E-Mail This Article to a Friend What happened to Kelly-Jo? (continued) BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

BY THE TIME Kelly-Jo had been transported to MCI-Framingham on July 21, however, she was two days into cold-turkey withdrawal from a 20-bag-a-day heroin habit. Experts in heroin withdrawal say that, at this point, Kelly-Jo would have been deep into the physical symptoms of withdrawal: severe body aches, hot flashes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and, possibly, convulsions.

As Kelly-Jo was marched into the female prison, fellow Lynn resident and childhood friend Kristen Bell, 22, who had also been sent to MCI-Framingham to await a court appearance on motor-vehicle charges, spotted Kelly-Jo. She still can’t forget how Kelly-Jo looked, Bell says: "really bad," with a pale and sunken face. While walking to the prison’s admissions desk, Bell says, "Kelly-Jo was throwing up. She couldn’t keep her bowels in. Liquid was coming out of her any way it could." Kelly-Jo, Bell adds, asked a guard if she could "please go to a hospital." But the guard replied, according to Bell, "This is the other side of the dope game. Get used to it."

Eventually, Kelly-Jo was placed in the health-services unit. Bell and other sources familiar with the unit at MCI-Framingham describe it as a closed ward, where guards monitor prisoners around the clock and inmates are confined to their cells. It consists of several rooms for prisoners, like Kelly-Jo, who are detoxing from alcohol or drugs. Bell, who suffers from epilepsy, was housed in the unit just three cells away from Kelly-Jo. On Monday night, as guards escorted Bell to her cell, she peered into her friend’s room, where four other inmates were detoxing. "She was this shadow laying on the bed in a ball," recalls Bell. One of the nurses, whose name Bell doesn’t remember, offered up her own assessment of Kelly-Jo: "The nurse told me, ‘Your friend is a pain in the ass.’"

On Tuesday, July 22, Bell passed her friend’s room while returning a food tray. She saw vomit splattered on the floor. Kelly-Jo was hunched over. Pieces of puke were stuck in her hair. "I said, ‘What’s up, kid?’" she recalls. Kelly-Jo just stared at her. Later, Bell heard a nurse yelling at Kelly-Jo, who’d evidently thrown up again. "The nurse said to her, ‘Look what you did. Now, you’re not getting any more medication.’"

Throughout the day, Bell says, she heard Kelly-Jo moaning for help. "Everybody could hear her," she says. Kelly-Jo cried for her mother. She cried for Bell. "She was yelling, ‘Somebody, I need an ambulance.’" On Tuesday night, Bell fell asleep — only to be awakened by a noise from Kelly-Jo’s room. "It was a loud smack, like somebody hitting the floor," which is cement tile. When Bell woke up on Wednesday, July 23, one of the inmates (Bell asked that that she remain anonymous because she is still incarcerated) told Bell some horrifying news. "She said, ‘Your friend flat-lined in the middle of the night.’" As soon as the door to her cell was opened, Bell ran down the aisle. Her friend was gone.

Since July 23, the Griffen family has received phone calls and letters from Framingham prisoners — all unsolicited — that corroborate Bell’s account of Kelly-Jo’s final hours. In letters to the family, as well as to prisoner-rights advocates, about a half dozen Framingham inmates report that Kelly-Jo’s pleas for help went unanswered by prison officials. In a July 28 letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Phoenix, one prisoner writes that Kelly-Jo "begged to be taken to a hospital," and that "after ignoring her pleas, inmates informed the staff that Kelly had turned purple." According to the letter, "inmates reported that officers on duty were cruel to Kelly, telling her to ‘toughen up’ and that she shouldn’t have used drugs to begin with." Similarly, in a July 29 letter, another prisoner writes that women in the health-services unit "said (I heard them say) that she had been asking for help all night long." The letter states that guards "gave her a bucket and mop to clean up after herself, and had the attitude, ‘Well, what do you expect? That’s what drugs do.’" When guards fetched Kelly-Jo for her court appearance the next morning, according to the letter, "she vomited and collapsed, with no heartbeat."

To this day, strangers are still seeking out the family to tell them what they know about Kelly-Jo’s death. Two weeks ago, a man called Scovil, Kelly-Jo’s great-aunt, to relay a message from a female friend who happened to be housed in the health-services unit at MCI-Framingham last July. In an interview with the Phoenix, the man, a Medford resident named Larry, explains that his girlfriend, whose name he asked the Phoenix not to publish, had been sent to the women’s prison while awaiting a hearing on drug-related charges. His girlfriend, Larry says, was also detoxing from heroin. On July 23, he says, "My girl called me all upset" over Kelly-Jo. He adds, "She said she could hear the young lady screaming all night. She was banging on the wall, screaming, ‘Take me to the hospital.’ But the guards kept telling her to shut up." The next morning, as Larry puts it, "she dropped dead." (Efforts by the Phoenix to reach his girlfriend, who is "on the run" after fleeing a court-ordered drug program in August, were not successful.)

The account is eerily similar to Bell’s, as well as to those provided by prisoners in letters to the family. Bell also says that several prisoners saw Kelly-Jo fall out of bed in the predawn hours of July 23, which would explain the noise that jolted Bell awake. "The girls told me," she says, that Kelly-Jo had endured a head wound, to which guards applied "liquid stitches," and then tossed her back on the bed. As far as Bell can tell, that’s the extent of the medical care Kelly-Jo received while in the unit. "They let her lay there and die for days," she charges. "There’s no other way to explain it."

DOC spokesman Justin Latini refused to address the allegations of prison neglect. "I’m not going to comment on what the family is alleging," he says. He maintains that medical personnel treated Kelly-Jo "the whole time" she was in DOC custody, and then offers, "It wasn’t like she was in a cell on the other side of the prison or in a wing left all alone."

Many of the questions surrounding Kelly-Jo’s death hinge on her medical records. To date, however, the only public document of her death is a July 29 death certificate that confirms she died on July 23 in Framingham. It does not specify whether Kelly-Jo perished inside the prison or at Metrowest Medical Center, where she was rushed by ambulance on the morning of July 23. Nor does it specify a cause of death. Edith Platt, of the state’s Chief Medical Examiner’s Office, which issued the certificate, explains that the cause of death in the Griffen case is "still pending further investigation." The agency’s William Zane, who performed the autopsy on Kelly-Jo’s body, declined to comment for this article.

Photographs of Kelly-Jo’s body taken by her family at the Lynn funeral home lend credence to Bell and other prisoners’ claims that Kelly-Jo had thrashed about and even fallen out of her bed. The photos, which were shown to the Phoenix, reveal a bruised face and head gash. Her long hair looks matted and sticky. Explains Kelly-Jo’s uncle, Jeff Lake, who took the pictures, "The first thing I said when I saw her was, ‘That’s not Kelly-Jo.’ She was unrecognizable."

The photos, as well as the prisoners’ accounts, have convinced Lake and his family that "something seriously went wrong" in the health-services unit at MCI-Framingham last July. It’s true that heroin withdrawal can be brutal. Typically, the second and third days — when Kelly-Jo was languishing in jail — are characterized by bone-and-joint aches, fever, and nausea. But not even heavy users, like Kelly-Jo, die from heroin withdrawal. And simple dope sickness doesn’t quite explain the bruised and battered shape of Kelly-Jo’s body. Michael Adams, Kelly-Jo’s stepfather, who identified her body at the hospital morgue, sums up the sentiment: "It’s hard to believe there was anything accidental about Kelly-Jo’s death." He then wonders, "If she was so sick, why was she allowed to get so bad?"

And then, there are the questions about where she actually died. The day Kelly-Jo perished, her mother received a phone call from Ed Foley, the acting superintendent at MCI-Framingham. Foley, Michele Griffen says, told her and other family members that Kelly-Jo "fell and hit her head" while walking to the prison’s van, and that she’d been sent by ambulance to the nearby Metrowest Medical Center. "I went off on him," Griffen admits, because she had begged prison officials to send her daughter to a hospital to begin with. Yet Foley cut off her tirade with this: "He said, ‘It doesn’t matter because she’s dead,’" Griffen recalls.

Within hours, the family received official word from the DOC. In a July 23 telegram, the department confirmed, as it states, "our conversation of July 23, 2003 regarding your daughter Kelly Griffen being transferred to Metrowest Medical Center from MCI-Framingham and being pronounced dead at 8:35 a.m." It was signed — "with our deepest sympathy" — by Foley.

Latini refused to allow the Phoenix to interview Foley, who’s served as MCI-Framingham superintendent since April. He simply confirms that Kelly-Jo was undergoing detox treatment at the prison and that medical personnel had cleared her for transport to Salem Court on July 23. Soon afterward, she suffered what Latini calls "a medical emergency." Staff responded by administering CPR. An ambulance was summoned. An hour later, she was pronounced dead at the hospital. When asked where she was when she fell critically ill, Latini replies, "She was still inside the facility, near the unit. That’s the best I can give you."

Interestingly, this contradicts what Latini told the Lynn Daily Item just weeks earlier. In an August 23 article, he’s quoted as saying that Kelly-Jo "was being escorted to a van for transport when the ‘condition’ struck." When the Phoenix pointed out the discrepancy, Latini responded: "I never would have said that." Kelly-Jo, he claims, hadn’t been anywhere near the location where inmates are processed to leave. He reiterates: "It was somewhere inside. I don’t know where. But she was inside the prison and medical staff were present."

It’s just one more inconsistency among many surrounding the July 23 prison death. The most significant, of course, are the numerous accounts from behind the wall that contradict the DOC’s assertion that it provided Kelly-Jo with 24-hour care.

So, what really happened?

AT THIS POINT, we can only speculate. We can only wonder if prison officials were unable to distinguish between dope sickness and Kelly-Jo’s other health problems, which would complicate heroin withdrawal. Or did they simply regard her as a junkie and forget about her? Reaction to Kelly-Jo’s case on a DOC prison-guard Web site indicates that it might have been the latter. One guard, who goes by the tag line "Nobody to blame but herself," offered up this observation: "Low lifes die like this every day."

"There are a lot of questions," concedes Howard Friedman, a Boston civil-rights attorney who represents the Griffen family and is investigating the circumstances of Kelly-Jo’s death. Friedman still cannot quite fathom even the basic facts of the case. Like how Kelly-Jo wound up at MCI-Framingham in the first place. She seems to have had no business being detained there; after all, she hadn’t been convicted of a crime. Rather, she was awaiting arraignment on two default warrants in Salem Court. Says Friedman, "This woman did not belong in a state prison."

The DOC’s Latini contends that "detainees," such as Kelly-Jo, who are held pending a court arraignment, often find themselves at the maximum-security prison because Massachusetts lacks the range of facilities for women that it has for men. Female county prisoners and detainees are held in Hampden, Bristol, and Suffolk Counties, he says — but not Essex County, where Salem Court is located. Adds Latini, "We’re a catch-all for counties that don’t have female housing."

Friedman, however, takes issue with this argument. He points to the May 22 deposition of former MCI-Framingham superintendent Barbara Guarino, which he conducted in an ongoing civil-rights lawsuit. The suit involves a woman sent to the Framingham facility overnight while awaiting a court appearance on a warrant. The woman is suing Guarino and other prison personnel for violating her civil rights as a detainee — whom the courts have recognized have more rights than convicted criminals. In the deposition, Guarino testified that the DOC "commissioner had made a decision we needed to stop" housing detainees after the lawsuit was filed, in May 2000. If that’s the case, Friedman asks, why was Kelly-Jo at Framingham? As he observes, "Most people would think if you wanted to go from Lynn to Salem, you would not have to go by way of Framingham."

The question is important, since, it seems fair to say, Kelly-Jo might still be alive if she had never landed in state prison. In any event, one thing is certain: answers are needed. The case has captured the attention not only of prisoner-rights groups, such as the MCLS and the ACLU, but of a growing number of state political leaders. State Representative Debby Blumer (D-Framingham) has vowed to push for an independent inquiry because, she says, "I’m left with questions from beginning to end." Blumer, who knows about the accounts of negligent care, began circulating a letter this week to legislative colleagues calling for an outside review. On Monday, she sent a formal request to the Department of Public Health’s Office of Health-Care Quality, which investigates medical malfeasance, asking it to look into conditions at MCI-Framingham that might have contributed to Kelly-Jo’s death. That a 24-year-old woman who didn’t have her day in court could end up dead in prison, she says, "warrants people paying attention."

Rose, the ACLU director, agrees. As it stands, she notes, "there hasn’t been a thorough or sufficient investigation." In fact, according to the DOC’s Latini, the department hasn’t even conducted an internal review, since Kelly-Jo died while "attended" by medical personnel. (The department’s own regulations call for an investigation when a prison death seems "suspicious or unnatural" in nature.) Yet Rose — and many legal observers — finds the apparent discrepancies among the accounts given by the DOC and the inmates present on the ward that housed Kelly-Jo disconcerting. "If the DOC is so convinced that it did nothing wrong," Rose adds, "it should welcome an independent investigation."

For now, all the family can do is push for information. To date, they have written dozens of letters to politicians, including Governor Mitt Romney, to urge an outside inquiry into what transpired in the health-services unit at MCI-Framingham on July 23. On October 5, they plan to hold a vigil outside the Framingham facility to keep the pressure on the DOC. "We want the truth," says Scovil. "We want justice for Kelly-Jo, and we won’t rest until that happens."

The sudden loss of a loved one is bad enough. But it’s worse, as the family can so painfully attest, not knowing how Kelly-Jo died. What are they to tell her seven-year-old son and two daughters, ages four and two, now left behind? How will they come to grips with their loss? As family members grieve, the question continues to plague them: what happened to Kelly-Jo?