on his Campus Commons South apartment and seized two assault rifles, a semiautomatic “machine pistol,” several 30-round magazines and other accessories.
Police Chief Ted Weatherly said it was unclear why Zouev had the weapons. “It’s a little unusual but it’s not out of the realm” of the ordinary, he said. “There’s a lot of people that have these things and they can legally buy them.”
Sometime after 10:30 Thursday morning, as the jail’s two corrections officers helped some inmates with regularly scheduled health checks, Zouev tried hanging himself in his cell from a shower head with a torn piece of bedsheet, Tomson said.
When that failed, he anchored the sheet by closing his cell door on a knot and tying the rest of the sheet around his neck.
He was found about 12:20 p.m. The cell door was left open at the time to give Zouev access to a day room.
, DataTimes