― Stephen King, “We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another,
remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except
through faith.” – Whether
this is one of life’s paradoxes or not is
unsure as it really doesn’t make much sense except that it talks about life,
birth, and death, and maybe a little bit of faith. This book is a spin-off from
my fourth book From the ‘Womb to the Tomb,’ and is an attempt to bring to the attention
of family and friends the need for better mental health care for those mentally
challenged. Too many people are dying needlessly through neglect and deliberate
indifference as society looks the other way to address this problem since the
funding for mental health clinics and hospitals has been defunded or closed
down and prisons now serve as proxy treatment centers for the seriously
mentally ill.
Tony Lester, a 26-year-old Native American incarcerated in a
Tucson prison, died because his medication and other treatment needs were not
addressed in a timely and orderly fashion. The title eludes to the fact that
when Tony Lester attempted to kill himself with a shaving razor that never should
have been issued to him while on a suicide watch.
As he cut himself with the
razors he should have never been given, Tony suffered 23 minutes of pure hell
waiting for help and the arrival of the Tucson Fire Department medical team as
there were five correctional officers, shocked and ill-trained to do the job
assigned did absolutely nothing but watch Tony die.
For 23 critical
life-threatening minutes, Tony gasped and struggled to get them to help him as
he laid there in his bed with his jugular vein severed and many more cuts on
his body. This book is the truthful story of what happened that day in cell # 8
assigned to the solitary confinement unit in the Manzanita Unit on July 12,
2010. As a close friend of the family, I was privy of a situation that became a
national headline – a newsworthy story of
how Tony was left to die, ‘bleeding out’ because nobody cared enough to stop
the bleeding and give him the help he needed. Although the case has been
settled between the agency and family, the tragedy lives on forever for family
and friends of Tony Lester.
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