Prison boot-camp death leads to $462,000 settlement
10:44 PM 1/10/03
Brenda Ingersoll Wisconsin State Journal

The state Department of Corrections has agreed to pay $462,000 to a Sun Prairie mother whose 20-year-old son died after an asthma attack at the St. Croix Correctional Center on June 30.

The department also agreed to Kimberly Gray's request that it revise policies regarding when and how participants in the Atlas and Challenge boot camp programs be required to perform physical exercise, Corrections Department spokesman Bill Clausius said Friday. After Franklin D. Homesly's death, the department barred asthmatics from boot camp programs, Clausius said.

"It's a unique event when a family insists on doing more than just receiving compensation," Gray's lawyer, Keith Clifford, said Friday. "They wanted to assure that future participants in the boot camp programs would receive safe practices and procedures in the physical training program."

Gray's lawsuit alleged that her son was forced to go for a run but collapsed, then struggled to breathe for about 30 minutes before an ambulance was dispatched. A coroner's report said he died of respiratory arrest, after inhaling vomit. Homesly had been having severe problems with his asthma, but prison staff ignored it over a period of days, Clifford said.

The lawsuit alleged that then-Corrections Secretary Jon Litscher and unnamed employees at the facility in New Richmond, about 55 miles west of Eau Claire, knew that Homesly was asthmatic and failed to exercise the appropriate standard of care, resulting in his death. Homesly's run with about 19 other prisoners was part of the Atlas Program, a voluntary military-style discipline program for drug offenders housed at the minimum-security center.

Homesly was placed on probation in April after he was convicted in Columbia County of possession of marijuana, according to court records. It was his third felony marijuana conviction. After he violated his probation, he volunteered for the four-month Atlas program, in lieu of revocation.

A 2001 audit of health care provided to Wisconsin's prison inmates, prompted by the death of an inmate at the Taycheedah women's prison, found that the quality of care in the state's prison system has been mixed. Michelle Greer, 29, died of a heart attack in 2000 after suffering an asthma attack and pleading for medical help that wasn't provided.