Correctional staff at a Western Maryland prison shut off the water to a mentally ill man’s cell, then allowed him to suffer for eight days before he finally died of dehydration, according to a lawsuit.

On July 5, 2023, an officer working at Western Correctional Institution noted in a logbook that Lamont Mealy, housed in an isolation cell without even toiletries, appeared to need help, according to filings in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

The officer later told investigators that Mealy looked dazed and was unresponsive at the time. He notified a sergeant, who did not get medical attention for Mealy, even though an IV at that point would have saved his life, the filing said.

Hours later, Mealy, 52, was dead.

The medical examiner’s office concluded that the cause of death was dehydration.

“Per report, Mr. Mealy had a history of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,” the medical examiner’s report said. “He was found in his single prison cell with fecal matter in and around his mouth.”

The medical examiner’s office ruled the manner of death an accident. There were no signs of significant trauma, and the toxicology report for drugs and alcohol was negative.

Many of the details of the events leading up to what the lawsuit described as Mealy’s “slow and excruciatingly painful death” were drawn from letters written by a fellow prisoner who was housed nearby, Danny Hoskins.

Hoskins filed complaints and wrote letters claiming that Mealy spent a week suffering in an isolation cell with no access to water, at times taunted by correctional officers.

The first complaint prompted correctional officers to come to Hoskins’ cell and beat him, he wrote, before he was later transferred to another prison. He then sent letters to the governor, the attorney general and Carolyn Scruggs, secretary of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

“For years, [Western Correctional Institution] has gotten away with murders, beatings, and pepper spraying of the Black inmates over and over again,” Hoskins wrote to the governor in a letter obtained by a legal team representing a member of Mealy’s family. “By the way I’m a white man who has risked my life in this. What will you risk?”

The corrections department investigated Hoskins’ claims and disputed parts of his account.

Attorney Cary Hansel, representing the family member, is arguing in a public records lawsuit related to the case that the relative is entitled to discovery. He wrote in a filing that the corrections secretary and her top lawyer were both made aware of the death “but covered it up, and did not disclose any of the wrongdoing to Mr. Mealy’s family.”

The Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, the attorney wrote, then stonewalled the family’s public records request until they filed the lawsuit, and “engaged in an obvious and unlawful effort to hide the most incriminating evidence of what was done to Mr. Mealy.”

In response to questions about the lawsuit, department spokesperson Keith Martucci said, “While the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services is unable to comment on matters involving pending litigation, the health and safety of those DPSCS is responsible for — as well as facility personnel — remains the Department’s foremost priority.”

Taken to an isolation cell

On March 20, 2024, Hoskins wrote a letter to Gov. Wes Moore, introducing himself as an inmate at Jessup Correctional Institution.

“I’m writing to inform you of a murder that was committed on or before July 5, 2023 at the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland,” he wrote. “This murder was done by all white correctional officers of a single Black male inmate!”

Hoskins wrote that he was housed in cell adjoined by Mealy’s, witnessed the events leading up to his death, and had “repeatedly tried to get your employees to do something about it with no success.”

Though he did not know Mealy’s name, he described seeing correctional officers lead him to the isolation cell. Mealy, Hoskins recalled, was struggling, “being pulled from several directions at one time by” correctional officers.

On June 30, 2023, Hoskins wrote, Mealy was placed in the cell by two officers who were not wearing name tags or rank insignia, who then went “directly to the closet between cells 1 and 2 on 4-B and turned the water off in the cell.”

“On July 2, 2023, the same two officers who cut the water off stood in front of cell 4-B-2 and asked, ‘are you thirsty, are you thirsty,’” Hoskins wrote. “The inmate asked several times, ‘water, water?’ The officers merely laughed and exited the tier.”

As Hoskins told it, “not much happened at all” in the isolation cell Mealy was held in, “but for the officers not feeding the inmate at times,” until July 5, 2023.

What killed Lamont Mealy?

Hansel described this as an “8-day period of torture” during which the prisoner was denied toilet paper, soap, deodorant, towels and a toothbrush.

Hansel wrote that video evidence from the day of Mealy’s death shows that officers performed about half the required checks on his cell, approximately once an hour as opposed to every half-hour.

The officers also failed to take Mealy to a medical appointment with a psychiatrist, “who would have observed his distressed state,” Hansel wrote.

After Mealy’s body was removed from the cell and the forensic team had left, a maintenance worker and two prisoners who worked with him “immediately went to the closet ... and turned the water back on,” Hoskins wrote in his letter.

Just before leaving the tier, Hoskins wrote, the plumber “yelled out, ‘I did not turn the water off, I did not turn the fucking water off.’”

In a deposition by Mealy’s attorneys, the worker responded to Hoskins’ recollection by saying “it was possible he made a similar comment to one of the inmate workers,” according to the lawsuit.

“Shockingly, any correctional officer at the facility has the ability, at any time, to walk into a utility closet and turn off the water to any given cell on the tier where Mr. Mealy was housed,” Hansel wrote. “In addition, a maintenance worker interviewed as part of the investigation claimed that when working in the utility closet, the water to a given cell can inadvertently shut off by accident.”

An internal investigation by the corrections department, however, said that some of Hoskins’ claims were “refuted” by the fact that he did not have a clear line of sight to the water closet from his cell and that other prisoners on the tier at the time did not recall Mealy asking for water, according to court filings.

The investigation concluded “there was no definitive evidence that WCI correctional custody, maintenance, or medical staff failed to perform their duties in such a manner that contributed to the death of Inmate Healy (sic).”

Allegations of a cover-up

Hansel said correctional staff from frontline officers to top-ranking officials participated in either whitewashing or obscuring the facts about Mealy’s death.

“We’re now months into this litigation, and even now, the agency is refusing to produce responsive documents,” Hansel told The Banner.

Hansel has not yet filed a wrongful death complaint. He said Scruggs, the corrections secretary, was aware of the death by dehydration, “yet no one had the common courtesy or moral fortitude to tell the family or see the involved officers charged with crimes, let alone punished.”

In addition to issues with obtaining public records, Hansel in his court filing said the corrections department “has engaged in an obvious and unlawful effort to hide the most incriminating evidence of what was done to Mr. Mealy.”

For example, Hansel said, the agency produced a “heavily redacted report” written by a department detective, “which is almost completely innocuous.”

“The ... report fails to investigate, and in some cases does not even mention, the failure to perform rounds, the failure to provide medical care, the failure to provide essentials like toilet paper and soap, and, most importantly, the ... report makes no effort to explain (or even investigate) how a mentally ill man in state custody came to die of dehydration,” Hansel wrote.