Criminal Justice
C.J. Ciaramella | 11.19.2024 7:00 AM
On June 13, 2019, Mandy Turner received the call every family member of someone in prison dreads. Her little brother, Frederick Turner, had been found dead in his cell in a federal high-security lockup in Colorado. He was a first-time offender and terrified of the violent, gang-ridden prison he'd been sent to.
But it's what Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials told her next that still haunts her: nothing.
Her little brother's case manager said the prison would have more information the next day, but for the following five days, Turner and her sister frantically called the prison, both to find out what happened and to prevent his body from being cremated, only to be ignored. She says she eventually learned their calls were being screened.
"That is the most brutal phone call you can get in your life," Turner says. "And then nobody can tell you anything. For the prison to completely cut off communication with us when we called—they actually said, if they're asking about Frederick Turner's case, do not talk—the thing that it made us feel is what the hell are they hiding? How can we find peace?"
When Turner's family finally received his death certificate several weeks later, they were flabbergasted. It listed his cause of death as complications from an appendix removal. Turner never had his appendix removed, inside or outside of prison. The BOP would later reclassify Turner's death as a suicide, but doubts and questions nag his sister to this day.
What Mandy Turner experienced is not unusual. Interviews with the families of people who die in federal prison show a remarkably consistent cruelty by BOP officials toward them during the worst moments of their lives.
Families describe delays in being notified that their incarcerated loved one had been hospitalized, or even died; having their phone calls ignored; not being allowed to see their loved one in their final moments; delays in being sent the body and death certificate; being given inaccurate or incomplete information about the manner of death; or waiting months and years for the Bureau to fulfill their public records requests for more information about how their loved one died.
"Generally when it comes to information about the wellbeing of people in the care and custody of the Bureau of Prisons, the Bureau of Prisons' first response is always to provide as little information as possible," says attorney Alison Guernsey, director of the Iowa College of Law's Federal Criminal Defense Clinic.
NPR reported in January that the BOP was misclassifying deaths as "natural," which prevents further investigation and leaves families in the dark about what really happened.
"An inmate in Arkansas complained of stomach pain for a year and a half before his death," NPR reported. "His family was not provided with any more details. Another inmate in Missouri died of respiratory failure, and his death was pronounced natural. But according to medical examiner records obtained by NPR, his death was later treated as a homicide. His family found out about this information for the first time from NPR."
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