Mom ‘angry’ about death of son, others in Barton jail
Inquest will look into drug-related incidents
As the family of Brennan Bowley prepares for his funeral, they are overwhelmed with sadness and questions, but most of all anger.
They’re angry that the 23-year-old is gone.
But also angry that he appears to be one in a growing line of inmates at the Hamilton Wentworth Detention Centre to die of a suspected drug overdose.
“I’m at the stage where I’m angry,” said his mom, Tamara Bowley, who is now focused on caring for her son’s two-year-old daughter and pushing for answers in his death.
“I grieve at night when the baby is asleep or have a cry in the shower,” she said.
“I’m not letting it get pushed under the carpet.”
A long-awaited super inquest examining the drug-related deaths of eight Hamilton inmates between 2012 and 2016 is set to begin April 9 and last for six weeks. This inquest has faced multiple delays — all while more people (at
least five) have died at the Barton jail.
The inmates whose deaths will be examined are: Louis Angelo Unelli, William Acheson, Trevor Ronald Burke, Martin (Marty) Tykoliz, Stephen Conrad Neeson, David Michael Gillan, Julien Chavaun Walton, and Peter Michael McNelis.
More recent deaths will likely have their own individual coroner’s inquests, where a jury decides cause of death and makes recommendations to prevent similar deaths.
This includes four “undetermined” inmate deaths last year, said Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services spokesperson Andrew Morrison.
Undetermined is how the ministry classifies non-medical deaths.
Ryan McKechnie, 34, died June 29 after being found unresponsive in his cell. A partial toxicology screening suggested the deadly opioid fentanyl was in his system. The other three deaths also in 2017 happened Jan. 11, Aug. 21 and Nov. 28.
Then, just 18 days into this year, there was Bowley. He died Thursday, just after 10:30 p.m., after being found unresponsive in his cell. His mom said she was told there were drugs, suspected to be cocaine, hidden in his body that appeared to burst out of their packaging.
He had been sick, vomiting, since the day before he died, including vomiting in the prisoner’s box at court. The morning before his death he was too sick to appear in court. His mother said she called the jail and asked if he needed to go to hospital, but was reassured staff were keeping an eye on him.
Other inmates have told the family he was continuously vomiting in his cell, that he couldn’t stand and at one point appeared to be hallucinating.
Bowley also said she saw bruises on his face that do not make sense.
The exact cause of death is unclear, as it takes months for toxicology test results.
But Bowley said she believes her son was hiding drugs inside his body when he was taken to jail.
He was facing drug charges after being arrested in front of the family’s home Tuesday. He died waiting for a bail hearing. Now his family is questioning what exactly killed him, including whether the burst drugs contained a mix of any opioids, such as the deadly fentanyl.
The amount of cocaine that could cause an overdose can vary significantly from person to person, said Dr. Ian Preyra, head of the emergency department at St. Joseph Healthcare Hamilton.
Speaking generally and not about any of the jail cases, he said a common way hospitals see cocaine overdoses is when people try to smuggle the drug inside their body, an act often referred to as packing.
Someone overdosing from cocaine can get chest pain, sweating, confusion, delirium, shortness of breath, seizures. Unlike opiates, there is no antidote, but rather doctors treat the symptoms, Preyra said. For instance a heart attack would be treated like a regular heart attack.
This is more complicated when cocaine is mixed with other drugs.
“It’s really hard to treat them, because they have two competing substances,” he said.
Fentanyl is a powerful narcotic that has a short half-life — meaning it metabolizes quickly. Overdose symptoms include losing consciousness, becoming sleepy, blurred speech, low blood pressure, respiratory problems, coma and death.
In an acute situation where someone takes too much of the drug and quickly overdoses, it’s often easy to see what went wrong. If caught in time, a patient can be saved with the antidote naloxone.
But a “chronic overdose” where there is a buildup of the opiate in a person’s body over time — from a slow leak, for instance — is much harder to detect, Preyra said.
It’s also impossible to tell from toxicology tests whether a person’s overdose was chronic or acute.
To complicate matters, Preyra said, vomiting can be a symptom of many things — overdose, withdrawal, virus and infection — making it very hard to determine what’s really going wrong.
Bowley said her son sold drugs, but wasn’t a drug user, adding that he was perfectly healthy when he was arrested.
She questions how the drugs she believes he was carrying were not detected, since the jail is equipped with a body scanner.
This technology is part of the ministry’s focus on “preventing contraband from entering into correctional facilities in the first place,” Morrison said. Staff is also trained to do frequent searches.
But insiders say the technology is not absolute, and small or disguised packages can slip past.
This is especially a challenge with the potent fentanyl and carfentanil, in which inmates are carrying very small packages, said Monte Vieselmeyer, chair of Ontario Public Service Employees Ontario’s corrections division, representing correctional officers.
A Hamilton Spectator investigation in 2015 into jail overdose deaths looked through 18 inquests held over the previous decade into 19 overdose deaths in provincial jails.
It found a startling number of similar recommendations repeated over and over again.
One of those cases examined was of a man who died of an accidental cocaine overdose after a plastic container of the drug hidden in his rectum burst at the Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee in 2008.
There are similar threads through many of the deaths, including claims that inmates were asking for help, and that inmates were not properly checked.
A visitation for Bowley will be held at Cresmount Funeral Home, 322 Fennell Ave. E. on Thursday from 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. The funeral is Friday at 1 p.m. in the funeral home’s chapel, followed by internment at Woodland Cemetery.