"Ken Kelley" by Wilma Parker (2008)
Kate Coleman, investigative reporter and close friend of Ken Kelley's, has been looking into the circumstances surrounding his death last January. Here are her conclusions.
"Just to let all of you know what I know, I talked to a family member of Ken's who has seen both the autopsy reports and Ken's medical records at various hospitals where he was sent during his last days.
"It had troubled me and others that Ken had been diagnosed when first admitted with three cracked ribs and a broken eye socket, which suggested the possibility that he'd been beaten.
"What I learned is that Ken told the admissions people at the hospital that he'd been about to use the toilet when he fell, which could certainly explain the broken eye socket, the most troubling of his injuries. The cracked ribs may have been old. He'd fallen (he had epileptic seizures) several times and, as he was very heavy in prison when I'd seen him last, it was certainly conceivable that he might well have cracked some bones if he fell unconscious. As I said, he had fallen unconscious a number of times.
"So I think it's safe to say he might well have fallen on his own and hurt himself.
"There were other questions about his being released from the first hospital before he was really okay (he'd been on a respirator because he'd been diagnosed there with pneumonia) and perhaps because it was an outside facility, the county might have been counting the money it was costing them, along with the guards they had to hire to watch over a prisoner not in their own facility (Ken, not having been a convicted felon was sent to a non-prison facility).
"All of that is not particularly actionable in a lawsuit, primarily because, sadly, Ken's health was rather awful on many scores. Hence, as his family member weighed in as much as to say, anything could have killed him, he had so many different health problems.
"The final point is that at one point in Ken's incarceration, he was, indeed, assaulted. A Mexican gang member, in Ken's telling to me, had approached Ken while he was on the prison pay phone, demanding Ken end his call. Needless to say, even with some prison tough guy, Ken was not easily intimidated and told him to go do it to himself; whereupon, the guy whupped him.
"Ken was so outraged he wrote to me enclosing a letter to the Alameda County District Attorney, Tom Orloff, saying he wanted to press charges against his assailant. (No bones were broken, etc.) Orloff passed on it.
"So, if Ken had been beaten and had his eye socket broken or ribs busted, I doubt he would have covered up about it when he was admitted to the hospital. I'm satisfied that the first of his bad cascading medical problems, at the very least, was not the result of a brutal prison beating as I had first feared."
Kate Coleman
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