Efrem Stutson was excited to go home. He had served 27 years of a life sentence for selling cocaine in northern Alabama, but he was getting out early under a new federal prison reform aimed at low-level drug offenders. Stutson, 60, talked to his sister Lawanda Rangal a week before his April 1 release. “He sounded happy,” she said. “He sounded relieved.”
But as the date approached, Rangal said, Stutson got sick. Very sick. “He could barely talk,” she said. Stutson had spent the last six months of his sentence working in the kitchen at United States Penitentiary Lompoc (USP Lompoc), where a severe COVID-19 outbreak is now spreading unchecked among inmates and staff.
Despite Stutson’s condition, which included a bad cough, Rangal claimed, USP Lompoc sent him packing on a Greyhound bus bound for San Bernardino. Their sister, Laura Harris-Gidd, met him there. “He was so out of it,” Harris-Gidd said. “He could hardly hold his head up.” Stutson refused to go to the hospital that night, but the next morning his family insisted. Paramedics wearing protective equipment rushed him to Kaiser Permanente medical center in Fontana. Doctors diagnosed him with COVID-19 and put him in quarantine. No visitors were allowed. Four days later, Stutson died.