Report: Woman Spent Six Days Dying and No One Moved to Stop It

In a front-page story Sunday, The Oregonian details the death of Madaline Pitkin over the six days she was a prisoner in The Washington County Jail.

Using pages of reports that were leaked when the county refused to release them, the paper details how Pitkin, a heroin addict, pleaded for help, how jail deputies tried to get her help, and how those requests went unheeded.

"Pitkin detailed her intensifying weakness on jail forms and twice wrote that she felt near death," reporter Rebecca Woolington writes.

"Yet the medical staff repeatedly ranked her withdrawal symptoms as mild. Even when nurses did become concerned about Pitkin in the later stages of her jail stay, they failed to track her low blood pressure."

Woolington details how the reports - which were leaked to her - "show serious breakdowns in the way" Pitkin were treated and how her written pleas for help were ignored.