Asthma and heat stress were the cause of death for a man who collapsed while incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center during a string of hot days in June, according to the Will County coroner’s office.
Michael Broadway, 51, had complained about hot conditions inside the prison in the weeks leading up to his death, one of Broadway’s relatives said in July. Terah Tollner, a lawyer for Broadway’s family, said Broadway would still be alive today if medical staff “provided adequate treatment.”
“We know that death by asthma is extremely preventable and it seems very likely that if they had responded appropriately he could still be with us,” Tollner said. “No one needed much confirmation of how awful it is at that prison and how really uninhabitable it is.”
Broadway’s death put fresh attention on conditions at the aging prison near Joliet, which the state plans to tear down as part of a multiyear project expected to cost nearly $1 billion that would also involve rebuilding a women’s prison in Lincoln.
The coroner’s office finding that the cause of Broadway’s death was bronchial asthma, with heat stress and hypertensive cardiovascular disease as contributing factors, supports suspicions of his friends and prisoner advocates that Stateville’s squalid conditions were partly to blame.
Broadway, who was known to have asthma, had been housed at Stateville since 2010. On the afternoon of June 19, he was feeling hot inside his unit, which lacked air conditioning, according to the autopsy report. He also told guards he was having trouble breathing. The prison’s health care unit was called but before they arrived Broadway was found unresponsive, leading to a call to 911.
The coroner’s office records show Broadway was given Narcan — a treatment normally used for someone experiencing an opioid overdose — and that CPR was administered before emergency medical services arrived. The records also show no drug use listed in Broadway’s medical history.
The official account closely matches one given by Anthony Ehlers, another person incarcerated at Stateville, that was provided shortly after Broadway’s death by Ehlers’ attorney, Maria Makar of the Chicago-based civil rights law firm Loevy + Loevy.
Ehlers, a classmate of Broadway’s in Northwestern University’s Prison Education Program, said it was extremely hot on the day Broadway died and that he watched as a correctional officer and a medical worker responded.
“When she got here, I watched what was happening in the mirror. She immediately injected him with Narcan even though … I told her that he had really bad asthma. It had no effect,” Ehlers said. “We kept yelling at her that he had asthma and she said, ‘I heard you, I heard you!’ but she didn’t do anything. When he stopped breathing, she still didn’t do anything.”
“It was a clown show from start to finish and as a result our brother died. Needlessly. He didn’t have to die,” Ehlers said. “What that tells me is we are not safe here. As a result of these conditions, our brother died.”
Broadway, who grew up in the Roseland community on Chicago’s Far South Side, was in prison on a murder conviction following what court documents described as a gang-related shooting. He graduated from the prison education program at Stateville last year and, according to a profile posted online by the program, dreamed of teaching sociology, a subject he said helped him make sense of the disinvestment in his community.
A spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Corrections declined to comment on Broadway’s death or the coroner’s report.
State records show that five correctional officers who responded on the date and unit where Broadway was found received “team effort award commendations” for their response to a person “experiencing severe respiratory distress.”
The officers “expertly facilitated the safe transport of the individual down multiple flights of treacherous stairs” and the response ““reflects the very best of our organization,” the commendations, signed by Stateville Warden Charles Truitt, stated.
Stateville has been under additional scrutiny ever since Gov. JB Pritzker earlier this year announced a $900 million plan to dismantle and rebuild the nearly century-old facility along with Logan Correctional Center, the women’s prison in downstate Lincoln. IDOC projects the plan will take three to five years to complete, but the department has yet to issue a final timeline on the process.
The Chicago engineering and construction firm CDM Smith, hired by the state to assess the Stateville site, found the site “can accommodate two new correctional facilities,” which is in line with the department’s proposal to put both Stateville and Logan at the same location. But prison officials have said there were no plans to close down Logan until a newer version of the prison is rebuilt.
The state began transferring men out of Stateville last month following a federal judge’s order that most inmates be moved out by Sept. 30. The order followed a motion filed by civil rights lawyers representing inmates that described bad smelling drinking water and “bird feathers and excrement” in the facility.
In granting the lawyers’ request for a preliminary injunction, the judge found “a probable risk of irreparable harm from falling concrete” in many areas.
In late July, a Loevy + Loevy attorney representing Stateville inmates in a 2013 lawsuit over the prison’s conditions said there were over 420 people incarcerated at the prison. As of last week, Anders Lindall, a spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, a union representing IDOC employees, said that following the judge’s order for the state to transfer inmates from Stateville, its population was down to about 200.
The state has not specified how and when the prison’s employees will be transferred to other facilities. The union has pushed for keeping Stateville open while a newer version of it is built.
“We have started impact bargaining to ensure that AFSCME members at Stateville have employment alternatives without losing pay or having to travel very long distances,” Lindall said Monday in an email.
Stateville also faces a lawsuit over an inmate’s suicide on Christmas Day in 2022. Rayshawn Smith, who was in prison on a murder conviction, was found hanging with a bed sheet looped from a vent in his cell, according to a lawsuit filed by Smith’s mother on Aug. 1 against Stateville personnel. The lawsuit accuses prison employees of failing to adequately check on Smith or other prisoners during their shifts and falsifying records to show they made sufficient checks.
The IDOC spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Javier Reyes, CEO and founder of nonprofit Challenge II Change, said at rally in July held to call attention to Broadway’s death that inmates who die at Stateville represent “more than just a statistic or a headline.”
“They were human beings with hopes and dreams, with families and loved ones who grieved their loss. They were deserving of dignity, respect and compassion, yet they faced conditions that were deplorable,” Reyes said.
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