Cellmate Describes Pain of Detainee Who Died

[babylonsister]

Cellmate Describes Pain of Detainee Who Died

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: August 19, 2008


A lawsuit filed in federal court a year ago by a Dominican detainee makes complaints about health care at a detention center in Rhode Island that are similar to accounts of how the center treated a Chinese New Yorker who died Aug. 6 in immigration custody. That inmate was suffering from a fractured spine and extensive cancer that had gone undiagnosed until five days before his death.

snip//

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Mr. De Los Santos, 37, said that Mr. Ng was briefly his cellmate early last month and that his extreme back pain and weakness were apparent.

“He was crying all night,” Mr. De Los Santos said from his home in Bridgeport, Conn., where he returned after he was released on bond on Friday. He faces deportation as a convicted drug dealer. “I got bottom bunk, he got the upper bunk, and when he’s going to bed, it’s terrible. And I got problems, too, in my back, but him, when I see him, I can’t sleep.”

Mr. Ng was eventually assigned to a lower bunk in another cell, but by late last month he could barely walk, Mr. De Los Santos said. “When you line up to take medicine, he would grab a chair, because he couldn’t stand. And they would tell him he had to let the chair go, he had to stand, but he couldn’t.”

He said that when Mr. Ng was bedridden, he saw a nurse go to check him in his cell. “She came out laughing and saying he was faking,” Mr. De Los Santos said.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/nyregion/20detain.html?em

[Trillo]

1. 'That's why they call it prison'.

It's got to be a place where people don't want to go, and who needlessly suffer while there. It's got to be much more than just a 'place of confinement' where individuals' "freedom" is severely curtailed.

/sarcasm

So much for the constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment".

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. I have a hunch there'd be more of an outcry about this if the victim had been a puppy.

But, what the hell, who gives a shit about an "illegal alien"?

I'm appalled that the people responsible for this were (a) employed in the first place (b) allowed to walk the streets without a leash and muzzle.

[madrchsod]

3. it is interesting that the nyt is running this story again

maybe someone decided it`s safe now to publish actual news about this government....