This story was told by a person incarcerated at Donovan.
Caller: But it’s all good. I’ve just, I’ve been hanging in there. I’ve been hanging in there, like I said I’m an optimistic person, so I tend to look on the brighter side of things, but it’s been difficult emotionally and mentally and, you know, but I’m making the best of it.
UCI: And I, I think you mentioned this and how the, how you could improve the situation at the facility, but I don’t know if you would mind repeating that part and your perspective and how you would change things to better the facility and how they handled the situation.
Caller: Well, I’ll say, like, it needed to start with this prison following its own policies and the policies of CDCR. Meaning there were policies that said infected people and uninfected people shouldn’t be mixed together for a period of time. This prison needed to respect that and honor that and separate people.
They didn’t and as a result, people gotten, more people got infected and more people, more people died. This happened several months ago. I personally know a guy that passed away, his name was [redacted] and it boils, I actually know several people that passed away but he passed away in my building and it’s because CDC dropped the ball.
They, there were a number of infected people that tested positive that should’ve been removed but, for whatever reason, they allowed them to stay and other people got infected as a result and people died. Now I can’t say for certain how people got infected or if he died because this or that. But what I can say is that there were at least 20 people in my building that tested positive and instead of moving them out of the building like they were supposed to do, they allowed them to stay in the building and the virus spread.
And it spread fast and people died, a number of people died. So, you know, like I said, that happened several months ago, so now they have started doing that policy again where you get, if you test positive, you have to go to a different yard, to a different building because people were complaining.
I know I complained to my family, people made calls down here to the prison, made calls to Sacramento and was bringing awareness to the issue. But this should’ve been, this all could’ve been prevented but this prison dropped the ball. And I know the warden has been under heat for his handling of the coronavirus and before that situation had happened and he dropped the ball again. Yeah.
