Cellmate of teen who died says he called for help 3 times

The former cellmate of a 14-year-old boy who died while in custody at the King County Juvenile Detention Center last year had called for help three separate times and waited about 10 minutes before a nurse arrived to treat the unconscious teen, according to the cellmate's testimony Wednesday.

The cellmate told an inquest jury that each time he pressed the intercom button inside his cell the morning of Dec. 26, 2005, a juvenile-detention guard answered, telling him that a nurse was coming.

But by the time the nurse got there around 6:30 a.m., he said, his roommate, Johnny Lim, had gone from vomiting and dizziness to collapsing on the floor and not breathing. Lim was later pronounced dead at Harborview Medical Center.

The Seattle Times is not naming the cellmate because he is a juvenile.

The testimony differed from the accounts Tuesday of two juvenile-detention officers, who said they responded as soon as they received the only call for help.

The cellmate, also 14, was one of several witnesses who testified Wednesday, the second day of an inquest into the events surrounding Lim's death. Lim had been in custody for five days on suspicion of car theft when he died.

The King County Medical Examiner's Office ruled the death was due to natural causes, specifically from spontaneous bleeding to his brain stem. But jurors in the inquest — a standard procedure when a person dies in police custody — are being asked to determine the cause, manner and circumstances of the boy's death.

The cellmate told the jury Wednesday that the night of Christmas, he and Lim did sit-ups and push-ups in their cell and then read until about midnight before going to bed.

Sometime during the night, he said, Lim woke him up mumbling about a "killer headache." The cellmate said he told Lim to drink some water and ask for a pill, but instead Lim went back to sleep.

The cellmate testified that he didn't see the guards making their required bed checks every 25 minutes that night.

Lim woke up again and began drinking water and then started spitting or vomiting in the toilet, the cellmate said. He said he dozed off and awoke around 6 a.m. to see Lim seriously ill.

"It looked like he was dizzy ... he just started wobbling. He fell on his butt area and he started sitting down, crouching, and that's when he started laying down." The cellmate said that's when he called for help the first time on the intercom.

When nurse arrived

He estimated he waited for five minutes and then made a second call. He waited five more minutes, during which juvenile-detention officer Chima Ijeoma promised him someone was coming, he said. When he pressed the intercom button a third time the center's nurse arrived, he said.

Jared Karstetter, a lawyer for the juvenile-detention guards, asked him how he knew how much time had elapsed between his calls for help when there was no clock in the cell. The cellmate said he estimated.

On Tuesday, detention officers testified that they responded to a single call for help from the cell immediately, at the same time that they called 911.

But there were some differences in testimony about what time detention-center staff members were alerted to the problem in Lim's cell and how quickly they, and paramedics, responded.

Kwame Ellis, a juvenile-detention officer on duty when Lim died, said Wednesday that he heard Ijeoma send the nurse to Lim's cell just after 6 a.m.

But Ijeoma said Tuesday that he checked the cell at 6:25 a.m. — something he said he had done regularly throughout the night — and everything appeared fine.

Michael Garvey, a paramedic with the Seattle Fire Department, testified Wednesday that the first aid unit was dispatched to the center at 6:32 a.m. and arrived five minutes later to find Lim unconscious and unresponsive, with the center's nurse performing CPR.

In his report, Garvey marked that there had been a delay in the call to 911. Wednesday, Karstetter asked him why.

"I believe the staff ... I know they started CPR on him immediately ... so that would have been a delay in them calling us," Garvey replied.

Pathologist testifies

Jurors also heard Wednesday from John Lacy, a forensic pathologist for the King County Medical Examiner's Office, who determined that Lim died from a congenital brain malformation that causes blood vessels to spontaneously rupture.

People often don't know they have the rare condition, although headaches and seizures before a rupture can be signs, he said.

The survival rate of Lim's particular condition, which can reach a crisis suddenly, can be 60 percent or higher if surgery, radiation or one of several other procedures is used immediately, Lacy testified.

By the time Lim had begun vomiting in his cell that morning, "he had a high probability of death," Lacy said.

Natalie Singer: 206-464-2704 or nsinger@seattletimes.com