Name: Coronavirus cases at San Quentin soar to 190; ‘they’re calling man down every 20 or 30 minutes’
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Coronavirus cases at San Quentin soar to 190; ‘they’re calling man down every 20 or 30 minutes’

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A week ago, Jessica Miller-Marez received a troubling phone call from her husband, 37-year-old Jesse Marez, who is incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County.Something strange was happening at San Quentin, Jesse told her. A large number of prisoners had recently arrived on buses from somewhere in Southern California and had been placed in cells on the upper tiers of Jesse’s housing area — a unit known as Badger.Soon afterward, Jesse told his wife, the prison started to perform coronavirus tests on the men in Badger.At first he didn’t know why, but then he overheard corrections officers saying that the men in the upper tiers — the recent arrivals — had come from a prison in Chino with a major outbreak of coronavirus.Then he started to worry.“They keep on doing tests, and every week, somebody comes up (positive): COVID, COVID, COVID,” Marez told The Chronicle on Thursday.The doors of the cells in Badger are made of bars, not solid materials, allowing vapor and droplets to mingle in the air and fall from the upper tiers to the lower ones, where Marez was celled along with about 200 other prisoners who were not from Chino. “We breathe the same air,” he said. “We use the same showers.” For some reason, prison leaders had mingled the men from the virus-swamped facility in Chino with previously healthy and uninfected members of the San Quentin population.“It was just a big old mix-up,” Marez said.Since then, he said, he has tested positive for the coronavirus, putting his life in danger as conditions at San Quentin deteriorate and the number of coronavirus infections rises exponentially — an outbreak that was both preventable and self-inflicted.Now 159 prisoners have tested positive for the virus — a figure that has increased tenfold in the last two weeks, according to the state’s web tracker. In addition, more than 30 San Quentin employees have recently been infected.These numbers are likely to climb as the virus races through the aging, overcrowded structure.Interviews with inmates and staffers give a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the confusion and chaos that erupted behind bars as prison executives tried to keep a lid on a disaster of their own making.In late May, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation decided to transfer 121 incarcerated men from the Chino prison to San Quentin. At the time, officials in Sacramento said this was done to prevent the prisoners from falling victim to the Chino outbreak.But many of the men before the state put them on buses.This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateAndrew Aguilar, 36, has been a corrections officer at San Quentin for a little more than a year. He said that until the infected Chino prisoners were brought into San Quentin, prison staff and inmates had successfully worked together to disinfect the facility and keep the virus out. “But once these new inmates came, officers and inmates started to get worried,” Aguilar said.Part of his job was escorting the Chino prisoners, and he couldn’t understand why they had been mixed with other prisoners in the Badger unit. One day, Aguilar said, he went to Badger to bring an elderly Hispanic man to the medical clinic.“I was speaking to him in Spanish and asked him how he felt,” Aguilar said. “He stated not too well and that he was from Chino.”Aguilar realized that other men from Chino were probably sick, too.Then, on Sunday, Aguilar spiked a fever. He started to cough and vomit, and his body ached. The symptoms worsened over the next several days; he tested positive for the virus. On Thursday night, his wife saw that he was having trouble breathing and took him to the emergency room at a hospital in Sonoma County where he is now a COVID-19 patient.His 57-year-old mother, Abby Aguilar, said she is scared for her son and angry at the state for risking his health.“Who in their right mind would send infected inmates without testing them to a state prison, San Quentin, where there were no cases?” she said. “I can’t believe it.”Coronavirus In PrisonsNext to the Badger section where the Chino prisoners were initially housed, there is a housing unit called Donner, with 200 to 250 cells. No men from Chino were placed in Donner. But a number of prisoners in Donner now appear to be getting sick.Before the prisoner transfer, “We had everything under control,” said Marcel Carey, 30, a San Quentin prisoner in the Donner unit, during a phone call Thursday. “As soon as (the Chino men) got here, there was an outbreak. Now everybody over here has the symptoms. ... It’s just spreading like crazy.”Parts of Donner and Badger serve as intake centers for new prisoners coming into the system. Carey says he has been stuck in the intake area of Donner since December and is eligible for parole next summer. If not for the pandemic, he says, he would have already been sent home on time served. Now he’s stuck in limbo.“This outbreak is crazy,” said Marlon Slaffey, 42, another incarcerated man in Donner. He said he is sick, with a cough and chills, and many other men in his unit are also showing symptoms of COVID-19: “They’re throwing up. Can’t even hold glasses of water down. Diarrhea. People can’t breathe. They’re calling ‘man down’ every 20 or 30 minutes.”Added Slaffey, “Everybody was clean until the Chino bus(es) came.”According to an internal memo sent by the prison’s acting warden this week, the Donner section and another housing unit, Alpine, have been placed under medical quarantine. And on Saturday, a prisoner tested positive in San Quentin’s North Block, which holds about 750 inmates, and North Block was placed under quarantine as well.The design of the prison makes it hard for staff to manage the growing outbreak. Most of San Quentin’s cells have old-fashioned bars instead of solid doors that create a barrier against droplets. So when prisoners test positive for the virus, they are sent to an area of the prison often used for punishment — the Adjustment Center — because the cells there have solid doors.Maura Bailey, a 35-year-old Sacramento woman, said her husband, Robert, is incarcerated at San Quentin, serving a short sentence for a low-level drug offense. He tested positive for the virus after the Chino prisoners arrived and was transferred to an isolation cell in the Adjustment Center, along with other infected prisoners.“He basically said he’s in The Hole. He’s in solitary confinement,” Maura Bailey told The Chronicle. She said he is suffering from high blood pressure and joint pain, and aside from a once-daily check of his vital signs by prison staff, he doesn’t have access to proper medical care.Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.“Are they going to just be left — I hate to say it — to die in there?” she said. “That’s how it really feels sometimes.”All of the Chino prisoners have now been moved to the Adjustment Center as well.Prison officials declined to answer detailed questions about the outbreak and provided inaccurate statements to lawmakers and to The Chronicle.Initially, the Corrections Department said that the Chino prisoners had been tested prior to arriving at San Quentin and that they “were not exposed to the general population.”“The false statements are a serious problem,” said Assemblyman Marc Levine, who represents Marin County and has long raised alarms about the prison system’s vulnerability to the pandemic. “We need accurate information.”This week, Dana Simas, a state Corrections Department spokeswoman, said that San Quentin is isolating prisoners who test positive for COVID-19. She did not respond directly to several questions sent Thursday, including questions about the Chino inmates being mixed with the San Quentin inmates and the virus jumping from one group to the other.In an emailed statement Friday, Simas said that extra public health staff have been dispatched to San Quentin. Medical providers, she said, are “working diligently to provide testing and assessments to the incarcerated population within the institution in order to make immediate housing and health care decisions” for prisoners who test positive or develop COVID-19 symptoms.In a federal court filing Thursday, state attorneys representing Gov. Gavin Newsom blamed the outbreak on the prison system’s provider of medical care, California Correctional Health Care Services.Newsom’s attorneys wrote that on May 23 Health Care Services gave prison leaders a list of 691 men at the Chino prison who were especially vulnerable to COVID-19 and had tested negative for the virus. Health Care Services directed prison officials “to transfer the listed inmates” out of Chino, according to Newsom’s filing.A Health Care Services spokesperson did not provide direct answers to questions about the claims in Newsom’s filing, but said that decisions about the transfer were made “jointly” with the Corrections Department.Legislators and advocates for prisoners say that the situation at San Quentin was fully preventable — the result of poor planning and errors by prison officials that have endangered prisoners and staff.For the past three months, attorneys for prisoners and justice reform activists have argued that the California prison system is overmatched by the virus and can’t possibly get control of spreading outbreaks unless it releases tens of thousands of prisoners to relieve overcrowding — a step that prison officials and Newsom have resisted, even while allowing some categories of prisoners to be released a few months early.In April and May, Levine pushed state prison leaders to plan for a surge of infections at San Quentin that could overwhelm local hospitals. In a May 26 letter to Levine, California’s top prison official, Corrections Department Secretary Ralph Diaz, explained that the department was taking a centralized approach, monitoring the pandemic from Sacramento.Loved ones of San Quentin prisoners and employees say they are struggling to understand how the state could have been so reckless.“I’m really frustrated and scared for my husband,” Jessica Miller-Marez told The Chronicle. “Just because he’s an inmate doesn’t mean he has to die from COVID-19. He shouldn’t have even been exposed in the first place.”Abby Aguilar, the mother of the sick corrections officer, said that state officials are trying to cover up their mistakes.Her son’s illness, she said, was caused by “somebody’s negligence — somebody who works in these offices, high and nice and plush and air-conditioned. They don’t care about the frontline workers.”Jason Fagone and Megan Cassidy are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: , Twitter: ,Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.

A week ago, Jessica Miller-Marez received a troubling phone call from her husband, 37-year-old Jesse Marez, who is incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County.Something strange was happening at San Quentin, Jesse told her. A large number of prisoners had recently arrived on buses from somewhere in Southern California and had been placed in cells on the upper tiers of Jesse’s housing area — a unit known as Badger.Soon afterward, Jesse told his wife, the prison started to perform coronavirus tests on the men in Badger.At first he didn’t know why, but then he overheard corrections...

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Megan Cassidy

Jason Fagone

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Coronavirus cases at San Quentin soar to 190; ‘they’re calling man down every 20 or 30 minutes’

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