Steven Zerbe was black and blue from head to toe, and his eyes were swollen shut. He was in respiratory failure, acute liver failure and had pneumonia when he died — six days after he was transported to Baptist Hospital in Pensacola from Santa Rosa Correctional Institution in June 2014.
Prior to his death, Zerbe, 37, who was legally deaf and blind, had alleged — to both his mother and prison officials — that he had been beaten, raped and knifed during his brief eight months in the Florida state prison system.
So how did Zerbe die? That’s a question that his mother, Bonnie Zerbe, has been trying to get answered for nearly two years. The medical examiner, who initially didn’t even want to conduct an autopsy, said he died of complications of lymphoma. But her son was never diagnosed with lymphoma, according to Zerbe.
His mother demanded the autopsy, his medical records and video from the prison in hopes they would explain how her son ended up so bruised and deathly ill. Prior to his death, she asked a nurse to take photographs of her son, showing what appeared to be large bruises all over his body.
His mother demanded the autopsy, his medical records and video from the prison in hopes they would explain how her son ended up so bruised and deathly ill. Prior to his death, she asked a nurse to take photographs of her son, showing what appeared to be large bruises all over his body.
But Zerbe, and many other families of inmates who died in Florida state prisons, have been routinely denied video and other documents by the Florida Department of Corrections, which cites medical privacy laws as well as legal exemptions related to security concerns, to prohibit their release. Often, the only way a family can obtain any information about an inmate’s death is to hire an attorney and hope to prevail in court.
The state maintains that releasing prison video, in particular, compromises the security of the prison system and, in Zerbe’s case, could reveal sensitive information that would endanger officers and other staff at Santa Rosa, one of the state’s toughest prisons.
But two years before Zerbe’s death, the state signed off on a reality TV show that spent eight weeks at Santa Rosa, filming many angles of the Panhandle prison, from the maximum confinement unit to gritty cells splattered with blood. Viewers could get an inside view of life behind bars, revealing where security cameras are located, when and how officers conduct searches, and even get a brief tutorial from an inmate on how to make a handcuff key out of a battery, then hide it in a roll-up deodorant container.
The result was a six-part series, Lock-up: Santa Rosa Extended Stay, which was part of MSNBC’s ongoing documentary series about prisons across the nation.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/special-reports/florida-prisons/article60272121.html