Reported / Citable
Background
The Estate of Derrick Ellison brought suit against a collection of Bexar County defendants arising from events at the Bexar County Jail. Defendants included Bexar County itself, Sheriff Javier Salazar, Corporal Carlos Marroquin and Sergeant Felipe Cadena of the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, Bexar County Hospital (doing business as University Health Systems), and various Doe defendants. The case was filed in 2024 and proceeded through at least seven rounds of amended pleadings before reaching the motion-to-dismiss stage.
The complaint alleged, among other things, that Mr. Ellison — who apparently suffered from serious mental illness — was denied antipsychotic medications and therapy sessions while detained at the jail. The claims spanned constitutional tort theories against the individual officers and the county, as well as statutory disability-discrimination claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act against the county.
All defendants moved to dismiss under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) or 12(c). The motions were referred to a United States Magistrate Judge, who issued a Report and Recommendation on May 18, 2026. No party filed objections within the fourteen-day window prescribed by 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1).
The Court’s Holding
Because no objections were filed, District Judge Fred Biery reviewed the Magistrate Judge’s Report and Recommendation for clear error and found none. He accepted the R&R in full pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1). The court granted the Hospital’s motion in its entirety, granted the Officer Defendants’ motion in its entirety, and granted the County’s motion in part and denied it in part.
All claims against Bexar County Hospital, Sheriff Salazar, the named officer defendants (Marroquin, Cadena, and Lt. Villarreal), and the Doe defendants were dismissed with prejudice. The overwhelming majority of claims against Bexar County were likewise dismissed with prejudice. The sole surviving claims are the plaintiff’s ADA and Rehabilitation Act discrimination claims against the County, predicated specifically on the County’s alleged failure to furnish Mr. Ellison with antipsychotic medications and therapy sessions.
Key Takeaways
- All individual-capacity claims against jail officers and the sheriff were dismissed with prejudice, leaving no surviving § 1983 or analogous claims against those defendants.
- The hospital escaped liability entirely at the pleading stage, with all claims against it dismissed with prejudice.
- The ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims against the county survive — the court’s order signals that alleged denial of prescribed psychiatric medications and therapy to a mentally ill detainee can state a viable disability-discrimination claim.
- The failure to object to a magistrate judge’s R&R waives de novo review; here, that procedural posture allowed the court to resolve the entire motion-to-dismiss docket in a brief order.
Why It Matters
The survival of the ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims is the consequential piece of this ruling for practitioners. Courts have increasingly recognized that jails and prisons can face disability-discrimination liability when they categorically deny necessary psychiatric medications or mental health treatment to detainees with serious mental illness. This order keeps that theory in play against Bexar County and may inform how other plaintiffs in the Fifth Circuit plead similar claims — focusing on the denial of specific, prescribed treatment as the discriminatory act rather than relying solely on constitutional tort theories.
The wholesale dismissal of the individual officers, the sheriff, and the hospital also illustrates the significant pleading burden plaintiffs face in multi-defendant jail-death or jail-injury cases. With the case now narrowed to a single ADA/RA theory against the county, the litigation will turn on whether Ellison’s disability was a basis for the county’s failure to act and whether the county’s conduct constitutes discrimination under the statutes — questions likely to be contested at summary judgment.