Instead of celebrating Efrem Stutson’s release from prison, his family has been mourning his death.
The 60-year-old man, released from the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex on April 1, boarded a Greyhound bus and arrived in San Bernardino. Hours after his arrival, he landed in the hospital.
On April 6, Stutson died, reportedly because of COVID-19, his family said.
His story, relayed by one of his sisters, La Wanda Rangel, serves as one sign of apparent mishandling of the public health crisis at the Lompoc federal prisons.
As of Thursday, 74 inmates had tested positive along with 25 staff members, most of whom live in the Santa Maria and Lompoc valleys.
Of 20 newly confirmed cases announced in Santa Barbara County on Thursday, eight were related to the prison outbreak, Dr. Henning Ansorg said.
Lompoc federal prisons continue to lead by far the entire BOP facilities nationwide in the number of cases.
Congressman Salud Carbajal, D-Santa Barbara, with California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris urged quick actions by Bureau of Prisons leaders as numbers continued to grow.
“Anything that stresses our public health system impacts the community at large,” Carbajal said. “This might be happening at a federal facility, but unless they get more resources and the support they need, there’s no doubt it’s going to have a disproportionate impact on the broader community public health resources that are available for the general public.”
Plans call for installing a field hospital at the site, but the timeline remains uncertain despite the crisis. The first 11 beds could be ready for patients in eight to 14 days, according to Van Do-Reynoso, Santa Barbara County’s public health director.
“It’s so important that the Bureau of Prisons … understands that this is of great urgency, not something that can wait. They need to give this their attention immediately, especially when you consider this prison tends to be at the forefront of the crisis in the entire Bureau of Prisons system,” Carbajal said. “What we know for sure is that if this arrives in four to five weeks, it’s too late. This is going to go from a crisis to something unfathomably worse.”
Prison staff and inmates also lack proper personal protective equipment such as masks, gowns, gloves and disinfectant, the congressman said, adding that he has talked to stakeholders.
The outbreak also raises concerns about already low staffing. Carbajal said the prison medical facility staffing is at 68 percent and 80 percent for other staff.
“From the get-go, they’re understaffed,” Carbajal said, adding that prison staff asked for a mobile hospital facility to set up one prison grounds and staffing to support it.
Along with staff who tested positive, others exposed to inmates or co-workers must be placed in quarantine, reducing staffing levels even further. Having inmates at off-site hospitals means additional correctional officers, possibly one to two per prisoner, further taxing staffing and local facilities.
Lompoc Mayor Jenelle Osborne also expressed concern about what she called “the super spreader event” and its impact of the staff being affected, how they’re being cared for and how they’re being protected to avoid affecting the entire community as well as the hospital.
“I just wish it could have been addressed sooner. I would have liked to have seen that, and I’m just unsure where the breakdown in communications happened,” she said, adding that she hopes to resolve the communication snag before another crisis.
Some details about the situation inside the prison facility are based on information from people speaking only if their names weren’t used because of fears of retaliation. One claimed that staff rarely used gloves, masks or other protection although the first positive cases came in late March.
While BOP reports all its cases being at the U.S. Penitentiary — suggesting at least some containment — the reality might be different. One internal source said that any ill inmates, even if they were from one of the camps or the nearby Federal Correctional Institution, were taken to USP.
Santa Barbara County Public Health Department leaders said they were assisting prison leaders with disease control and mitigation, the field hospital and staff testing.
At the April 10 briefing, Ansorg spoke about the Lompoc federal prison efforts at the facility housing about 2,700 male inmates at four facilities.
“It is of great concern to the Public Health Departent,” Ansorg said of the outbreak. “It’s a very densely populated small parcel of real estate.”
He said the site has a unit able to isolate up to 100 inmates suspected of or confirmed to have COVID-19.
Amid rising numbers and more scrutiny, BOP did not respond to a list of 20 questions submitted by Noozhawk this week.
Questions also linger for Stutson’s family. In a recent conversation about her brother’s situation, Rangel remembered her brother as “loving, affectionate and a caring type of person. Whoever he was around, he wanted the best for that person.”
Stutson, who served time for narcotics-related charges, told his relatives he thought he had a bad cold.
“He told her, ‘I never felt as bad as I feel now, so he was thinking it was just a cold,’” Rangel said, adding that she wondered if her brother knew the seriousness of the novel coronavirus because of limited access to information in prison.
As his sisters try to deal with the aftermath of his death, Rangel has wondered about strangers he might have infected en route to San Bernardino.
“My concern, too, is they put him on a Greyhound bus knowing he was sick, so how many people did he come across and infect?” she asked.
— Noozhawk North County editor Janene Scully can be reached at jscully@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.