HOW DID Kelly-Jo Griffen die?
It’s a question that haunts her family and friends, who have
made up T-shirts featuring Kelly-Jo’s smiling face with the
caption WHAT HAPPENED TO KELLY-JO? It’s also a question that
has aroused the suspicions of prisoner-rights advocacy groups
like Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services (MCLS) and the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). When Carol Rose, the
executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU,
heard the story of Kelly-Jo, she was outraged. "It sounded as
though a grave injustice had been done, and I wanted more
facts," she says. But even today, nearly seven weeks after
Kelly-Jo perished in a prison cell, the details of her death
remain, in Rose’s words, "sketchy."
The only people who can tell us
how Kelly-Jo Griffen came to die while detained at
MCI-Framingham work for the Massachusetts Department of
Correction (DOC). But they’re not talking — at least, not in
any substantive way. Maybe DOC officials know what happened to
Kelly-Jo. Maybe they don’t. Either way, the department is the
only state entity in a position to find out. Yet it has
refused to launch an investigation into circumstances
surrounding the prison death. So the effect, in the end, is
the same: the DOC appears to be living up to its long-held
practice of sweeping suspicious matters under the rug.
At the time of her demise,
Kelly-Jo was a 24-year-old Lynn resident being detained at
MCI-Framingham for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear,
given that the mother of three young children had been merely
charged with two criminal offenses — "leaving the scene of
property damage" and "unlicensed operation of a motor
vehicle." She had not yet been tried, much less convicted.
Prison officials told the Griffen family that she died of
injuries sustained when she fell while getting ready to leave
for court. Photos of Kelly-Jo’s body at the Solimine,
Landergan & Rhodes funeral home, in Lynn, taken by her family,
show dark-purple bruises on her forehead and around her left
eye. Her left cheek is swollen. There’s an inch-wide cut on
the top of her head, around which her long, brown hair looks
matted, as if tied in dozens of knots. In other words, they
look like injuries unlikely to have resulted from a simple
fall. Prison officials say Kelly-Jo, who was suffering
from a heroin addiction, was attended closely by medical staff
during her brief stay at MCI-Framingham. Current and former
inmates say they saw and heard Kelly-Jo utter persistent,
desperate cries for help, which went unanswered.
That shouldn't come as a big
surprise, given the public’s apparent lack of interest in
prison conditions, where the ethic of former governor William
Weld’s promise to introduce inmates to the "joys of busting
rocks" prevails. Indeed, Kelly-Jo died a full month before
defrocked Boston priest John Geoghan was murdered while
incarcerated. Yet prior to Geoghan’s death, the media showed
little interest in how she came to die while in the custody of
the DOC. According to Kelly-Jo’s great-aunt Karen Scovil, who
distributed press releases to newspapers and television
stations about her niece’s mysterious demise, the Boston
Phoenix, the Lynn Daily Item, Kelly-Jo’s hometown
paper, and the MetroWest Daily News, in Framingham,
were the only news outlets investigating her death behind the
wall. Since Geoghan’s murder, however, the Boston Herald
published an August 28 op-ed penned by the ACLU’s Rose, in
which she calls for independent oversight of the state’s
prison system. And Boston Globe columnist Eileen
McNamara weighed in with a piece September 7 comparing
Kelly-Jo’s death with Geoghan’s.
Regardless of how attention was
drawn to the way Kelly-Jo died, it’s clear that her story
raises serious questions about how the DOC treats those in its
care. In many ways, her story seems more disturbing than
Geoghan’s because, without the heightened interest in DOC
policies brought about by his murder, very few people cared to
find out what had happened to Kelly-Jo. What does it say about
our culture that the story of a woman awaiting arraignment on
minor charges who perishes mysteriously while in DOC custody —
that is, under the care of the state and by way of public
dollars — doesn’t rate on the scale of daily outrages?
FAMILY AND friends describe
Kelly-Jo as a kind-hearted, caring mother struggling to kick a
long-time heroin addiction and to get back on her feet. Over
the years, Kelly-Jo had bounced in and out of drug-treatment
programs; she also fed her habit in ways that got her in
trouble with the law. Indeed, her addiction may have played a
role in her last brush with the criminal-justice system. On
June 26, around noon, Kelly-Jo and a male companion were
driving in Lynn when their vehicle "swerved onto a lawn, over
the curb, struck a fence, and then struck the tree," according
to a report issued by the Lynn Police Department. When
officers arrived on the scene, they spotted two people
fleeing. One of them was Kelly-Jo, who, according to the
police report, admitted that she had been driving the car,
"but got scared after the accident." She was arrested and
charged with two criminal offenses — "leaving the scene of
property damage," and "unlicensed operation of a motor
vehicle."
On June 27, Kelly-Jo was
scheduled to appear in Lynn District Court for arraignment on
the two motor-vehicle charges. She didn’t show, according to
court records, and a warrant was issued for her arrest. Nearly
a month later, on July 20, Lynn police arrested Kelly-Jo at
her mother’s home. The next day, Kelly-Jo’s mother showed up
at court to pick up her daughter. But by the time her mother
arrived, Kelly-Jo had already appeared before First Justice
Joseph Dever. According to court records, the judge arraigned
Kelly-Jo on the charges pending against her, and continued the
proceedings until August 25. Though the records show that
Dever released Kelly-Jo on "PR," or personal recognizance, he
also called for a "special mitt" — or mittimus, a writ
of commitment — to take Kelly-Jo into custody and transport
her to Salem District Court, where there were two warrants for
her arrest on charges of "possession of a hypodermic needle"
and "unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle." Yet Kelly-Jo
never made it to Salem Court. Instead, she spent hours in a
holding cell at the Lynn courthouse; eventually, she was sent
to MCI-Framingham. By then, some 10 hours later, she was deep
in the throes of heroin withdrawal. She was placed in the
facility’s health-services unit to undergo detox; after a
prison doctor signed off on her health, she was to be
transported to the Salem Court. But 36 hours after entering
the maximum-security prison, Kelly-Jo was dead.
Kelly-Jo’s sudden death has
left her mother, Michele Griffen, distraught — and confused.
During a recent interview at her aunt’s home, the Lynn
resident, 45, sits on her knees, rocking back and forth,
flipping through photographs of her eldest daughter — at age
two, hugging a stuffed animal; at three, getting a haircut; at
five, going to school. Throughout the modest apartment are
posters that read FOR OUR ANGEL KELLY-JO and BIG SIS —
EVERYDAY I MISS YOU. Michele Griffen wears one of the T-shirts
the family has made bearing a photo of her smiling daughter.
As she remembers moments from her child’s life, her eyes well
up with tears, her voice cracks. She says, "I still cannot
deal with the fact that my Kelly-Jo is gone."
It is wrenching to listen to
Griffen recount her last moments with her daughter — that July
morning when Lynn officers arrested her on the outstanding
traffic warrant. She and her daughter had just packed the car
for a trip to the beach when two officers approached. They
produced a warrant for Kelly-Jo, who, as her mother recalls,
pleaded with the cops to let her go." She said, ‘Please, I’ll
clear up the matter,’" recalls Griffen, who says her child
"was freaking out" because she’d planned to enroll in a
drug-detoxification-and-rehabilitation program the next
morning.
By nightfall, when Kelly-Jo
still hadn’t returned home from Lynn police headquarters,
Griffen became deeply concerned about her daughter’s
well-being. She knew Kelly-Jo would, at this point, be "dope
sick." Her daughter hadn’t had any heroin in 24 hours; if
she’d been at home she would have taken some of the drug to
manage the physical symptoms of withdrawal — the violent
shakes, the searing body aches, the overwhelming nausea.
Needing to do something, anything, to help her child, on the
night of July 20 Griffen brought Kelly-Jo a care package and
left it at the Lynn station: jeans, a sweatshirt, socks, and a
McDonald’s cheeseburger.
The next day, Griffen went to
Lynn Court to get Kelly-Jo. When she realized that her
daughter had been taken into custody for the Salem warrants,
she went to Salem Court to fetch her. By 5:30 that afternoon,
she was finally told that her daughter had been sent to
MCI-Framingham for the evening, and that Kelly-Jo would be
brought back to Salem Court the following morning. One Lynn
court officer even relayed a message from Kelly-Jo to Michele
Griffen: "She said to me, ‘Mommy, take care of my kids. Please
be in court tomorrow.’"
Meanwhile, over the course of
the next 36 hours, Griffen called the women’s prison and spoke
with several guards, whom she warned about her daughter’s
condition. "I told them that Kelly-Jo was detoxing by
default," she says. Not only that, but she explained that
Kelly-Jo had a history of kidney infection and high blood
pressure. She urged the guards to send Kelly-Jo to a hospital.
On Tuesday, after checking up on her daughter once again,
Griffen says she was reassured that the prison’s medical staff
would "take good care" of Kelly-Jo.
More
Copyright
2003 The Boston Phoenix
Reproduction of this material constitutes a 'fair use' of
copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the
U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C.
Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for
research and educational purposes.