So when some lumber got jammed on a conveyor belt at the Pueblo sawmill where she’d been working through a prison-work program, the woman serving prison time for escape and being an habitual traffic offender obeyed the prodding of her foreman and fellow inmates. She climbed below the conveyor belt and reached toward the wood.
“Upon dislodging the wood, and without warning, a saw came straight at Ms. Fuelling’s head, slicing through her helmet (and scalp, causing her to bleed profusely). Ms. Fuelling screamed as loud as she could, but her voice was muffled by the noise of the saw,” the civil lawsuit she filed this week in U.S. District Court in Denver says.
The lawsuit names the sawmill, Pueblo Wood Products, and 10 people as defendants. One of the defendants is Fuelling’s supervisor who allegedly had assured her the saw was turned off. The lawsuit only refers to him by his first name, Connor, because she couldn’t recall his surname.
Fuelling, 48, also sued Colorado Department of Corrections employees, including those who drove her back to La Vista Correctional Facility instead of taking her to a hospital. The lawsuit says the still-bleeding and screaming woman should have been rushed to a hospital emergency room.
Fuelling has since been released from prison and placed in community corrections. Denver attorneys Thomas Ward and Tiffany Drahota seek unspecified damages for her emotional distress, humiliation and loss of enjoyment of life. They also are seeking punitive damages and compensation for attorneys fees and court costs.
Pueblo Wood Products corporate manager Micah Langston will not be available for comment until Monday, a sawmill employee said. Prison spokesman Mark Fairbairn said he has not yet seen the lawsuit and would reply once he had a chance to speak with legal staff.
“As a for-profit program run by (Corrections Industries), on behalf of CDOC, corners were cut and on-the-job-safety training took a back seat to profit margins earned by Pueblo Wood, CCI and DOC,” the lawsuit says. Fuelling’s safety training consisted of receiving four pages of tips including advice for how to avoid avoid back injuries and getting cuts from sharp objects.
Fuelling was serving sentences for escape and being an habitual traffic offender at the time of the accident on Aug. 10, 2015. Her version of the incident was, including the following details:
- Fuelling was wearing steel-toed boots, a helmet and gloves as she worked on the sawmill’s top platform when a piece of lumber got lodged in the conveyor belt, jamming it. Inmates and supervisors including Connor assured her that they had turned the saw off and it was safe to yank the lumber from under the conveyor belt.
- She yanked on the piece of lumber until she managed to pull it free.
- The saw immediately came directly towards her. It ripped through her helmet, “barreled” through her skin and punctured her cranium. Pieces of her “head matter” stuck to her shirt and she began bleeding profusely. Dazed and shaky, she was able to move out from under the conveyor belt and into the sight line of crew members.
- “In shock, she began drifting in and out of consciousness…Ms. Fuelling was terrified to remove her hands from her skull because she was scared that her head was going to fall apart.”
- With no first-aid kit on hand at the sawmill, someone put two feminine hygiene pads on Fuelling’s bleeding skull. No one called 911 or summoned an ambulance. Instead, fellow inmates helped her back to the prison transport van and worked to keep her awake on the ride back to the prison.
- Despite repeated calls to a La Vista prison supervisor to explain Fuelling’s injuries were grave, a shift commander ordered Fuelling returned to the prison.
The prison is north and the hospital is south of the sawmill, the lawsuit says. The distance between the sawmill at 1110 E Northern Ave. and La Vista prison is 4.2 miles, according to Mapquest. The distance between the sawmill and St. Mary-Corwin Medical Center is 2.1 miles, or half the distance.
Back at the prison, corrections officers took Fuelling to the infirmary where nurse Loraine Fosdick and licensed practical nurse Kathy Holt examined her while Fuelling cried in intense pain. Holt noted the gaping wound and pieces of scalp in Fuelling’s hair. Holt placed two pads over the wound and wrapped it with gauze. Fosdick and Holt asked that Fuelling be taken by ambulance to the hospital.
By the time she was finally sent 5.2 miles south from the prison to the hospital, Fuelling was nauseated, dizzy and had blurred vision. She had a 4- to 5-inch scalp laceration and received 15 stitches.
In the days and weeks after she returned to prison, Fuelling told nurses about a large lump that had formed in the back of her head. She was bumping into walls, had headaches, severe pain and was saying odd things. For example, when she meant to say, sew a uniform, she said sew a bikini.
Dr. Thomas Pulk examined Fuelling on Aug. 31, 2015, three weeks after the industrial accident, and diagnosed her with “chronic pain” and prolonged post-concussion syndrome. He also noted his concern about possible infection because the saw blade was filthy. Eleven days later — after green pus leaked from Fuelling’s head wound — a culture confirmed that she had Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. At that point, prison medical staff administered Bactrim.
On Sept. 28, prison staff fired Fuelling from a prison job and put her in isolation partly because of Fuelling’s complaints about the conditions of her confinement including poor sanitation. As a “pretext for firing her” from her job, she was accused of stealing underwear from the laundry. She was prohibited from seeing her family for 74 days.
In an action that confirmed their own knowledge about how dangerous the sawmill is, the company closed and fenced it off as a direct result of Fuelling’s injury, the lawsuit says.
