Federal prosecutors should launch a civil rights probe into the 2013 death of a mentally ill Rikers Island inmate who was locked in his cell for six days without care or medication, a state oversight panel concluded in a review that called the treatment “so incompetent and inadequate as to shock the conscience.”
Bradley Ballard, a 39-year-old paranoid schizophrenic with diabetes, died shortly after a doctor finally went into his cell and found him naked, covered in feces and badly infected from a piece of cloth he tied tightly around his genitals.
The review by the New York State Commission of Correction, obtained by The Associated Press, said the lapses by the city and its medical provider, Corizon Health Inc., violated state law and “were directly implicated in his death.”
“Had Ballard received adequate and appropriate medical and mental health care and supervision and intervention when he became critically ill, his death would have been prevented,” the report said. “The medical and mental health care … was so incompetent and inadequate as to shock the conscience.”
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“I need help,” Ballard told the doctor.
He died in a hospital hours later after suffering three heart attacks in quick succession.
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
