Cascade County has reached a settlement in a wrongful death case with the estate of a woman who died in the Cascade County Detention Center.
The terms of the settlement include a $200,000 payment to the estate of Aleesha Mae Kempa, who died by suicide in 2022. The county admits no liability as part of the agreement.
Kempa was booked into the jail on Aug. 24, 2022, for alleged felony theft. Court documents said she was awaiting transfer to the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs for mental health care. She died on Sept. 3, 2022. Kempa was 35.
Kempa’s estate first filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Cascade County District Court, but it was moved to U.S. District Court in 2024. The estate alleged that detention officers should have recognized that Kempa was a suicide risk and performed more regular checks. The lawsuit named Sheriff Jesse Slaughter, Cascade County and multiple detention officers as defendants.
Neither Slaughter nor the attorney for Kempa’s estate returned requests for comment.
The settlement comes a year after another wrongful death lawsuit. That case, concerning the suicide of Michael Lee Alexander, Jr., resulted in a $550,000 settlement.
In July, the Cascade County Detention Center was in the spotlight again as three inmates died within a span of two weeks — two suicides and one drug overdose, according to the sheriff.
Slaughter has gone on social media to explain what he views as a balancing act to curb overcrowding and produce revenue to fund the 372-bed facility that regularly houses more inmates than that. He has contended that the jail is not equipped to monitor people with serious mental health issues.
“We literally have become Warm Springs for the state of Montana,” Slaughter told Montana Free Press in September. “The mentally ill are suffering in our community.”
Following Kempa’s death in 2022, Slaughter told KRTV that a pre-trial diversion program could have prevented the jail suicide. That program launched this fall, and it keeps certain people who are charged with a crime but awaiting court hearings out of jail with community monitoring services.
Kempa was born in Great Falls and was a daredevil who loved sports and “anything that moved fast,” according to her obituary. She was the mother of two children.
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