Rikers Teen Inmate Dies in Agony After Officials Ignore Torn Artery for Months

For
months, Andy Henriquez, a 19-year-old inmate at Rikers Island in
New York City, complained about chest pain to prison guards. Other
inmates who could hear the teen’s agonized screams pleaded with
correctional officers to help him. But the shoddy medical care
Henriquez received did nothing to alleviate his symptoms.
Eventually, a doctor wrote him a prescription for hand cream.

Hours later, Henriquez was found dead. An autopsy determined
that Henriquez had gradually succumbed to a torn aorta—something a
hospital could have treated had medical personnel bothered to
conduct cardiac examinations.

That’s according to a lawsuit filed against Corizon, the
healthcare company for Rikers, by Henriquez’s mother, Sandra De La
Cruz. DNAinfo’s Rosa Goldensohn
reports:

“I felt desperate. I felt despair, not being able to help my
child,” De la Cruz told DNAinfo New York in Spanish from her
lawyer’s office recently.

“They should have let him leave. They should have taken him to
the hospital. If I could have, I would have.”

De la Cruz is one of more than two dozen New Yorkers who have
sued Corizon since 2012, accusing the company of negligence in
medical care at Rikers and other correctional facilities. …

Henriquez’s death came two years after New York’s Commission of Correctionhad already
opened an investigation into other state inmates’ deaths under
Corizon’s watch, city records show.

The outcome of that investigation was unclear and the commission
declined to say whether it had finished or what it had found.

The guards claimed that they did not hear Henriquez begging for
help, but other inmates reported that the COs did indeed hear
Henriquez—they merely chose not to do anything about him. In either
case, the COs acted improperly, since they were supposed to be
checking on Henriquez every 15 minutes. Officers admitted that
these required checks did not take placed, according to
Goldensohn.

Henriquez entered Rikers at the age of 16. He was charged with
being part of a gang that murdered another teenager, though
Henriquez was not actually the one who committed the murder,
according to the police. His case had not yet gone to trial by the
time of his death.

No matter what his crimes were, he deserved better care than
this. Even the useless hand cream was poorly administered; the
doctor wrote the wrong name on the prescription.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time this year that Rikers
made headlines for
killing an inmate via neglect.

More from Reason TV on the incarceration of young people
below.