TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — It was the hottest September in more than a century in parts of South Florida, and Dwayne Wilson could hear his 81-year-old fellow inmate gasping for breath and crying out for help at the Dade Correctional Institution, 45 miles southwest of Miami on the edge of the Florida Everglades. The elderly man was confined to a wheelchair and for weeks had been complaining of severe chest pain and difficulty breathing in the unventilated dorm where he was serving his sentence, according to a federal class action lawsuit filed this week on behalf of Wilson and two other inmates at the prison.
Early on the morning of Sept. 24, the wheelchair-bound inmate, who is identified in the lawsuit as J.B.
, was heard once again begging for help, according to the lawsuit. A prisoner wheeled him to the infirmary, where within 15 minutes medical staff ordered him to return to his cell, according to legal filings. Soon after, J.
B. was found unresponsive, his mouth gaping open, the lawsuit says. Attorneys said that on the day the 81-year-old died, the exhaust fans in his dorm weren't working and the heat index had climbed to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).
Living in the prison's unairconditioned cells could feel like “being locked in a sardine can with no air to breathe,” an inmate identified in the lawsuit as G.M. said, and the heat had taken a toll.
The lawsuit filed this week by the prison reform advocacy group Florida Justice Institute says that heat at th.
