ST. LOUIS — Four detainees at the city’s downtown jail were stabbed and injured in a fight Wednesday afternoon.
Monte Chambers, a spokesperson for the city Department of Public Safety, said the trouble started around 1:20 p.m., when a guard sent out a distress call about a disturbance in one of the jail pods.
The disturbance eventually became a fight between the detainees. Ambulances arrived and took the injured to area hospitals for evaluation.
City Sheriff Vernon Betts said he’d seen the detainees and that it looked like everyone would live.
Chambers said a jail staffer also went to the hospital for an evaluation, but it was not related to the disturbance. An investigation is ongoing.
The incident is the latest bad news for a jail that has spent much of the last few years dealing with headlines about riots, hostage-taking, a rash of detainee deaths, and slow medical responses.
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The city has made efforts to improve health care: Officials hired a new provider and budgeted $2 million for new city health department positions overseeing care.
But the jail has also struggled to hire guards. Officials said earlier this year that correctional officer counts had fallen below 100, out of 226 budgeted positions.
ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Interim Public Safety Director Dan Isom talks to the media about the updates made to the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ city Justice Center before providing a tour of the third floor of the jail on Wednesday, May 4, 2022.
Video by David Carson, dcarson@post-dispatch.com
