Judith Arrascue says she has tried for months to find out what happened to her husband, Luis, a state prison inmate who died at the Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center in April.
On Tuesday, Florida’s Department of Corrections unveiled a new online database of inmate deaths that reveals Arrascue died after he “fell down on the sidewalk’’ outside one of the prison dorms.
His death, the investigative summary says, was accidental. Informed of that finding Tuesday, Arrascue remained suspicious.
Five months after the episode, she said she has no autopsy, no incident report, and no other details from the Department of Corrections, except that her husband’s head “smashed like a watermelon’’ on the concrete pavement.
My husband past away 12/3/24 from medical negligence at the hands of RMC. He was denied proper medical evaluation and continuously taken to their in house urgent care, where proper medical precautions were never rendered. My husband had pulmonary edema from his heart failure and needed to be taken to an outside hospital for thoracentesis and proper medical care . For days he was coughing up blood, so swollen he was unable to walk . His speech had become so slurred it was difficult to understand what he was saying. I reached out by email and phone calls . Almost a week later my husband sat in the hall until he went into shock 12/2/24. Even then they just pushed him from room to room before they finally took him to Shands Hospital, where doctor informed me that by the time they brought my husband in his body temp was 75 degrees ,he was in shock and his heart stopped, he said my husband was way past urgent care and should have been brought in way before… 12/3/24 my husband passed away at the age of 43. He was only at RMC barely 7 months. He suffered so much his last days because of their neglect.