Fifth woman dies from COVID-19 at Fort Worth prison; women say cases have not gone down
A fifth woman has died from coronavirus while incarcerated at FMC Carswell, a federal medical prison for women in Fort Worth.
Wendy Campbell, 56, died on Saturday from COVID-19. She had been at FMC Carswell for five months.
Campbell was seen by medical staff at the prison on July 15 for complications related to liver disease, according to a press release from the Bureau of Prisons. She was taken to a hospital for treatment and tested positive for COVID-19 on July 18.
Four days later, she was discharged from the hospital and returned to Carswell.
On July 27, she again was evaluated by staff for declining mental status due to liver disease. She was taken to the hospital again.
On Aug. 15, Campbell died.
Campbell was sentenced in Tennessee to a 42-month sentence for conspiracy to distribute more than five grams, but less than 50 grams, of methamphetamine.
Campbell is the fifth woman to die from coronavirus at the women’s prison, which at one point in July had the second most cases of the virus of any federal prison.
On April 28, Andrea Circle Bear became the first Carswell inmate to die — and the first woman in the country to die from the virus while in federal custody — and Sandra Kincaid, 69, became the second when she died on July 14. On July 20, 51-year-old Teresa Ely died while on a ventilator. On Aug. 3, Veronica Carrera-Perez, 40, died from the virus.
The Bureau of Prisons said in a previous statement that it is carefully monitoring the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
As of Monday, the prison reported that 533 women had recovered from the virus and eight were still positive. According to BOP data, 1,316 tests had been administered at the prison and 541 inmates had tested positive overall. The prison currently holds 1,314 women, but some have been tested multiple times.
Women at the prison dispute the BOP’s report that 533 women have recovered from the virus. Sandra Shoulders, an inmate at the prison, said hundreds of women only recently tested positive, and they served meals to women throughout the prison.
“It’s so scary that the workers who tested positive are back at work, plus serving us sack lunches, which is playing with our lives,” Shoulders said in an email.
In reference to workers who test positive working in food service, the BOP said inmates cleared to prepare meals are “asymptomatic, screened by medical staff, and cleared to workin Food Service,” according to a statement on their website.
About 70 inmates filed a potential class-action suit against FMC Carswell’s warden on Aug. 3. One inmate said in the suit that she tested positive for COVID-19 on Aug. 6 and was hospitalized until Aug. 8. When she returned to Carswell, she was put back into her 300-person unit without being quarantined. A nurse told her everyone in that unit had already tested positive for COVID-19.
However, the woman said an officer declared the unit “negative” on Aug. 7.
“If this were in fact a negative unit ... they knowingly put me back in here, which would result in a complete reinfection of the unit,” she wrote in a letter included in the lawsuit.
The BOP says since social distancing is difficult in many prisons, it has issued cloth face masks to inmates and common areas are sanitized multiple times a day.
Joyce Godwin is serving a nine-year sentence at Carswell for bank robbery. She said in a letter to the Star-Telegram that although she tested negative for coronavirus three times, she was placed in a cell with women who had not been tested. She tested positive for COVID-19 on Aug. 1.
Godwin said she and two other women who tested positive were taken to quarantine, where they will be released in 10 to 14 days.
“We all make choices in life, some worse than others,” she wrote. “But most of us don’t deserve death sentences for what we’re here for.”
