Confused by language, refugee resisted deputies (video). Struggle brought a broken arm and care was delayed, lawsuit says.
View full sizeHeld by his son, Irakoze Abudu, 14, Maparo Ramadhan shows a surgical scar on his arm. Onondaga County Justice Center deputies broke his arm and noticed a protruding bone, but a jail nurse told them it was just bruised and he could go to court.Syracuse, NY -- Maparo Ramadhan was 12 when he escaped civil war in his native African country of Burundi. Police officers dragged his parents from their home and killed them, he said.
He fled to Rwanda. In 1994, a campaign of genocide chased him to a refugee camp in Tanzania for 14 years.
Political persecution, torture and murderous officers. He survived them all. It was only in a jail in Syracuse 18 months ago that he came to harm.
His upper arm broke when he resisted jailers at the Onondaga County Justice Center who tried to take him to court. The bone was sticking out of the skin. They asked a nurse to look at it.
“Yeah, it’s swollen and bruised,” the nurse told them in an exchange captured on videotape.
She put a bandage on the bleeding wound. As he moaned in agony and cried out in his native language, jailers wrapped him in a shirt and continued to wheel him to court.
The December 2008 episode left Ramadhan’s arm disabled. He’s suing the county in federal court, claiming his civil rights were violated by the county’s failure to provide competent medical care, and by the failure to provide a language interpreter. He speaks Kirundi, and jail officials contacted a Swahili interpreter.
The lawsuit, filed by lawyer Samuel Young of Legal Services of Central New York, claims the county violated federal requirements for inmates’ access to language interpreters.
The incident came 11 months before a female inmate died at the jail after moaning in pain for 14 hours from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Together, they illustrate what inmate advocates say is a problem at the Justice Center: poor medical treatment at a jail that 15 years ago was cited by the U.S. Justice Department for deplorable health care.
After The Post-Standard publicized details about the death of inmate Chuniece Patterson two weeks ago, the chairman of the county Legislature’s Public Safety Committee started looking into it. The state Commission of Correction is scheduled to issue its findings in that case in the next month. And a civil rights group planned to discuss the death in Syracuse on Saturday.
The New York Civil Liberties Union has been investigating complaints of improper medical care at the jail for more than a year, said Barrie Gewanter, director of the NYCLU’s Syracuse chapter. The cases of Ramadhan and the pregnant inmate were among them, she said.
“The information we’ve been gathering indicates the possibility of a pattern that’s very disturbing,” Gewanter said. She would not say how many cases the NYCLU has been tracking. One of the organization’s concerns is the medical training that the jail staff receives, Gewanter said.
Language barrier
Ramadhan, now 52, was arrested Dec. 27, 2008, at his home in Syracuse on a charge of assaulting his wife.
No Kirundi interpreters were around to tell him why he was arrested. As he waited in jail, he had no idea what the charges were or why deputies were coming to his cell to take other inmates away, one by one, he said in an interview through an interpreter. He remembered how authorities worked in Africa — when they took you away it was often to die, Ramadhan said. That’s why he sat down in his cell when the deputies came for him, he said.
The sheriff’s emergency response team was called. Eight to 10 deputies went into his cell, held him down and placed him in restraint belts. One of them wrenched his arm behind his back at an unnatural angle, he said. He could feel it break.
The deputies saw the blood and realized he needed medical help, they said in their reports. They took him to the nurses’ station, where registered nurse Donna Conklin examined him, the reports said.
“His right bicep area had a very severe deformity that I noticed and showed Sgt. (Alexander) Caprilozzi,” Deputy Doug Paninski wrote in a report. “He advised the nurse who again looked at it and said it was bruised and swollen and nothing else.”
In the video, which the jail routinely takes in a emergency team incident, Ramadhan was sobbing and trying in vain to communicate.
At one point, a nurse tried to pass on a message through another inmate who’s trying to interpret for Ramadhan: “Tell him we’re taking him to court and he needs to calm down.”
Another deputy, Sgt. Arthur Barksdale, wrote in a report that he’d talked with Ramadhan the day before through another inmate who spoke a language similar to Kirundi. Ramadhan had said he was afraid of what might happen to him, and Barksdale had conveyed that to other deputies in their daily briefing, he wrote. Barksdale was among the deputies surrounding Ramadhan in the nurses’ station.
“After standing there for several minutes, I noticed a bone was sticking out of inmate Ramadhan’s right arm,” Barksdale wrote.
The injury was clearly to Ramadhan’s upper arm — the humerus bone. But in Conklin’s medical notes, she said three times that he had an injury to his forearm, the lower arm. She wrote that the arm was bruised and swollen.
The lawsuit will boil down to the decision that Conklin made when she looked at the arm in the nurses’ station, Deputy County Attorney John Sharon said.
“You can see it on the video — she looks at the guy and she makes a judgment,” Sharon said. “Whether she made the correct judgment is something we’ll have to sort out as we go forward.”
Sheriff Kevin Walsh, who runs the jail, declined to comment because of the lawsuit. Conklin could not be reached for comment.
The county health commissioner, Dr. Cynthia Morrow, said she couldn’t comment on the case. But Morrow defended the care her employees give to a constantly changing, often difficult population.
Since a Justice Department investigation of the Justice Center in the mid-1990s, the jail has had in place a quality assurance committee that regularly monitors and reviews medical treatment, Morrow said. In addition to that committee, she meets monthly with the jail’s health administrator, Colleen Clancy; the head of nursing; and the jail’s medical director, Dr. James Greenwald of Upstate University Hospital.
“We try to be really careful with the quality of care that we provide,” Morrow said.
In 2008, 15,587 inmates were booked at the Justice Center and the county penitentiary in Jamesville — a daily census of 1,063, Morrow said. In that time, there were nearly 4,000 physician visits with inmates, more than 61,000 nursing visits, 324 trips to the emergency room and 92 hospitalizations, she said.
Clancy, the administrator of health care at the jail for the past 15 years, announced two weeks ago that she was resigning. But she said that decision had nothing to do with the Patterson case. She’s leaving the job that pays $87,400 a year to return to nursing, she said. Morrow called Clancy an excellent employee.
Video shows injury
Ramadhan suffered the compound fracture Dec. 29, 2008, when deputies restrained him in his cell. The 50-minute video taken from that point shows the following:
When a restraint belt was removed from the arm to reveal the injury, a deputy said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nurse, come here. Look at the arm.” The deputies told her they think he should go to the hospital, not City Court. The nurse responded that it’s just swollen and bruised, and put a bandage on it.
“Bruised?” asked one of the five or six deputies gathered around Ramadhan.
The deputies took him to court on a stretcher. When they arrived outside the courtroom, they pulled back a covering from the arm. It was grotesquely twisted and swollen. They again saw the protruding bone.
“Oooh!” the deputies shouted.
“Cappy, like I was saying, man,” Deputy Anthony Gorgoni told Sgt. Alexander Caprilozzi in the video. “This dude needs to go to the hospital.”
Caprilozzi said it was the nurse’s call, and that until she signed off, they were keeping the court appearance as scheduled.
“We’re here now. We’re two minutes away from the judge,” Caprilozzi said.
Other deputies convinced him to call for an ambulance, and Ramadhan was taken to Upstate.
Domestic argument
After his injury, Ramadhan spent another two months in jail. He was released in February 2009, after the assault charge was dismissed. His wife, Mariam Ntezimana, never wanted him charged, she said.
Jail deputies in Syracuse broke the upper right arm of Maparo Ramadhan in December 2008, then a nurse told them to transport him to court with a bone protruding through his skin. Ramadhan suffered a compound fracture of his upper right arm. He is shown in his Syracuse home. His wife, Mariyamu, and son, Daniel, 1, are shown in the background at right.
They were arguing the night her husband was arrested, she said. She was pregnant and had scratches on her arm, so police called an ambulance and she went to the hospital. She didn’t know he’d been arrested until the next day, she said.
Marapo Ramadhan said they’d gotten into an argument and both hit each other.
Ramadhan eventually had surgery to repair his arm. He still has a metal plate and screws holding the bone in place. It’s still painful, he said. He has a footlong scar along his triceps from the surgery, and a small dark spot on his biceps where the bone protruded.
He can’t raise the arm above his head, can’t lift anything heavier than 5 pounds, and his hand shakes when he tries to sign his name. The injury has kept him from getting a job to support his wife and five children, ages 1 to 14, he said.
Ramadhan had seen death all his life, he said.
Many members of the Hutu tribe in Burundi fled the country in the early 1970s to avoid the murderous regime of the Tutsis, according to Jean-Claude Ndizeye, a leader among the Burundi refugee population in Syracuse. Ramadhan is Hutu.
Ramadhan was among the Hutu who made his way to Rwanda, then Tanzania. He met his wife in a Rwandan refugee camp. His first four children were born in a Tanzania camp. His youngest was born last year in Syracuse.
“I came away from persecution and torture,” Ramadhan said. “I didn’t expect the same kind of thing here.”
Contact John O’Brien at jobrien@syracuse.com or 470-2187.