Mother, Boyfriend Blame Woman's Life-Threatening Staph Infection On Jail Stay

ST. PETERSBURG The day before Valentine's Day, Dorothy Palinchik, a 42-year-old down-on-her-luck waitress, was booked into the Pinellas County Jail on charges she had stolen a $9.20 Philly steak sandwich from a Publix supermarket.

Nine days later, she left in an ambulance.

Now, Palinchik is in an induced coma at Largo Medical Center, suffering from a combination of pneumonia and a type of staph infection that is resistant to antibiotics, family members said.

Dorothy Palinchik

Palinchik's family and boyfriend think she got sick at the jail and that the staff there is responsible for her condition.

"They didn't give her proper medical care," said her mother, whose name is also Dorothy Palinchik. "I just don't think they wanted to deal with it."

The Pinellas Sheriff's Office, which oversees the jail, has a detention investigative unit that has started looking into the matter, said Pinellas Sheriff's spokeswoman Marianne Pasha. Such probes are launched whenever someone leaves the jail in a deteriorating health condition, Pasha said.

Pinellas Sheriff Jim Coats said it was too early to tell whether his staff did anything inappropriate, but he defended the quality of health care at the jail and the conditions there in general. The budget for inmate health care is $21 million, with roughly $2 million for pharmaceuticals, he said.

"A lot of these inmates, they've had little or no health care maintenance in their lives," Coats said. "We don't know what ailments they may or may not have and a lot of time we have to rely on what they tell us, or don't tell us."

Palinchik is accused of ordering the sandwich at the Publix in downtown St. Petersburg at dinnertime, and of walking out without paying for it, according to an arrest affidavit. She was charged with petit theft, with bail set at $250.

Palinchik's live-in boyfriend, Michael Mullican, said he was out of town working as a truck driver in the Miami area when she was jailed. When he visited her at the jail's video visitation center Thursday, eight days after she was booked, she looked terrible, he said.

"She could hardly walk" when she sat down in front of a camera for the visit, he said. "She puts her head down and says, 'Michael, I've never been so sick in my life.'"

"I said, 'Baby, what's wrong?'" Mullican recalled. "She says she's been running a 101.5 temperature [for five days]." He said she told him the staff at the jail gave her one Sudafed and one Motrin. Then she cut the visit short because she wanted to lie down again, he said.

"The next time I saw her was Saturday afternoon on a ventilator at Largo Medical Center," Mullican said.

"She's not responsive to anything," said her mother. "I looked at her hands yesterday and they were black, hard and all blown-up and I've never seen anything like that.

"The nurses tell me it doesn't look good."

"When she went in there, she was healthy as can be," said Mullican. "They should be scanning people to see who's who and who's what instead of throwing people in a melting pot and see who catches what and who dies."

"If she's sick she whines," Mullican said, "so I know damn well she was asking for help and she didn't get it. Ridiculous. No compassion whatsoever."

Pasha, the sheriff's spokeswoman, said Palinchik was transferred from a regular wing at the jail to a medical wing on Feb. 21, the same day Mullican visited her, and the next evening she was transported by ambulance to Largo Medical Center.

Roger Sanderson, an epidemiologist with the Florida Department of Health, described Palinchik's staph affliction, technically called staph MRSA, as one that can be passed on through a simple handshake. A person may be carrying it for months or years in their noses and sinuses without knowing it -- until it is triggered by simply rubbing one's nose then touching a small cut, he said.

MRSA can cause heart valve infections and infections in the bones, Sanderson said. An infection in the lungs causes pneumonia.

"MRSA pneumonias are well known and they can have a fairly high fatality rate," Sanderson said. "Cases like this do happen. People with signs of pneumonia need to get to their physician right away.

"This is not something unique to jails," Sanderson said. "It can happen anywhere."

Reporter Stephen Thompson can be reached at (727) 451-2336 or spthompson@tampatrib.com.