It’s hard to overstate the travesty that occurred in March when a North Carolina inmate with mental illness died of thirst. Only worse is the fact that, after an investigation, the state hasn’t released its findings and many questions remain unanswered. This incident, coming after others involving mentally ill inmates, underscores the fact the state prison system must do better.
Michael Anthony Kerr, 54, was found unresponsive after being driven about three hours, from Alexander Correctional Institution in Taylorsville to a mental hospital at Central Prison in Raleigh, on March 12, The Associated Press reported. North Carolina Depart-ment of Public Safety Secretary Frank L. Perry pledged "an aggressive, yet thorough in-ternal investigation" into Kerr's death. Subsequently, the department fired a captain and four nurses at Alexander, and a nurse and a staff psychologist there resigned. Yet the department has not made public any results of its investigation, the AP reported.
Kerr had a long record. It included several convictions for larceny. In 2011, he was sen-tenced to serve 31 years as a habitual felon after being charged with illegally possessing and discharging a firearm. His sister told the AP that she had been trying to get prison officials to help her brother, who had been struggling with mental illness after two of his sons were fatally shot in separate incidents.
Kerr was known to suffer from schizoaffective disorder - for which he was not receiving any treatment at the time of his death, a state pathologist, Dr. Susan E. Venuti, concluded. She was allowed to read – but not copy – an internal report before writing an autopsy report for the North Carolina Medical Examiner's Office that was released Thurs-day.
Before being driven to the hospital, Kerr was being held in "disciplinary segregation," or solitary confinement. According to Venuti, the internal report left unanswered key details about the circumstances leading to Kerr's death, including when he last had access to food and water.
Because of the lack of information, Venuti wrote that she was unable to make a determination about whether Kerr's death should be classified as natural, accidental or homicide, and whether his mental health and/or external factors played a role in the dehydration.
We don’t know all the details, but it seems clear that a mentally ill prison inmate was left unattended and untreated and, as a result, died on the way to the hospital. This is terrible.
And it’s not an isolated incident.
Dating back to at least 1997, the state prison system has several troubling incidents involving mentally ill inmates, the AP noted.
Regarding the latest incident, the department of public safety needs to make its findings known to the public, no matter how damning they are. And the system needs to do a better job in general of treating mentally ill inmates.
