SHREVEPORT – The parents of a 21-year-old Indiana man who died in the Vivian Police Department jail last summer have filed a lawsuit alleging their son was unlawfully held on a defective warrant and left unmonitored for hours before he was found hanging in his cell.
Angela Ricard and Jeremy Miers filed their complaint April 13 against the City of Vivian, Mayor Ronnie Festavan, Vivian Chief of Police Ryan Nelson, the Vivian Mayor’s Court, multiple unidentified Vivian police officers and jailers, the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Henry Whitehorn Sr. and several Caddo Correctional Center officials.
According to the complaint, Caiden Miers had been incarcerated since July 26, 2024. On August 15, 2025, the Department of Corrections issued a certificate of release and completion of sentence, and correctional center officials prepared a medical release/transfer form reflecting chronic mental-health issues and prescriptions including buspirone, hydroxyzine and sertraline, the suit states.
But instead of being freed, the complaint claims unknown officers transferred Miers from Caddo Correctional Center to the Vivian Police Department jail based on a September 13, 2024, bench warrant issued out of Vivian Mayor’s Court for contempt for failure to appear on a misdemeanor resisting-arrest charge tied to the same incident that led to his Caddo Parish case.
Miers’ parents allege the warrant was “procedurally defective” because it was issued while Miers already was in continuous custody and therefore legally incapable of willfully failing to appear, and because a mayor’s court is not a court of competent jurisdiction to issue such a detainer for more serious offenses.
The lawsuit contends Caddo and Vivian authorities knew or should have known that a failure-to-appear warrant cannot lawfully issue against someone already jailed and that they failed even to verify Miers’ custodial status before executing it. By accepting custody and continuing to hold him after his sentence was complete, the defendants allegedly subjected Miers to an unlawful seizure and double jeopardy in violation of the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and parallel provisions of the Louisiana Constitution.
The parents further allege that Caddo officials provided Vivian officers with documentation of their son’s significant mental-health history, including suicide-watch placements and psychiatric evaluations, along with multiple “bubble sheets” of prescribed medications.
Despite that information, the complaint says Vivian personnel allegedly placed him alone in a cell, allowed him to keep his personal sneakers with laces rather than issuing jail slippers or removing potential ligatures, and failed to conduct proper mental-health screening or heightened observation.
On August 15, Ricard spoke with her son by phone and understood he would be released from Caddo Correctional Center into her custody. She says he told her he was eager to return to Indiana, seek work, pursue his GED and meet the family’s new dog. After learning he had been taken instead to Vivian, Ricard began driving south from Indiana and called the Vivian PD on the evening of August 15 and again the morning of August 16 when she was told he would be released at 7 p.m. Sunday, August 17, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit alleges that sometime on August 16, Miers was left alone in his cell, with only one other detainee housed across the hall in a twin cell block, and that no Vivian officer or civilian “meaningfully monitored” him in accordance with jail standards or his documented mental health needs.
A security camera was installed in the jail, but the family does not know whether it was operational, and they claim it should have been.
Miers was discovered in an “incomplete hanging posture,” with a shoelace from one of his sneakers wrapped around his neck, and was pronounced dead at 7:24 p.m. on August 16, 2025, the complaint states, citing the Caddo Parish Coroner’s report. That report lists the cause of death as asphyxia due to incomplete hanging and notes no evidence of resuscitation attempts, according to the filing.
Ricard says she called the Vivian jail at about 9:17 p.m. that night seeking to speak to her son but was met with evasive responses, and only later, at 11:47 p.m., did a representative from the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office inform her that he had been found hanged around 7:15 p.m.
By the time she arrived at the Vivian jail shortly after midnight, she was not allowed to see his body and was told he had last been checked at around noon that day, with no apparent checks between then and his discovery, the complaint says.
The suit says Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office is serving as the investigative agency into Miers’ unattended, in-custody death, and that the probe remains open. Ricard alleges she has been told a grand jury is being or will be convened in connection with the case, but that both CPSO and VPD have largely refused to release information while the investigation is pending, despite preservation letters from the family and their attorneys.
The complaint accuses Festavan, Nelson and Whitehorn of failing to properly train and supervise officers on basic jail standards, warrant verification, transfer procedures, mental-health protocols and suicide prevention, amounting to deliberate indifference and cruel and unusual punishment. The parents also allege unnamed civilian workers conspired with or acted in concert with law-enforcement defendants to harm their son or allow him to be harmed.
The plaintiffs are being represented by Mark A. Perkins and Terri Kay Oliver of Perkins & Associates in Shreveport.
U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana case number 5:26-cv-01163
