Inmate dies of drug OD
‘Heartbreaking & infuriating,’ sez advocate
A 31-year-old Rikers Island inmate died Wednesday after overdosing on drugs at a women’s jail, the Daily News has learned.
Mary Yehudah took the drugs Tuesday at the Rose M. Singer Center and went into medical distress, sources said
A correction officer came to her aid and contacted medical personnel, who gave Yehudah Narcan and revived her to the point where she was breathing on her own, the sources said.
Medics then took Yehudah to Elmhurst Hospital Center, where she died about 5:11 a.m. on Wednesday.
“I’m very upset, enraged, let down,” said Jamar Uno Dunning, Yehudah’s cousin. “[She] believed in helping out, taking care of her family.”
Yehudah is survived by two biological sisters, he said. She is the fifth Rikers Island detainee to die this year.
Advocates said Yehudah’s death is the first involving a detainee at the jail commonly known as Rosie’s since Layleen Polanco died in June 2019 after an epileptic seizure in solitary confinement.
Seventeen correction officers faced discipline for breakdowns in preventing Polanco’s death.
“This tragedy is both heartbreaking and infuriating,” said the Rev. Sharon White-Harrigan, head of the Women’s Community Justice Association and the Beyond Rosie’s campaign. The group called for Rosie’s to be closed and replaced by a “healing justice center for women” in Manhattan.
Yehudah was arrested on Feb. 11 on a robbery charge and entered Rikers the following day.
“Ms. Yehudah’s passing fills us with sadness; every life here is precious. Our thoughts are with her family and loved ones,” said Correction Commissioner Louis Molina.
The cause of the death is under investigation, officials said.
Her death came one day after the city submitted a plan to a Manhattan federal judge detailing how the Correction Department will regain control of Rikers Island. Federal prosecutors have said they’re mulling a court request for outside leadership to take over the chronically dysfunctional jails.
The News has previously reported on staffing breakdowns that preceded the deaths of three other Rikers inmates this year. In each of the three cases, correction staff either was not doing required rounds or simply was absent from the units when the detainees went into medical distress, according to the Board of Correction.
On Monday, The News reported on the lack of mental health treatment for the fourth Rikers inmate to die this year, Dashawn Carter, 25. The detainee arrived at the jail without a mental health designation noting he’d been on suicide watch just last year, according to records. Carter hanged himself in his cell in general population on May 7.
Sixteen inmates died in city custody last year.
“Twenty-one people died in these jails in just the last year and a half. Mary Yehudah was only 31 years old. The city must decarcerate now,” said Anisah Sabur, an organizer with the Halt Solitary campaign.
Yehudah was first at Rikers from Sept. 7, 2020, to Sept. 21, 2020, for allegedly robbing a man at knifepoint, the Bronx district attorney’s office said. She was released on bail, then failed to appear and a bench warrant was issued that October.
She was taken into custody again in Brooklyn on Feb. 11 as a person of interest in a domestic violence case, but prosecutors there declined to bring charges. Yehudah was held on the still-pending Bronx case, a source familiar said.
Bronx prosecutors requested bail because of her failure to appear in court, the Bronx DA’s spokeswoman said. The judge set $10,000 bail.