HJNO Jul/Aug 2020

PRISON HEALTH to the prison the following morning. “Every number that I called, a different person told me different things.”Eventually, Rogers said, she spoke to a senior guard of- ficer, Robert Wright, who told her he did not have the virus. “He said, ‘I can assure you of that.’” Williams told relatives he was isolated in a cell behind heavy metal doors. Later, after he was moved, a nurse said he was being given oxygen, fluids and antibiotics but was still having trouble breathing. Over the next few days, although the fam- ily called the prison repeatedly, it got little information. One nurse said he was getting better. But the next day, May 9, a doctor called from Our Lady of the Lake to say that “he wasn’t going to make it.” By the time they arrived, Williams was brain dead. “He was locked up for 40 years,” Rogers said. “He lived in total hell, and even at the end of his time, they treated himunfairly. Not everyone going to prison is a criminal. And even if they are, if anyone does wrong, it don’t give you the right to mistreat. They still need to be treated when they are sick.” n suffered a stroke in 2019 that left him walk- ing with a cane. Starting in early April, she calledAngola several times to ask that he be isolated from sick inmates if possible. Correc- tions officials, she recalled, said “they were taking all these precautions.” Billeaud was Williams’ third defense at- torney since he was sent to prison 45 years earlier, but the first to push his innocence claim. Among the facts she focused on were that another convicted armed robber had confessed to the murder, and that the state’s chief witness had changed his account re- peatedly. The lead detective in the original investigation also provided Billeaud with an affidavit saying he believesWilliams was wrongly convicted. In late April, Williams told one of his sis- ters, Terry Rogers, that several men in his dormitory were sick and someone in an adja- cent dormitory had died. “This stuff is getting close,”he said. He was likely infected already. They spoke on the phone every Sunday night, and on May 3, Williams sounded strange. The next night, another inmate called her to say that Williams was sick with a fever and chills. She began making a flurry of calls has tested about one-fourth of the roughly 115,000 inmates in its state prisons, finding 3,730 COVID-19 cases. But it has recorded only 19 prisoner deaths. If the true spread of the disease inside Angola has been as wide as many inmates suspect, the prison may have been fortunate to escape with 12 confirmed deaths so far — all but three of the total for Louisiana’s state prisons. “Louisiana was a state that was hit really hard,”said Morrison, the corrections depart- ment’s former medical chief. “Just looking at the numbers should reflect that we were re- ally lucky or we were doing something right.” But to the inmates who have been building the coffins and laying them in the ground at the prison graveyard, it has been an espe- cially busy time. “These last fewweeks we’ve been using a backhoe,” one inmate said. Howmany deaths might have been avoid- ed by wider testing or more attentive care is impossible to know. But relatives of Michael Williams said they could not help but wonder. Williams’ attorney, Allyson Billeaud, said she knew her client was particularly vul- nerable. In addition to his diabetes, he had “Inmates who were obviously sick with the coronavirus were denied even cursory medical examinations, mostly because they did not register sufficiently high fevers. Men passed outandweretoldtheyweredehydrated.Others, who complained of bad coughs, aches, fatigue and stomach pains were treated with Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol and Tums.” –Angola Prisoners 24 JUL / AUG 2020  I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS