commentary by Patrick H. Moore
I suppose every one of us has his or her own personal catastrophe just lying in wait to spring like a big cat when we are most vulnerable. This, in effect, is what happened to a 56-year-old mentally ill ex-Marine named Jerome Murdough who in mid-February was literally “cooked to death” in his jail cell at Rikers Island jail.
Murdough’s crime wasn’t much when you think about it. He had been looking for a warm place to sleep on a chilly night in early February when he spotted what he probably thought was the perfect place for a good long catnap – an enclosed stairwell on the roof of a Harlem public housing project.
However, either someone spotted him and turned him in to the authorities, or the authorities just happened along on their own and arrested him for trespassing. He was then taken to Rikers Island, the (in)famous 12,000 inmate city jail facility that sits on the island of the same name in the East River adjacent to the LaGuardia Airport runways.
Murdough, whose criminal record included 11 misdemeanor convictions for trespassing, drinking in public and minor drug charges, had been held at Rikers for approximately a week because he could not raise the prohibitive $2,500 bail when they put him in the oven and cooked him.
Jake Pearson of the Associated Press writes:
According to the city officials, Murdough was locked alone into his 6-by-10 cinderblock cell at about 10:30 p.m. on Feb. 14, a week after his arrest. Because he was in the mental-observation unit, he was supposed to be checked every 15 minutes as part of suicide watch, they said. But Murdough was not discovered until four hours later, at about 2:30 a.m. on Feb. 15. He was slumped over in his bed and already dead.
Great! Based on his mental state, Murdough was supposed to be checked every 15 minutes. Of course, that would take quite a bit of effort – effort the guards on duty were apparently not willing to expend.
When Murdough finally was discovered and his cell was opened, his internal body temperature and the temperature in the cell were at least 100 degrees. According to the officials, those temperatures could well have been higher before he was discovered because the cell had been closed tight for several hours.
Dr. Susi Vassallo, an associate professor at New York University School of Medicine and a national expert on heat-related deaths who monitors heat conditions at Rikers Island, explains that psychotropic medications (Murdough was apparently taking anti-psychotic and anti-seizure medications), can impair the body’s natural sweat function, thus making it retain more heat than it otherwise would. According to Vassalo, exposure to intense heat for a couple of hours by someone on such medications could be fatal.
“He basically baked to death,” said one of the officials, who prefers to remain anonymous.
The medical examiner’s office said an autopsy was inconclusive and that more tests were needed to determine Murdough’s exact cause of death. But according to officials, all of whom have detailed knowledge of the case, initial indications from the autopsy and the investigation point to extreme dehydration or heat stroke.
Advocates for mentally ill inmates in New York are not happy. They point out that Murdough’s death represents the failure of the city’s justice system in three key ways. 1) They arrested Murdough instead of finding him help; 2) They set bail at what for Murdough was obviously a prohibitive $2,500; and 3) They failed to supervise him properly in what is supposed to be a special observation unit for inmates with mental illnesses.
As might be expected, Department of Correction spokesman Robin Campbell stated that an internal investigation will look into all circumstances of Murdough’s death, “including issues of staff performance and the adequacy of procedures.”
To his credit, Campbell acknowledged that the temperature in Murdough’s cell was “unusually high” and assured the public that action has been taken to fix ongoing mechanical problems in order to ensure safe temperatures, “particularly in areas housing vulnerable inmates.”
Assuming steps are really being taken, this then falls into the category of “too little, too late.”
* * * * *
It’s not easy to be mentally ill and it’s even harder to be mentally ill and homeless. Murdough’s 75-year-old mother, Alma Murdough, did not even hear about her son’s death until she was contacted by the AP last week, nearly a month after he died.
“He was a very lovely, caring guy,” said his mother, adding that her son had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and that she had not seen him in about three years.
“He had beer problems. Drinking beer. That was his downfall. Other than that, he was a very nice guy. He’d give you the shirt off his back.”
Murdough was raised in Queens and joined the Marine Corps right out of high school. He is believed to have completed at least one tour of duty in Okinawa, Japan.
Reading between the lines, it appears that Murdough may have shown signs of mental disorder prior to joining the Marines. According to his family, after he returned home from the service, both his mental illness and his drinking problem became more pronounced. He would often disappear for months at a time, seeking respite at times in hospitals and shelters.
“When he wanted to venture off, we let him, we allowed him to come and go,” recalled his sister, Cheryl Warner, sadly. “He always came back.”
* * * * *
Rikers Island is the nation’s second-largest jail system with 12,000 inmates. A whopping 40 percent are mentally ill, and a third of them suffer from serious mental problems. Advocates have long argued that correction officers are not sufficiently trained to deal with mentally unstable inmates with complex needs.
Catherine Abate is a member of the New York City Board of Correction. Her agency is charged with overseeing the city’s jails. Ms. Abate suggested at a recent public meeting that Murdough, upon being picked up, should have been referred to psychiatric care, not to Rikers Island.
Jennifer J. Parish, an attorney at the New York-based Urban Justice Center’s Mental Health Project, agrees.
“So Mr. Murdough violated the trespass law. So he suffered the consequences by going to jail,” she said. “But the jail system committed more serious harm to him. And the question is, ‘Will they ever be held responsible?’”
Murdough’s family, of course, wants answers.
Another of his sisters,Wanda Mehala, says:
“We want justice for what was done. He wasn’t just some old homeless person on the street. He was loved. He had a life. He had a family. He had feelings.”
Yes but he was an older homeless person on the street at the time of his arrest. His family couldn’t keep him at home because he didn’t want to be there. And they call them “these mean streets” for a reason. In an ideal world, one of the functions of any city’s public health system would be to deal with its homeless population in a reasonably humane way. No easy task and it would cost a fortune.
Thus, what actually occurs, and not just in New York, it that the homeless are “controlled” by the city police. They are the ones with the power to question, arrest and detain. In this case they did all three with Murdough. The fact that he was on suicide watch suggests that the officials at Riker’s recognized that he was severely troubled and that he was on psychotropic medication. In fact, they may have been giving him his daily dose of psychotropics – American jails are usually not shy about passing out anti-depressants and anti-psychotics.
The fact is that in the final analysis, the failure was twofold. Although a system was certainly in place to protect Murdough from himself, a negligent guard(s) failed to do his job. Even this human oversight would probably not have resulted in any great harm was it not for the fact that the jail’s cooling system was on the blink.
But, let’s not forget that there was no reason on earth for Murdough to be there in the first place. He should have been released the morning after he was picked up for some nominal bail.
This is America. We have put a man on the moon and we have advanced technology. What we also have is crumbling outmoded infrastructure.
They say there is no worse place to spend the night than in the drunk tank of a South Georgia jail. Well, Rikers is no picnic either. In fact, in May 2013, it was ranked as one of the ten worst prisons in the United States, according to Mother Jones magazine.
So this was Murdough’s fate, to be insane and to wander and to search for warm places until his final catastrophe, rife with irony, caught up with him. He found a warm place, a very warm place, or rather a very hot place found him, and that was all she wrote for Jerome Murdough.