Death At Sing Sing Prison Spreads Coronavirus Panic Among Those Inside
On Monday morning, I received a frantic message from a man at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
“Lisa, this is crazy, a law library clerk just died,” wrote Bruce Bryant via JPay, an electronic mail system for people incarcerated at New York state prisons.
A few hours later, he added: “He was in isolation for a couple of weeks complaining about loss of breath, all they gave him was generic Tylenol, he supposedly had Covid 19, I think his name was Mosquero…It’s getting crazy, guys are really scared.”
The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) confirmed that Juan Mosquero, a 58-year-old incarcerated at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, had died at approximately 7:43 a.m. on March 30, after having received emergency medical attention. The Westchester County Medical Examiner will determine Mosquero’s cause of death, but if it is due to COVID-19 — the disease caused by the coronavirus — it would be the first fatality from the virus in a New York state prison.
At Sing Sing, men were already frightened before the death. On Sunday evening, Bryant called me to say he’d heard that someone who worked in the mess hall had tested positive for COVID-19. He feared the virus would quickly spread because even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended mitigation strategies for correctional facilities similar to those it has for the rest of the country — “Implement social distancing strategies to increase the physical space between incarcerated/detained persons (ideally 6 feet between all individuals, regardless of the presence of symptoms)” — there is no way to do so in prison.
Now, people inside Sing Sing, like others detained around the country, are desperate for both more protection and more information. They know the coronavirus pandemic is spreading in the U.S. broadly and in the prison system. The death was a reminder of just how dire the problem is, and how little they can...
