Over the last two months, as a deadly COVID-19 outbreak first crept, then raced, through the federal prison complex in Lompoc, the Santa Barbara Independent has documented multiple instances where prison officials neglected to give medical care to critically ill inmates, which likely contributed to their hospitalizations and deaths.
The first involved a man named Efrem Stutson, who was released April 1 after serving 27 years of an overturned life sentence. During his final days at the complex ― the site of 1,107 coronavirus infections, more than any other federal prison in the nation ― Stutson grew weak and came down with a bad cough. He was barely able to talk. Prison officials, nevertheless, put him on a Greyhound bus to his hometown of San Bernardino. When his family met him at the station, they said he couldn’t hold his head up. Stutson, 60, died four days later.
The second case took place in late April, when Maria Del Carmen Torres Figueroa, who lives in Florida, received a letter from her son, 24-year-old Yonnedil Torres. He said he was extremely sick but his repeated requests for a doctor were being ignored. The next letter to Figueroa came from Torres’s cellmate, who said his condition had become so dire that the other inmates on their block all started banging on their doors until attention arrived. Staff found Torres in acute respiratory shock. He was put into a medically induced coma, and while he’s since woken up, he suffered permanent lung damage that paralyzed his left arm and injured his heart.