Utah man dies in police custody after being jailed for $2,400 unpaid ambulance bill

[Cheese Sandwich]

Rex Iverson was put in the Box Elder County Jail when he didn’t pay an ambulance bill. The next day, he was dead.

Iverson didn’t have the money to pay bail much less the $2,376.92 bill to the Tremonton City Ambulance service. There was an attempt to to garnish his wages, “but he didn’t have a job, that we knew of,” City treasurer Sharri Oyler explained.

“We go to great lengths to never arrest anybody on these warrants,” Elder County Chief Deputy Sheriff Dale Ward told the Ogden Standard-Examiner. “The reason we do that is we don’t want to run a debtors’ prison. There is no reason for someone to be rotting in jail on a bad debt.”

“How can you get blood out of a turnip?” Josh Daniels of the Utah-based Libertas Institute said. “The thing about going to jail, your time does not pay your debt… A person should be obliged to pay, but putting him in jail doesn’t solve the problem.”
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more:
https://www.rawstory.com/2016/02/utah-man-dies-in-police-custody-after-being-jailed-for-2400-unpaid-medical-bill/