Ashley Dolcy heard panic in her husband’s voice. On most evenings, they would talk after she returned home from her job as an assistant principal at a school in the Bronx. Jason “Poppy” Phillips would call on a prison-issued tablet from his cell at Greene Correctional Facility near Albany, New York. On Dec. 14, 2023, he told her that, since lunch, he’d increasingly had trouble breathing and swallowing. Alarmed that Phillips was struggling to breathe while locked in his cell, Dolcy called the main number at the prison to seek help. No one picked up.
Phillips, it would turn out, had an infected epiglottis, theflap of cartilage in a person’s throat that directs air to thelungs and food and liquid to the stomach. The infection is rare — about 3 out of every 100,000 adults contract it annually — but treatable: 99% of patients recover. But theinfection becomes a medical emergency when, left untreated, the epiglottis swells and chokes a person to death.
In New York Prisons, Lack of Medical Care Led to Preventable Deaths
Eventually, a cousin reached prison officials and told them Phillips needed medical care. As Phillips’ breathing became more labored, his cellmate called for help, at one point screaming for help 40 times over 30 minutes. When nurses came to his cell a second time, Phillips was facedown on thefloor. “He’s on the ground for bed,” a nurse asserted, according to prison surveillance video obtained by TheMarshall Project. “He’s fine.” The nurses left without opening his cell.
About six hours after his cousin’s call for help, Phillips was found in his cell with no pulse, and efforts to revive him failed.
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Donate to The Marshall Project.In the past decade, more than 30 people who were experiencing a health crisis in New York prisons died of preventable or treatable conditions, an investigation by The Marshall Project has found. A few men died from treatable infections. Several others succumbed to obstructed bowels. A prisoner with asthma died after he was denied access to an inhaler just feet away.
Several doctors and prison medical experts — after reviewing details of the case — told The Marshall Project that had Phillips been taken to an emergency room earlier in the evening, he likely would have survived.Read the Full Story
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