Whistleblower warned of conditions at Fort Worth prison before woman died of coronavirus
On April 1, 30-year-old Andrea Circle Bear became the mother of a baby girl at a local Fort Worth hospital.
She was a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. She was also an inmate at FMC Carswell, Fort Worth’s federal medical prison for women, and a COVID-19 patient.
And on Tuesday, four weeks after she gave birth, Circle Bear also became the first woman to die from coronavirus while in federal custody.
In the weeks before her death, Circle Bear’s fellow inmates and the staff at FMC Carswell sounded the alarm about the potential spread of COVID-19 in the prison. They described confusion over coronavirus safety guidelines and the lack of social distancing.
Circle Bear was in her third trimester when she was transferred to FMC Carswell on March 20 from a jail in South Dakota, the Bureau of Prisons said in a press release about her death. When she got to Carswell, Circle Bear was immediately put into quarantine, per the BOP’s COVID-19 procedures.
Medical staff evaluated Circle Bear and became concerned about her pregnancy on March 28. They took her to the hospital and she was discharged later that day.
Three days later, she developed a fever, a dry cough and other COVID-19 symptoms. She went to the hospital again.
This time, she never left.
Circle Bear was placed on a ventilator to help her breathe. On April 1, she gave birth while on the ventilator via cesarean section and, on April 4, she tested positive for COVID-19, the BOP said.
Fear of another prison outbreak
Three days after Circle Bear tested positive for coronavirus, FMC Carswell’s officer union filed a whistleblower complaint through a letter to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.
According to the letter, which was sent April 7, staff were given minimal guidelines about how to deal with the virus. The prison had not gone on lockdown even though the BOP told the public otherwise, and inmates continued to play volleyball in the compound or watch TV together in a small room, the complaint said.
As a corrections officer at Carswell, Christopher Beasley told the Star-Telegram, he saw firsthand that the administration was not doing enough to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
“We had to make them step it up. We didn’t feel like they were doing everything they were supposed to do to protect the staff and inmates,” said Beasley, also a local steward of the officers’ American Federation of Government Employees union.
Six officers and one nurse treated Circle Bear when she was in the prison, but those staff members were cleared to return to work before Circle Bear’s positive test came back, according to the complaint. Per CDC and BOP guidelines, staff should have been quarantined immediately after Circle Bear showed COVID-19 symptoms. After the positive test, they were told to quarantine, the letter said.
After the union became involved to hold administrators accountable, administrators “really picked it up” and started enforcing safety precautions at Carswell, Beasley said. The virus has been contained to two inmates and no further spread has been seen.
But staff are still worried about an outbreak, like the one FMC Fort Worth is dealing with. As of Saturday, 446 inmates at the male federal medical prison had tested positive for coronavirus.
“This virus is crazy,” Beasley said. “It does whatever it wants to do.”
Beasley said if an outbreak happened at Carswell, John Peter Smith Hospital could be overwhelmed with patients. FMC Fort Worth and FMC Carswell both take inmates to JPS, and “there is only so much bed space,” Beasley said.
In the letter, the union said the BOP “knowingly and willingly misled the public” by assuring people they were taking necessary precautions against coronavirus. In actuality, the bureau was putting “the staff, inmates, and community at risk to the most lethal pandemic since 1920,” according to the union.
A spokeswoman with Cornyn’s office said in a statement that after Cornyn received the union’s complaint, his staff made “multiple inquiries with the Justice Department about the situation at facilities in North Texas.”
“Our staff pressed the Justice Department repeatedly about mitigation of the spread of the virus, the conditions in these facilities, and expressed concern for the officers and staff there,” the statement from the spokeswoman said. “We also pushed the Justice Department to use their authority to allow for individualized releases based on specific circumstances, including an inmate’s health.”
Call for investigation
After four weeks in the hospital, Circle Bear died.
The BOP said Circle Bear had a medical condition that the CDC lists as a risk factor for developing severe symptoms with coronavirus, but did not specify what the condition was.
Circle Bear was a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe based at Eagle Butte, South Dakota, the Capital Journal reported.
She was indicted in March 2019 on a charge of possessing and planning to sell methamphetamine and maintaining “a drug-involved premises,” according to court records. She was sentenced to 26 months in prison. In January, the judge recommended she serve her sentence at FMC Carswell since she was pregnant, and she was held at Tripp County Jail until her transfer in March, according to the Capital Journal.
Circle Bear’s newborn daughter was returned to family in South Dakota, according to the Washington Post.
Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a prison reform advocacy group, called for an investigation into Circle Bear’s death on Wednesday.
“Her death is a national disgrace, and I hope it is a wake-up call. Ms. Circle Bear was sentenced to 26 months in prison, not the death penalty,” FAMM president Kevin Ring said in a press release.
FAMM is also calling for the expansion of compassionate release and home confinement.
“Not every prison death is avoidable, but Andrea Circle Bear’s certainly seems to have been — she simply should not have been in a federal prison under these circumstances,” Ring said. “In fact, nothing better demonstrates our mindless addiction to punishment more than the fact that, in the midst of a global pandemic, our government moved a 30-year-old, COVID-vulnerable pregnant woman not to a hospital or to her home, but to a federal prison.”
In 2015, Circle Bear’s sister also died while she was in custody and pregnant. Sarah Lee Circle Bear was 24 when she died from a methamphetamine overdose in a South Dakota jail, Indian Country Today reported. Hours before she died, fellow inmates wrote and signed a letter to jailers saying they were concerned for Sarah Lee Circle Bear’s well-being, according to the Aberdeen News.
FMC Carswell is the only federal medical prison for women in the U.S. and currently holds 1,625 women. As of Saturday, one other inmate had tested positive for COVID-19 and Circle Bear was the only woman who had died at Carswell from the virus.
Multiple women at FMC Carswell told the Star-Telegram they are afraid of getting sick because of the conditions at the prison. Many signed a letter to the warden asking for compassionate release, saying a single case of the virus at the prison would be like lighting a match on a box of matches.
This story was originally published May 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
