By Alan Johnson
The Columbus Dispatch
MARION, Ohio — “Oh, he’s dead.”
Those three words, spoken so matter-of-factly by a prison officer at Ohio State University Medical Center, hit Robin Maier like a brick when she and her 12-year-old daughter arrived at the corrections unit of the hospital about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.
She knew her husband, Jeff — inmate 607-950 — was hospitalized, but she had no idea his condition was life-threatening. She made the trip from Toledo as quickly as possible after receiving a call Tuesday morning from officials at the North Central Correctional Institution in Marion.
“He’s dead.” Was it possible?
Jeff Maier, 53, knew prison bars from both sides — as a corrections officer for more than five years and as an inmate for the past 13 months. He made the biggest mistake of his life two years ago. While working as a corrections officer, Jeff Maier was caught trying to bring drugs into a prison. He got a two-year sentence.
“I don’t know why he did it, and I never will,” his wife said. “We had a good relationship, and he was a good provider.
But when he was drinking, he wasn’t himself.”
A few months after coming to the Marion prison, Maier was diagnosed with lung cancer. In January, surgeons removed part of his lung and several ribs in hopes of stopping the spreading disease. He was told that chemotherapy and radiation treatments would follow, but they never did, his wife said. An MRI test to find the cause of his blinding headaches was scheduled but canceled.
The headaches continued, accompanied by repeated vomiting. Prison personnel told Jeff Maier it was probably a reaction to psychiatric medications he was taking. They told him to lie down and put a cold cloth on his head.
Sometime last Monday night or very early Tuesday morning, Maier was found unconscious on the floor of his prison cell. His head was swollen to nearly twice its normal size. He never regained consciousness.
By the time his wife arrived at the medical center, Jeff Maier was already in the morgue, having died at 2:45 p.m. after hospital officials disconnected him from life support with his mother’s approval. He had died shackled to his bed; such restraints are the state’s standard procedure when inmates are hospitalized.
Julie Walburn, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said on Friday that she is looking into questions about Maier’s treatment and death.
“We provide all necessary medical care to inmates in our custody,” she said. “I know no reason that we would have deviated from that in this case.”
Walburn did say, however, that the manner in which Robin Maier said she learned about her husband’s death, if accurate, “would be a concern.”
“I have someone looking into that as well,” she said.
Prison officials could not be reached yesterday for further information.
“The worst thing was that Abby, our 12-year-old daughter with Asperger’s syndrome, had to hear about her daddy’s death in that manner,” Maier wrote in an e-mail to The Dispatch.
“I feel the state was wrong in handling our family like this. He wasn’t Charles Manson, he wasn’t on Death Row. ... I hope that this is addressed and corrected so that other families don’t have to suffer like ours.”
Copyright 2010 The Columbus Dispatch