Three months after Julie Buelna was fatally injured in the Dallas County jail, the Sheriff’s Department has yet to notify the Texas attorney general’s office about her death. State law requires notification within 30 days.
Sheriff Marian Brown hasn’t explained why her agency neglected that duty. She hasn’t returned our phone calls or those of Tracey McManus, our newsroom colleague who broke the story. Buelna’s unexplained death and the Sheriff’s Department’s silence about it are shameful, but McManus’ reporting revealed even more concerning behavior.
Buelna was critically injured on her first night in jail. After the ambulance arrived at the facility, it took about 15 minutes for Dallas Fire Rescue paramedics to be cleared through security and reach Buelna. Are there measures that detention officers could have taken to prepare for their arrival and avoid the delay?
Buelna’s family was not notified that she was hospitalized in critical condition until two days later — and it was hospital staff, not someone from the sheriff’s office, who contacted her relatives. When her mother and sister asked the Sheriff’s Department for information, they were told Buelna had jumped from a second-story ledge in the jail. The sheriff’s office has not disclosed any other details or provided evidence to verify that explanation.
There are so many things wrong with this picture that it’s hard to know what to address first. Buelna, 48, had struggled with bipolar disorder since her teens and was being held in Dallas on a theft warrant out of Collin County. She was severely injured at the jail and transported directly to the hospital.
Notified that Buelna was hospitalized, Collin County directed Dallas to release her as “an administrative action related to her medical status,” a spokesperson for the Collin County Sheriff’s Office told McManus. Dallas County then officially released Buelna from its custody. That maneuver didn’t absolve the sheriff of the moral responsibility, or the legal duty, to notify the Texas Commission on Jail Standards and the Texas attorney general when she died 11 days later.
The jail standards commission reaffirmed in February that all in-custody deaths, even if they happen outside of the jail, must be reported to the commission within 24 hours. They also must be investigated by an outside agency. The commission’s director confirmed to McManus that Buelna’s death should be considered an in-custody death.
McManus’ previous reporting has shown that more than 70 people have died in Dallas County’s custody since Brown was first elected in 2018. At least 10 of those inmates’ deaths were caused by medical conditions that experts say probably would have responded to treatment had they been caught earlier.
We still don’t know the details of what happened to Buelna. All we know is something awful happened her first night in the Dallas County jail, and the Sheriff’s Department is shirking accountability.
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