Why A Nurse Was Charged For Hardel Sherrell’s Death In Jail

Del Shea Perry didn’t know her son, Hardel Sherrell, was dying. Sherrell showed clear signs of poor health with undiagnosed Guillain-Barré syndrome at Minnesota’s Beltrami County Jail in 2018. And now, for the first time in Minnesota history, a medical care provider has been charged in connection with an incarcerated person’s death.

Staff said Sherrell was “faking” paralysis and incontinence. He didn’t receive standard wellness checks. His heart rate was dangerously high as the autoimmune disease attacked his nervous system. He died under the watch of MEnD Correctional Care nursing director Michelle Skroch, the partner of MEnD's founder, nicknamed “Dr. Death.”

Skroch is now facing charges of manslaughter and felony criminal neglect. Her license was revoked in 2023. MEnD’s operations ceased after filing for bankruptcy. Health professionals are supposed to be “obligated to their patients.” But what happens when they don’t see those patients as human?

This is the throughline connecting incarcerated and non-incarcerated Black patients, from medical experimentation and reproductive violence to segregated hospitals.

What happens in prisons happens outside them, with anti-Blackness determining who is and isn’t "worthy" of safety and humanity. History demonstrates the impact of this on our communities. “No matter who gets criminally charged, it will never compare to the sentence I got,” says Perry. “[A] life sentence. My baby is gone.”