Lexington jail left inmate suffering from AIDS out in the cold, lawsuit says
The Lexington County Sheriff’s Department dropped a man suffering from diarrhea and trouble walking into a cold January night after nearly two months of delaying his medical care, according to a lawsuit filed against the department.
When Cody Smith was arrested and booked into the Lexington County Detention Center in November 2023, a two-month long fight to receive adequate care from the third-party contractor in charge of the detention center’s medical services ensued, Smith claims in a lawsuit filed in Lexington on July 25. The lawsuit isn’t the first time the company, Wellpath Holdings, Inc., has been accused of routinely denying or delaying medical care.
Smith was booked into the detention center, run by the county sheriff’s department, on November 17, 2023. He was released two months later on Jan. 17 while experiencing “severe diarrhea, difficulty walking and altered mental status,” his lawsuit claims.
He’d spent the better part of two months requesting medical care after finding blood in his stool. The lawsuit indicates that Smith had refused to attend a medical appointment in December. Smith’s attorney, Elizabeth Dalzell, told The State that by the time of Smith’s scheduled medical appointment in December, 13 days after he’d initially complained of blood in his stool, “he couldn’t even really function and wasn’t really in his right mind.”
“His roommate, who was with him the whole time, said he couldn’t even walk so he’d go to try to take a shower and he’d sit in the shower for hours on end. He couldn’t get out ... Nobody was paying attention. Nobody was helping him.”
Smith had “a known history of I.V. drug [use] and multiple sexual partners,” but wasn’t tested for HIV during his medical screening, the lawsuit says. If he had been tested, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend, Dalzell contends the disease could’ve been caught earlier, helping to avoid long-term health effects.
He was released in the middle of the night on Jan. 17 with no coat, and he was later found by a correctional officer on the ground outside of the detention center, unable to walk, the lawsuit says, and was eventually picked up by his father who took him to get medical treatment. Two days later, Smith tested positive for AIDS and was later diagnosed with HIV encephalitis, which can cause cognitive issues like memory loss and motor dysfunction.
A spokesperson for the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department declined to comment on the lawsuit when reached by The State.
The county is in its third year of a three-year contract with Wellpath LLC, the largest commercial provider of health care in jails and prisons across 37 states, to provide medical services to inmates at a price tag of around $5 million annually.
The Nashville-based company filed for bankruptcy in December of last year in an attempt to shed dozens of lawsuits related to medical malpractice within the prisons and jails it serves. In April, it announced a $15.5 million settlement for its creditors and those who’d filed lawsuits against it. A 2019 CNN investigation found that Correct Care Solutions, which was renamed Wellpath after being acquired by a private equity firm, had been accused in lawsuits of contributing to more than 70 jail deaths.
This story was originally published July 29, 2025 at 1:34 PM.
