INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Chandra Kantor would have gone to the ends of the earth to save her 21-year-old adopted son. That’s how far away he seemed: Century Correctional Institution, at the tip of Florida’s Panhandle and an eight-hour drive from her home in Sebastian.
On her fifth and last visit, the drive was an hour shorter: her son, Hanuman Joyce, had been taken by ambulance to Pensacola’s Baptist Hospital with kidney failure. Hanuman had lupus, a progressive auto-immune disease that in the outside world might have been managed.
In prison, it turned his six-year sentence into a death sentence.
Days after his mother’s visit, Hanuman was shackled and put in the back of a prison van for a four-hour drive to Lake Butler, a prison complex that includes a hospital. When guards opened the van door on arrival, Hanuman was dead.
Kantor got the news just as she and Dr. Gerald Pierone were beginning a morning staff meeting in Vero Beach.
Kantor has been Pierone’s nurse practitioner for more than 20 years, starting at his AIDS clinic in Fort Pierce.
Since that day in early March, Kantor has devoted herself to finding out what happened not just to her son but to the dozens of Florida inmates emerging as victims of abuse or inadequate medical care in prison.
If Kantor’s research is correct, her son had no medical supervision on the ride. If a social worker’s notes bear out, he yelled at his guards only to be silenced, not checked on.
If her conscience is clear as she grieves, it’s because he died despite her every effort to spare him such an ignominious end.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation into his death is pending; the official autopsy report is not yet released.
But after a preliminary examination of the body, the medical examiner spoke by phone twice to Pierone, telling him Hanuman’s lungs were “heavy,” possibly indicating pneumonia.
There was no trauma to the body, no stroke, and no heart attack, though in hospital records, Pierone noted an elevated pulse of 118 – what he calls “a red flag” indicating stress.
A second autopsy paid for by Hanuman’s parents noted bruising where Hanuman was shackled. To Pierone, that indicates a struggle.
“I don’t think a person dies without making some kind of commotion,” he says.
“The worst nightmare,” says Pierone, “is being a mother who’s as medically sophisticated as Chandra is, watching this slow-motion wave in front of her and being powerless to prevent it.”
Being Hanuman’s mother was never uncomplicated. Even his adoption took two years, after Hanuman’s birth mother, an AIDS patient at Pierone’s clinic, died with no relatives to care for the baby.
Kantor called her husband and asked, “Do you mind if I bring this baby home?”
Hanuman was soon found to have severe learning disabilities coupled with a low IQ.
Kantor and her husband fretted over Hanuman’s sense of identity as the black child of white parents, attending mostly white schools. When in high school he dropped soccer to play football; he seemed eager to be around black athletes.
After spending a grueling summer of practice at Sebastian River High School, he made the varsity team. But as soon as school started, he became too weak to play.
When Hanuman’s legs swelled to the point that he had to be in a wheelchair, his parents took him to a pediatric hospital in St. Petersburg where he was diagnosed with lupus nephritis.
Doctors started a course of monthly chemotherapy in Tampa. He was put on a heavy dose of Prednisone, a corticosteroid that can cause personality changes.
Kantor says it coincided with a streak of criminal behavior.
Arrested five times on burglary charges, Hanuman was hospitalized with a lupus flare right before his sentencing.
He was taken to Indian River Medical Center in kidney failure, treated and released back to jail. Four days later, no amount of pleading by Pierone could convince Judge Robert Pegg that Hanuman was too sick for prison.
Hanuman got six years.
Hanuman entered the Florida prison system in April 2014, just months after the for-profit prison healthcare provider Corizon took over. That year, inmate deaths spiked to a 10-year high.
of 503 inmate deaths since the start of 2014, for 274, including Hanuman, cause of death has not been determined.
Kantor’s efforts at remote mothering became nearly impossible. Hanuman called her daily but didn’t always follow her advice. Going to the infirmary was a sign of weakness among inmates. And the prison doctor wanted her to quit calling, her son told her.
“I put in two formal complaints to the Corizon hotline that he wasn’t getting an adequate dose of his medication,” Kantor says. “They responded that they would ‘take it under advisement.’”
Pierone wrote to the prison doctor with specific recommendations but never got a reply.
That left Hanuman, with serious cognitive impairment, to fend for himself.
“He didn’t even understand what lupus was,” says Kantor.
When four months into the sentence, the prison doctor ordered a consultation at Lake Butler, Hanuman, then feeling fine, refused to go.
By February, Hanuman wasn’t feeling fine. Kantor called the infirmary’s head nurse to say she suspected a lupus flare. The nurse sent for Hanuman, examined him, then asked the doctor to see him, but the doctor refused, Kantor says.
The nurse then gave him Tylenol, he told his mom.
Some days later, Hanuman collapsed.
Sent to the infirmary, he was taken by ambulance to Baptist Hospital after suffering an apparent seizure.
When the daily calls from Hanuman stopped, Kantor called the infirmary and was told he was there. The next day, she learned he’d actually been at Baptist, but Baptist told her there was no one there by that name.
“I called the infirmary back and I was screaming. ‘I want to know right now: Has he died?’ And she said she was told, ‘Ma’am, I would have told you if he was expired.’”
Kantor got special permission from the warden to visit, but only for an hour. Her heart sank when she saw him: “He was the sickest I’ve ever seen.”
When a distraught Kantor followed a doctor out of Hanuman’s room to talk, a nurse accused her of harassment. A report was filed noting that if Kantor showed up again, security would escort her off hospital grounds.
Days later came the call that Hanuman was dead.
