Latandra Ellington, 36, died Wednesday at Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, less than 24 hours after her family called prison officials to express concerns about her safety.
Ellington was in solitary confinement when she died after being placed there by prison staff in response to her complaints about the threats. In a letter to her aunt a week before she was put in confinement and died, Ellington wrote that a guard, identified as “Sgt. Q,” had threatened to “beat me to death and mess me like a dog.”
Benjamin Crump and Darryl Parks, lawyers representing Ellington’s aunt Algerene Jennings, wrote in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday that
a private autopsy by a doctor hired by the family “revealed hemorrhaging caused by blunt force trauma consistent with kicking or punches to the lower abdomen.” The lawyers asked Holder to open an investigation into her death, citing a backlog of inquiries into inmate deaths by Florida officials and a lack of confidence about the likelihood of an impartial and timely investigation by state and local law enforcement.
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Contrary to the findings by the private doctor hired by the family, an autopsy by the medical examiner found “that there was no identifiable trauma anywhere in the body,” Crews said. Toxicology reports have not yet been completed and a cause of death has not yet been determined, he said.
“At this point, that’s all we know. So right now what we have is conflicting information between the medical examiner and whoever this physician is or doctor is that the family decided to hire,” Crews said.
But he also acknowledged that the circumstances surrounding the death of the mother of four, who had seven months left in her sentence for fraud charges for filing fake tax returns, would likely be met with skepticism by an already suspicious public.
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