THE LONELIEST PLACE TO DIE
HIS DAD WARNED ME. HE SAID IT’D BE DIFFICULT TO READ. I PRINTED THE EIGHT-PAGE DOCUMENT ANYWAY AND LEFT IT ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF MY DESK FOR A FEW DAYS. BOLDFACE WORDS ON THE COVER SHEET WOULD CREEP INTO MY PERIPHERAL VISION, THOUGH, AND AFTER TAKING A FEW DEEP BREATHS, I PICKED UP THE PAPERWORK. NO ONE, I THOUGHT, SHOULD HAVE TO READ THE AUTOPSY REPORT OF A FRIEND.
Using the emotionless prose of a pathologist who sees dead bodies every day, the coroner described Brian Heath Roundtree’s six-foot, 165-pound frame, brown hair, graying beard, and blue eyes. She noted that he looked roughly his age, which was 43.
They were prosaic details, things even an acquaintance would’ve observed. But I’d known Brian for a little more than 13 years as a co-worker and a friend, so when the coroner indicated a small scar on his lower back, recounted his pierced left ear, and chronicled several tattoos I knew the stories behind—the names and birthdates of his first two children on his right forearm, his wedding date on his stomach (“Til the wheels come off 5-14-05”), crude lettering of his nickname “Tree” on his left ankle—a smile tugged at my lips.
In life, Brian always had a story to tell. He was one of those people who seemed to have squeezed two lifetimes into the space typically reserved for one. After a beer or two, he would unfurl outlandish anecdotes from a troubled early adulthood—the time he spent on the streets, the drugs he did, the women he slept with, the serious legal trouble he got into—in a way that made you feel as though he had never left out a single detail, no matter how damning or disheartening. His candor was charming. His self-deprecation, irresistible. To know Brian was to know him fully. He had nothing to hide.
Except that wasn’t really true. The remaining notations in the autopsy report reminded me that, like anyone else, Brian had kept some things mostly for himself. Three names I’d never heard him mention were inked into his skin. Several other words had been purposefully made illegible. Scripted on the inside of his left wrist was “Be the water,” and scrawled on his shoulder was a quote from Henry David Thoreau.
Apparently, Brian still had tales to share, but it would be his body that would reveal the details of his life’s closing chapter, a story he wouldn’t be able to narrate himself. Even with his preternatural ability to turn a lesson learned the hard way into amusing happy hour chatter, Brian would’ve struggled to explain his final weeks, days, and hours. The fog of major depression—something else he had hidden from most of us—can engulf the mind and make even the most irrational decisions seem rational. That may have been why, in part, on January 19, 2018, Brian lay prostrate on a stainless steel table wearing an orange shirt and pants stamped with “Arapahoe County” and why the coroner concluded that there were fractures of the laryngeal cartilage consistent with suicide by hanging. It was the fourth time the Arapahoe County coroner had seen such a death in the county jail in as many years.
COUNTY JAIL IS where many people land when life takes an unexpected, dramatic, and potentially criminal wrong turn. Perennially underfunded, inundated by the ebb and flow of arrestees and detainees, run by elected sheriffs who can come and go every four years, and subject to zero statewide standards in Colorado, county jails vary wildly in quality.
Recently, critics and activists have directed their ire at the gross deficiencies of jailhouse health care. Inmates, they say, are not receiving necessary medications, being seen by appropriate providers, or having their health concerns taken seriously—all of which has led to negative outcomes and bad press, particularly for the large, for-profit health care companies that are increasingly contracting with county jails.
The free public rarely dispenses much compassion for the woes of the incarcerated community. But, according to everyone from county sheriffs to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), it should. “It’s really a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ situation,” says Denise Maes, public policy director for the ACLU of Colorado. In other words, one extra cocktail, one bar fight, one unpaid fine, one lapse of character, or
