A total of five people who were incarcerated near David Mitchell have now described him pleading for medical care before he died at Southern State Correctional Facility. Spurred by his death, prisoners’ rights advocates are planning a protest in front of the Statehouse next week.

The rally, organized by the nonprofit Vermont Just Justice, will also honor other people who have died recently in Vermont’s prisons.

Mitchell was the 12th person to die at the Springfield prison since January 2022, according to official reports. The 46-year-old died on April 17 after he had “difficulty breathing,” Vermont State Police said in a press release that day.

Most of those deaths have been attributed to natural causes, death certificates show. An autopsy to determine Mitchell’s cause of death was still pending on Wednesday, and investigations by the state police, Department of Corrections and Defender General’s Office are ongoing.

The new accounts of Mitchell’s final hours, which Matthew Hewitt, 33, Louis Tobin, 36, and Randy Persad, 46, shared with VTDigger this week, largely align with those previously shared by Preston Lawson, 22, and John White, 35.

In interviews conducted over the phone, as well as using video and messaging apps, all five men described Mitchell begging for help before and after he was briefly seen by medical staff on the morning of his death. All five also said a corrections officer told Mitchell he would be sent to segregation if he didn’t stop complaining.

Four said Mitchell used an oxygen tank and three said he had been removed from buprenorphine, which is commonly used to treat opioid dependency, in the days before his death.

Corrections Commissioner Nick Deml last week denied any misconduct in Mitchell’s death, saying that an “initial review” did not line up with the account first shared by White. Deml also said Mitchell had a “robust medical history.”

Haley Sommer, a corrections spokesperson, said on Wednesday that the department would have no comment on its investigation.

A representative for Mitchell’s family declined to speak for this story.

Vermont Just Justice, a nonprofit and blog advocating for criminal justice reform, is organizing the Statehouse rally on May 4. Timothy Burgess, the Vermont leader for Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, is helping to spearhead the event.

“The basic reason for (the rally) is we have far, far too many people dying incarcerated,” Burgess said. “David Mitchell’s death is a symptom of the problem. So did his death prompt this? Probably.”

Burgess plans to speak alongside Will Hunter, a former legislator and current Windsor County resident who works to house people coming out of prison and those struggling with substance use; Leslie Thorsen, a nurse and criminal justice reform advocate from Chester; and possibly family members of those affected by the recent deaths in Vermont’s prisons, Burgess said.

More witnesses come forward

Persad, who lived two cells down from Mitchell in the “Foxtrot 2” unit, said Mitchell was begging for medical assistance on the morning of his death. Persad was initially in an outdoors area referred to as the “bullpen” where he could both see and hear Mitchell, he said.

“He kept asking, ‘Please, I really feel like something’s wrong with me.’ He was crying like real tears out of his eyes,” Persad told VTDigger in a video call from the Springfield prison on Monday.

After Mitchell continued to beg for help, medical staff visited with him for about two minutes, according to Persad. “They just placated him,” he said.

A few minutes later, Persad said, he heard cries for help and was called inside by Lawson. Once there, Persad saw Mitchell face down. A correctional officer was nudging Mitchell with his foot, telling him to “stop faking it,” Persad said, which was also described by Hewitt and Lawson. Tobin and Lawson described seeing blood on the wall from where they believed Mitchell hit his head before falling.

Fearing the worst, Persad said, he told the officer to put Mitchell on his back and begin attempts to revive him.

“I’m screaming at the top of my lungs. ‘Save his life! Bring him back! Bring him back!’ ”

It was already too late, he said.

Persad told VTDigger that people in the Springfield prison are talking about Mitchell’s death, hoping to draw attention to it. Medical care in particular is a problem, according to Persad, who said he contracted MRSA and was forced to try to treat it on his own as he waited to receive medical attention.

Persad said he and other people who witnessed Mitchell’s death were interviewed by the Defender General’s Prisoners’ Rights Office on Monday. Rubin Jennings, an investigator in the office, did not respond to questions via email on Wednesday.

Hewitt said he was previously cellmates with Mitchell in a different unit before they both moved to Foxtrot. Mitchell had contracted COVID-19 months ago in Springfield and had sporadically been denied access to an inhaler and nebulizer that he requested to treat his breathing issues, Hewitt said.

As Hewitt recalled, he was on the phone with his girlfriend around 8:30 a.m. on Monday when he first heard Mitchell’s pleas for help with his breathing struggles. Hewitt said he heard the nearby correctional officer threaten to send Mitchell to “seg” — referring to segregation, or solitary confinement — if he did not stop panicking.

Tobin lived in the cell directly above Mitchell and told VTDigger via the prisoner messaging app that the two would communicate daily by talking into the vents that connected the two cells.

“We were fast friends,” Tobin wrote. “We can talk to each other laying (right) on our beds.”

According to Tobin, Mitchell arrived in the Foxtrot close custody unit five or six weeks ago. The unit only has 16 people, Tobin said, making it unusually quiet and easy to communicate with people in other cells. Close custody units, which have a higher level of supervision, are for incarcerated people who may pose a higher risk or who have received a reprimand while in prison.

“Every day I would listen to Dave struggle to breath threw (sic) the vent and on recreation when I’d talk face to face with him,” Tobin wrote. Tobin, Persad, Lawson and Hewitt said Mitchell used an oxygen tank.

Tobin recalled Mitchell complaining about his breathing throughout the morning of April 17, even after a brief interaction with medical staff. His struggles eventually reached a tearful panic, Tobin said.

From his own cell, Tobin could see Mitchell when he left his cell, and hear what was happening inside Mitchell’s cell.

Like White, who spoke to VTDigger last week, Tobin recalled the correctional officer telling Mitchell to “lay down” and to stop complaining, eventually threatening him with “the hole” — solitary confinement — if he did not calm down.

When an officer discovered Mitchell unresponsive, Tobin said he could hear inmates telling a correctional officer to “stop kicking him.” Twenty to 30 minutes of life-saving attempts ensued, Tobin said.

Three of the people interviewed — Tobin, Lawson and Hewitt — said that Mitchell had been taken off his buprenorphine medication for opioid use either a day or two before his death.

“I wrote to case workers about his condition and suggested him be moved to infirmary,” Hewitt wrote, referring to Mitchell’s health issues.

Four of the five men interviewed by VTDigger attempted to contact the news organization last week, but messages they tried to send using the prison messaging app, called Getting Out, did not arrive until Wednesday.

In response to questions the day before, Sommer acknowledged the corrections department censors some of the messages on the platform.

“To ensure the safety and security of both our incarcerated individuals and the community,” Sommer wrote, “messages containing certain ‘watch words’ are automatically filtered into a separate communication line for our intelligence staff to read before it reaches the incarcerated individual or vice versa.

“For example, if the word ‘death’ was on our watch list, your message would automatically go to our staff to mitigate any risks associated with that word,” Sommer said.

A court backlog and a history of poor medical care

Mitchell had been in state custody since November 2022 for allegedly violating his probation related to a charge of larceny from a person, as well as a charge of misdemeanor theft, according to state police.

Mitchell also had at least 10 court dockets listed as “active-pretrial” at the time of his death, according to court records.

Falko Schilling, advocacy director for ACLU-VT, declined to speak about Mitchell specifically, but he said that the number of recent deaths in Vermont’s prisons is of great concern to the ACLU and something its staff are following.

“We’ve brought litigation in the past when we’ve seen that medical services are inadequate,” he said.

Schilling also said that the organization is “very concerned” about “a substantial rise in the number of people the state is holding pre-trial.” A court backlog since COVID has contributed to an increase in pre-trial detention, he said, as well as the discretion of prosecutors and judges.

Earlier this month, the corrections department announced it will switch its health care services provider from VitalCore to Wellpath LLC, effective July 1. The state previously contracted with Wellpath from 2010-15, when it operated under the name Correct Care Solutions.

According to Annie Manhardt, a supervising attorney in Vermont’s prisoners’ rights office, when the state switches health services providers, “it tends to be all of the same staff.” Most of what changes, Manhardt said, is the “corporate leadership.”

During its previous stint as Vermont’s prison health services provider, Wellpath drew the scrutiny of the Human Rights Defense Center and ACLU-VT after the company declined to provide records as part of a public records act request. The Vermont Supreme Court sided against Wellpath, arguing private contractors acting as an “instrumentality” of the state have an obligation to provide records to the public.

Following Wellpath’s first stint as Vermont’s prison health services provider, Centurion Managed Care took over the job in 2015.

Several years into its contract, the Virginia-based Centurion came under fire due to the quality of its care.

In late 2019, Kenneth Johnson, an incarcerated person who complained he couldn’t breathe, died in state custody at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, Vt. Several months later, Jim Baker, the interim corrections commissioner, criticized Centurion for the circumstances around Johnson’s death.

A correctional officer told Johnson that if he “did not knock it off” he would be placed in the holding area at the prison, a form of solitary confinement, according to an investigation conducted by the prisoners’ rights office. A law firm contracted by the state found that corrections staff did not do enough to help him.

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