Advocates say preventing prison suicide has not been a priority for the state
"They left him everything to hang himself."
Guy Duffy predicted that he was going to die in the Essex County jail in Middleton. Barely two weeks into a 30-day sentence for animal cruelty — Duffy’s first time behind bars — the retired sign maker tearfully told his wife that he couldn’t eat or stop shaking. He was losing weight, he said, and losing hope.
“I’m gonna die here,’’ he told Laurie Duffy in a recorded call in July 2015. “I’m breaking down.’’
Corrections officers twice sent Duffy to the infirmary, where staff dressed him in a paper antisuicide gown and kept him behind a glass door for constant monitoring. But Duffy hated it, believing the staff was laughing at him. Eventually, they moved the anxious inmate to “protective custody” in a single cell, records show, because he was afraid to be with other prisoners.
There, alone with his confusion and pain, Duffy hours later made a noose out of stripped bed sheets and hanged himself on a coat hook. He died just 10 days before he could have returned a free man to his North Andover home.
The suicide of former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley last month has put a harsh spotlight on the suicide risk for inmates in state prison. But Guy Duffy is part of a much bigger — and largely unnoticed — group who’ve taken their lives while behind bars in this state’s county jails, where inmates serve shorter sentences or await trial.
Read the complete story at BostonGlobe.com.
Don’t have a Globe subscription? Boston.com readers get a 2-week free trial.
