The Georgia sun scorched the slab of concrete beneath Juan Carlos Ramirez Bibiano’s body when nurses found him in a puddle of his own excrement, vomiting, according to a complaint.
Officers left Ramirez in an outdoor cell at Telfair State Prison on July 20, 2023, for five hours without water, shade or ice, even as the outside temperature climbed to 96 degrees by the afternoon, according to a lawsuit brought by his family. That evening, the complaint says, Ramirez died of heart and lung failure caused by heat exposure. He was 27.
Ramirez’s family, including his mother, Norma Bibiano, announced a lawsuit against the Georgia Department of Corrections on Thursday, alleging that officers’ negligent performance of their duties caused his death. The warden directed officers to check on inmates, bring them water and ice and limit their time outside, the complaint says.
The Department of Corrections reported that Ramirez died of natural causes, Jeff Filipovits, one of Norma Bibiano’s attorneys, said at a news conference in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta.
Go stand in that heat for 5 hours. Go ahead we will wait for you to report back on how easy it was to survive.
I mean, I’ve worked in agriculture pulling weeds in those temps and setting up irrigation lines. It was literally 30° F hotter in my job where I stand in front of the kitchen door a couple weeks ago. It’s a far cry from comfortable, especially if you don’t have access to water, but I can’t imagine dying from it, absent some other health condition that was aggravated by it.
Also, just to be clear, I absolutely think it’s abusive to leave an inmate in such conditions without access to water and shade, I’d just be surprised to hear it was fatal in an otherwise healthy young person.
Lol, tell me you haven’t worked in agriculture without saying it. These are not wet fields, it was drip lines strung over pots with a black plastic tarp laid out underneath, so you get to enjoy the heat being reflected back up to you. Yet another liberal on the internet that wants to speak on behalf of people whose experiences they have no frame of reference for.
A person working in hot conditioms has the ability to back out and find AC and shade if they are starting to feel heat sick. A prisoner just suffers.
It amazes me how incapable of a little empathy some people are. What the fuck is wrong with people?
A person working in hot conditioms has the ability to back out and find AC and shade if they are starting to feel heat sick.
Welcome to working in agriculture, where you don’t get to do this, unless you can afford losing your job. Keep on telling me how it is in a job you’ve obviously never worked, though.
How? Yes, it is absolutely abusive behavior, but these are hardly the worst conditions people work in. It’s literally been hotter and with higher humidity in New York for a couple of weeks, let alone the sort of conditions that many work in in tropical countries, or even a significant portion of the South, a great number of which are not known for extraordinary labor rights. It’s entirely possible to point out that something should not be permitted, while also recognizing it generally wouldn’t be fatal to an otherwise healthy adult.
This does not attribute any blame to the individual, nor does it reduce the culpability of the officers that subjected them to these conditions, fwiw. Just because something should not generally be fatal does not in any way mean it’s okay to subject someone to those conditions.
