NVN Thursday: GATESVILLE TEXAS
by Tina Williams
A 37-year-old woman died Friday morning while incarcerated at the Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed. The department identified the deceased woman as Elizabeth Hagerty. Staff found her unresponsive and initiated life-saving measures before she was pronounced dead at 12:48 a.m., according to a department spokesperson. The cause of death is still pending and an investigation is underway. Hagerty is one of at least three people in their 30s to die suddenly in the last week at a prison without full air conditioning. —Nexstar, June 30, 2023
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Inmates are dying in stifling Texas prisons, but state seldom acknowledges heat as a cause of death.
—The Texas Tribune, June 29, 2023
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two weeks after our last class with the women in white news comes that someone on the unit has died with no cause given for her death but it may have been cancer or a work-related incident or a weak heart with guards finding her bent over a commode scrubbing her uniform but let us consider why she is here and how we reap what we sow she from what perhaps an uncle sowed which was destined not to grow a child but something harder with teeth until one day she lifts a necklace or moves heroin or simply waits in the car as told and by the time she figures out the pop someone is screaming drive and the road leads to the Lane Murray Women’s Unit in Texas where the heat is 100 and the senate sees scant need for AC in a concrete block on the last day in June when she dies at 37 with no cause given for her life either
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Author’s Note: I volunteer with a non-profit organization that offers trauma-informed classes for women in several prisons in Central Texas. The class I facilitated at the Lane Murray Unit ended in March, but another of our classes there ended two weeks before the reported death of a 37-year-old woman on the Lane Murray unit. I used the article and my experience working with women in Texas prisons to tell an Everywoman story. My poem imagines the way a woman may have been found, the childhood trauma that may have led her life to spiral, the crimes that may have led to her incarceration, and the circumstances that may have contributed to her death.
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Editor's Note: Nexstar reported that 64-year-old woman died at the same facility one week earlier: "Inmates expressed concern Thursday afternoon that the deceased became ill due to heat, according to a member of Texas Prison Community Advocates and former Murray Unit inmate in communication with people on the inside."
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Tina Williams lives in Austin, Texas, and has had poems published in Borderlands and The Concho River Review.