by Tina Williams
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| A 37-year-old woman died Friday morning while incarcerated at the Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed. The department identified the deceased woman as Elizabeth Hagerty. Staff found her unresponsive and initiated life-saving measures before she was pronounced dead at 12:48 a.m., according to a department spokesperson. The cause of death is still pending and an investigation is underway. Hagerty is one of at least three people in their 30s to die suddenly in the last week at a prison without full air conditioning. —Nexstar, June 30, 2023 |
—The Texas Tribune, June 29, 2023
two weeks
after our last class
with the women in white
news comes that someone
on the unit has died
with no cause given
for her death
but it may have been cancer
or a work-related incident
or a weak heart
with guards finding her bent
over a commode
scrubbing her uniform but
let us consider
why she is here
and how we reap
what we sow
she from what perhaps
an uncle sowed
which was destined
not to grow a child
but something harder
with teeth
until one day
she lifts a necklace
or moves heroin
or simply waits in the car as told
and by the time
she figures out the pop
someone is screaming drive
and the road leads
to the Lane Murray Women’s Unit
in Texas where the heat is 100
and the senate
sees scant need for AC
in a concrete block
on the last day in June
when she dies at 37
with no cause given
for her life
either
Author’s Note: I volunteer with a non-profit organization that offers trauma-informed classes for women in several prisons in Central Texas. The class I facilitated at the Lane Murray Unit ended in March, but another of our classes there ended two weeks before the reported death of a 37-year-old woman on the Lane Murray unit. I used the article and my experience working with women in Texas prisons to tell an Everywoman story. My poem imagines the way a woman may have been found, the childhood trauma that may have led her life to spiral, the crimes that may have led to her incarceration, and the circumstances that may have contributed to her death.
Editor's Note: Nexstar reported that 64-year-old woman died at the same facility one week earlier: "Inmates expressed concern Thursday afternoon that the deceased became ill due to heat, according to a member of Texas Prison Community Advocates and former Murray Unit inmate in communication with people on the inside."
Tina Williams lives in Austin, Texas, and has had poems published in Borderlands and The Concho River Review.