The son of a woman who died at the Cumberland County Jail has filed a federal lawsuit, alleging staff “deliberately ignored” his mother while she was dying and provided inadequate medical care.
Bridgett Toulan had been at the jail for less than two days in April 2024, after an officer arrested her for drug possession, according to the civil complaint her son, Kevin Toulan, filed last month in U.S. District Court in Portland.
A medical examiner found that Bridgett Toulan died of “acute intoxication,” according to the lawsuit. Jail staff who booked her said she needed to be monitored for opioid withdrawal, after testing positive for several substances, according to a copy of the internal affairs investigation following her death.
Citing the jail’s policy, Kevin Toulan’s lawyer wrote in the lawsuit that Bridgett Toulan should have been held in a detox cell, where staff would check on her every 15 minutes. The lawsuit alleges that didn’t happen.
Just before 6 a.m. the next morning, an officer found her unresponsive.
Toulan’s son is suing Cumberland County, the sheriff’s office and Armor Correctional Health Services, which provides health care at the jail.
Bridgett Toulan is among several people who have died in Maine jails in recent years.
The Cumberland County Jail reported the death of a Washington County man less than a month before Bridgett Toulan died. In 2022, a father arrested on drug possession charges died in custody, according to a lawsuit filed by his family, after pleading with jail staff for suboxone. The lawsuit is still pending in federal court.
Last year, a Lewiston mother sued the Androscoggin County Jail and its health care provider over the death of her 25-year-old son, who died from pneumonia while in custody in 2023. That case is also still pending in federal court.
In Kevin Toulan’s lawsuit, he is also suing staff from the Office of the Maine Attorney General and the state’s department of corrections, alleging they have withheld investigative findings.
A spokesperson for the attorney general declined to comment. Jill O’Brien, director of government affairs for the DOC, did not respond to requests to discuss the lawsuit. The sheriff’s office said it was unable to comment on pending litigation and a spokesperson for Armor did not respond to requests.
Lawyers have about a month to respond to the lawsuit in court.
“I just want to get the truth for my mom,” Kevin Toulan told the Press Herald in a recent interview. “I believe it matters that the truth is known and no one else has to go through what her and my family went through.”
‘She cared about everybody’
Bridgett Toulan’s family has previously said she had struggled with substance use over the years.
“She cared about everybody,” said Kevin Toulan, who lives in Florida. “She was loving and she had a great heart.”
After Bridgett Toulan’s death, her mother, Gemma Toulan, said her daughter had moved to Maine with a boyfriend three years earlier. Gemma Toulan, who was living in Maryland in 2024, said her daughter had been planning to visit her around the time she died.
“I know she wasn’t in the best health and she’s had addiction problems for years, but she was trying so hard to be good,” Gemma Toulan told the Press Herald that year. “It was a shock.”
Bridgett Toulan was arrested in April 2024 after police found her with drugs, which they suspected was in violation of her release conditions from an earlier arrest that January, when an Auburn officer reported he found her in a friend’s car where police also found opioids and Adderall pills, according to court records.
That Auburn officer wrote that Bridgett Toulan repeatedly told him she was nervous and was about to start drug court later that week.
“I told her I was not here to take her to jail (and) that I wanted to get her help if she had a problem,” he wrote in a police report. “Toulan said she knew she had a problem.”
At the jail
At the Cumberland County Jail, after her arrest, Bridgett Toulan told an intake nurse she had “just got out of the hospital for liver disease,” according to her son’s lawsuit.
Bridgett Toulan should have been placed in special detox housing, her son’s attorney Joseph Guzzardo argued in the lawsuit, citing the jail’s policy for residents in withdrawal and the nurse’s assessment. The lawsuit alleges she was placed in “general population” with little oversight.
“Bridgett died because corrections officers and privately contracted medical staff deliberately ignored her for over 9 hours, leaving her to suffer and die in her cell,” the complaint states.
The complaint alleges “9 hours passed before anyone noticed Bridgett wasn’t breathing” and that surveillance video shows “officers nonchalantly walking by her cell without inspection throughout the night, completely oblivious to her dead body.”
According to the complaint, none of that information was provided to Kevin Toulan or his siblings.
Public records requests
Kevin Toulan tried requesting records in February 2025 from the Portland Police Department, which had announced they were helping investigate his mother’s death, according to the lawsuit.
He flew to Maine with his birth certificate after Portland police said they needed proof of his relationship to Bridgett Toulan in order to file his request, Guzzardo wrote in the lawsuit.
Guzzardo wrote in the complaint that his client received some records a month and a half later, “much of the report redacted,” and is still waiting to receive a second collection of documents.
Portland police spokesperson Brad Nadeau said the agency declined to comment. The police department is not named in the lawsuit.
Guzzardo described his and his client’s difficulties to obtain more records from the agencies that Kevin Toulan is now suing.
The complaint alleges the department of corrections withheld records after learning the agency was being sued and that the attorney general’s office withheld records, deferring to the DOC, after receiving Guzzardo’s request.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Emily Allen can be reached at eallen@pressherald.com.