A 25-year-old patient who died at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem last year was subjected to years of indifferent, substandard care and long stretches of solitary confinement that were tantamount to torture, according to a new lawsuit filed by the man’s sister.
Sierra Hass, the sister of former patient Kenneth Hass, filed a federal lawsuit Monday accusing the Oregon State Hospital and nearly 20 individual staffers of violating her brother’s constitutional rights for years, setting the conditions that led to his March 2025 death.
The state and its employees “were deliberately indifferent to the rights held by Mr. Hass,” the lawsuit says. “The conduct by the Individual Defendants shocks the conscience given the significant opportunities to do the right thing coupled with the refusal to do so.”
A spokesperson for the state hospital, Amber Shoebridge, declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
The 140-page lawsuit offers an exhaustive chronicle of three years Hass spent at the hospital – first as a criminal defendant unable to aid in a court case against him, and later under a civil commitment order.
Born in Springfield, the suit says Hass was subjected to abuse and neglect early in his life and was exposed to alcohol and methamphetamine use by the time he was 10. After troubled teenage years that included hard drug use, Hass’s mental health deteriorated in his early 20s, eventually landing him in state care.
Doctors at the state hospital wrestled for years with Hass’ tendency to take off his clothes and attack other patients or staff, the suit says. It suggests the conduct ultimately resulted in an overreliance on seclusion, a tactic that is typically intended to last for four hours or less.
According to the lawsuit, Hass was often kept alone in a locked room for extended periods of time, sometimes under four-point restraints. It chronicles dozens of incidents of Hass falling or jumping from a bathroom sink and hitting his head, playing with his own excrement, and repeatedly drinking potentially toxic amounts of toilet water.
In the final months of his life, Hass spent 250 days in a solitary room often smeared with his own feces, the lawsuit says, with the physicians charged with his care largely indifferent to those conditions.
At the same time, some staff objected to Hass’ isolation, the suit says. An outside consulting firm hired to identify and correct problems at the hospital told top Oregon Health Authority officials that the facility’s reliance on long-term seclusion was a “high priority” for correction.
The suit claims that, in January 2025, a hospital administrator said they could not support a plan to reduce seclusion “if it was dependent on staff overtime.”
“Prolonged seclusion is widely understood to cause physical decline, cognitive deterioration, and deeply worsening psychiatric symptoms in anyone subjected to it, independent of any underlying mental illness,” a press release announcing the lawsuit said. “For Kenneth, that isolation played out in a room constantly smeared with feces and pooled in urine and trash, conditions they recorded again and again but routinely failed to clean or address.”
The suit notes that Hass was never formally diagnosed with a precise mental health disorder during his time at the state hospital and suggests doctors there never developed a coherent treatment plan as a result.
Hass died on March 18, 2025, after hospital officials allowed him access to a bathroom within his isolation unit that was often kept locked. The suit says Hass drank more than five gallons of water and fell down repeatedly.
At one point, Hass fell off his toilet and vomited after he struck his head on a door and the floor. The lawsuit says hospital staff waited for more than four minutes to enter the room, watching as Hass twitched and convulsed. He had gone limp by the time staff began CPR.
Hass was eventually declared dead as a result of water intoxication, the suit says.
In the wake of his death, federal regulators threatened to pull the state hospital’s eligibility to be reimbursed by Medicaid and Medicare. It has since been found in compliance after implementing a corrective plan and jettisoning a former interim superintendent.
The Oregonian/OregonLive, which highlighted the circumstances surrounding Hass’ death, reported this year that the state hospital ranked ninth out of more than 1,300 psychiatric facilities around the country in terms of how much it relied on seclusion in the year before Hass died.
The lawsuit filed Monday accuses the state hospital of negligence, physical abuse, and violating Hass’s rights under the 14th Amendment.
It seeks damages in excess of $300,000 on behalf of Hass and his sister, and requests court-ordered oversight of policies and care at the state hospital.
“Without substantial change, more patients will die, more patients will be subject to abusive and inconceivable inhuman treatment, and the Oregon State Hospital will believe it is beyond the law and medicine,” the suit says.
