Medical Neglect Killing Prisoners at CCA-Run Texas Prison?

by Matthew Clarke

Family members and former Dawson State Jail prisoners are alleging medical neglect led to the recent deaths of two prisoners at the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) run prison in Dallas, Texas.

The 10-story high rise Jesse R. Dawson State Jail was built near the Trinity River in downtown Dallas in 1997. CCA was to run the medium-security, co-gender facility, which was designed to house nonviolent prisoners with short sentences close to their homes. But many Dawson prisoners never saw the end of their sentences. Instead, they died at the facility which, with five prisoner deaths in 2008 alone, had the greatest number of prisoner deaths of any state facility in Texas.

Pam Weatherby, 45, was serving a one-year sentence for drug possession when she died at Dawson on July 14, 2012. Anne Roderick, who was serving a sentence at Dawson at the time and was housed in the same dormitory as her, said Weatherby was very ill, but prison staff refused to move her from her cell to the prison infirmary for medical treatment. She and the other prisoners on the dorm desperately tried to keep Weatherby alive.

"I knew she was going to die," Roderick said. "I knew if we didn't get her out of there, she was going to die."

A news report of the death on the Dallas CBS television affiliate Channel 11 caught Keith Grady's attention.

"I wondered that night if I had done more myself (would) that girl still be alive," said Grady.

Grady's misplaced feelings of guilt about Weatherby's death resulted from the fact that, two years earlier, his sister died at Dawson under similar circumstances of alleged fatal medical neglect. Ashleigh Shae Parks, 30, died a mere six weeks before she was scheduled to be released, having completed her 18-month drug possession sentence.

"My little sister lived long enough for my mother to make it to her bedside," Grady remembered, noting that he didn't even know she was ill until the family received a phone call that she had been moved from Dawson to a hospital. "As soon as my mother came in, she died."

According to the family's physician, Parks died of pneumonia. The family believes that she would have survived had she been given antibiotics sooner. They blame the staff at Dawson for not having recognized how ill Parks was sooner. They filed a lawsuit, but later dropped it.

"The medical personnel in ICU told me there was basically nothing they could do for her," Grady said. "And these are the people at the hospital [who] told us that the prison killed my sister."

Grady and other members of the family believe that inadequate medical treatment killed Parks and Weatherby. They aren't alone.

Weatherby's parents were concerned about her diabetes from the moment she was incarcerated. According to her mother, Nelda Alfano, Weatherby was a brittle diabetic who was extremely dependent upon insulin and had wild swings in blood sugar. When they didn't hear from her for weeks, they became concerned. Their concern grew to outright alarm when they finally received a letter from her telling them that Weatherby had been in and out of the hospital. The alarm became panic when they got another letter from prisoners on Weatherby's dorm telling them that her medical condition was life-threatening and she wasn't receiving proper medical treatment. They called Dawson 28 times "trying to get someone to listen," but no one would.

The problem was that medical personnel at Dawson had taken Weatherby off of the insulin injections she had been using since she was 18 years old and placed her on oral diabetes treatment with Glyburide instead. According to a lawsuit filed by her family, this caused three consecutive days of diabetic coma.

Jail officials mistook the coma for a suicide attempt and sent Weatherby to a mental health unit in Gatesville where she was given insulin injections and stabilized. After a few days in Gatesville, she was returned to Dawson, put back on oral diabetic treatment and lapsed into a coma again.

When guards discovered the unresponsive Weatherby, they sent her to Parkland Hospital. There she was given insulin shots, stabilized and returned to Dawson.

The third time the cycle repeated itself was fatal to Weatherby who died after "yet another diabetic crisis" according to the lawsuit. That crisis actually began at 10:30 p.m. the previous night when Weatherby began to feel ill and was taken to the jail's medical unit. Unfortunately, the medical staff had gone home for the night and, although jail policy states that after hours a prisoner can speak to a nurse by phone or video monitor, no one placed the call for Weatherby. She was declared dead at the hospital before 7:00 a.m. on July 14, 2012. Shortly thereafter, Weatherby's mother received her first communication from the jail about her daughter's medical condition—a chaplain called to tell her Weatherby had died.

Lorraine Brown, a diabetic who served time at Dawson for writing a hot check, said she never received her insulin at set times and the jail did not provide appropriate food or exercise for diabetics. She became so ill while at Dawson that she thought she would die, yet no one in the medical department would assist her. She also witnessed medical staff ignoring the medical distress of other prisoners, including one who had a stroke.

Fourteen former prisoners and several guards have contacted the CBS affiliate since it began running a series of stories on medical neglect at Dawson. Abby, who doesn't want her last name used, is a former Dawson prisoner who said she was denied medical treatment and thrown into an isolation cell when she had a 104° fever. Danna Parker, another former Dawson prisoner who was serving time for DWI, said she was denied medical treatment and placed in segregation for ten days when she became seriously ill.

The chief of security at Dawson conducted an investigation into Weatherby's death and concluded that supervisors had failed to follow proper procedure by failing to call for medical assistance for Weatherby. He recommended that a shift supervisor be fired. But, in the incident report CCA was required to filed with the State of Texas, the warden stated that "staff acted in accordance with TDCJ procedure," concluding that "no training needs have been identified."

Shortly before Weatherby's death, in June 2012, a premature baby was delivered at Dawson without any medically-trained personnel in attendance. Autumn Miller suspected she was pregnant, having had three previous deliveries. She requested a pregnancy test, but the request was denied. Then she began bleeding and experiencing painful cramps.

Miller was transported to the jail's medical unit, but was not seen by a doctor despite the fact that one was on the video screen when she arrived.

“The lady that was down in the medical unit in charge told the doctor they did not need him for this patient and they just turned this off ... She was crying, complaining that she was feeling pressure, pain, bleeding and something was bad wrong. They needed to do something," said Miller's grandmother, Jean Burr. "One of the guards in there made the comment that, 'Oh, it is probably the food, you probably need to go poo.' They gave her a menstrual pad, locked her in a holding cell and closed the door."

In this isolated cell, Miller sat on the toilet trying to relieve the pressure. But instead of "going poo," she delivered a 26-week premature baby into the toilet. She began screaming and both mother and baby were transferred to the hospital. But the lack of prenatal medical attention made the doctor's task nearly impossible to perform and Gracie Miller died on her fourth day of life.

Instead of receiving medical care upon her return to Dawson, Miller was tossed into solitary confinement for two days. She has hired an attorney, but the attorney is refusing to allow Miller to be interviewed while she remains incarcerated at Dawson.

Shebaa Green, 50, didn't make it home alive from Dawson. She, like Parks, died of complications from pneumonia which was allegedly inadequately treated at Dawson. Green had been complaining of diarrhea and trouble breathing for three days, but was left jail's medical unit, unseen for at least seven hours. Later, she was transported to Parkland Hospital where she died the next day.

State Rep. Jerry Madden (R-Plano), who chairs the House Criminal Justice Committee which oversees state jails, said he will investigate Weatherby's death, but it is likely to be the typical legislative cover-up. A better suggestion has come from state Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston), who proposed that Dawson be closed since the Texas prison population had decreased by about 4,000 prisoners in recent years and the jail is located on valuable real estate with great development potential. Whitmire also wants to close the CCA-run Mineral Wells Pre-parole Transfer Facility. According the Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm, Dawson has blocked development of "the biggest development project in our city" for years "so we've got to do something."

The Dawson State Jail closed in August 2013. [See: PLN, July 2013, p.38; June 2013, p.1].

Sources: dfw.cbslocal.com, Dallas Morning News, www.grassrootsleadership.org, Dallas Observer.

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