For the second time in a year, staff at MDC Brooklyn — the troubled federal jail where Sean “Diddy” Combs is now locked up — largely ignored an inmate’s medical complaints for months as a cancerous tumor grew in his body.
Dwayne Pickett, 29, who’s awaiting sentencing in a gun trafficking case, asked for medical help 17 times between January and August, desperately describing extreme pain in his leg.
He was seen just three times by a nurse practitioner, who made no note of what would turn out to be a growing tumor on his right leg, according to federal court records. Finally, he saw a doctor at the jail on Aug. 7, and was hospitalized a day later.
Daily News Front page for July 28, 2024
“He was given nothing more than Advil when it turns out he has cancer. By the time the MDC took him to a doctor, he had a 7-centimeter tumor bulging out of his leg,” his lawyer, Kyla Wells of the Federal Defenders, told the Daily News. “Nobody from the MDC has been able to explain the constitutionally inadequate medical care provided here. It’s inexcusable.”
And his defense attorneys told the judge that Nurse Practitioner Beverly Timothy and Dr. Bruce Bialor, the same medical staff who botched the diagnosis of another cancer-stricken inmate this year, were responsible for overseeing Pickett’s health.
Delays in treatment and missed medical appointments have long been a problem at MDC Brooklyn, formally known as Metropolitan Detention Center, which has also made headlines for several recent violent incidents, including two fatal stabbings.
Defense lawyers for rapper Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, who’s awaiting trial for racketeering and sex trafficking charges, cited the horrific conditions at the jail in their failed attempt last week to get him released on bail.
Pickett’s medical treatment was the focus of a hearing on Monday where Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Nina Morrison read all 17 of his pleas for medical help into the record.
“They are frankly stomach-turning to read,” Morrison said.
The calls, which are submitted through an e-mail system made available to inmates, started on Jan. 20, when he complained about sharp pains in his right leg. He early on thought he tore his ACL or pulled a muscle playing basketball and was seen by the nurse practitioner on Feb. 22.
He was given Advil and continued on his sleep medication but things got worse from there.
Video from inside Brooklyn’s federal jail, the Metropolitan Detention Center, shows MS-13 members stab a man 44 times, attacking him for an agonizing 37 seconds before a lone correction officer arrives to stop them.
On May 1, he complained it felt like a bone in his leg was fractured and on May 24 he said it felt like he had blood clots, writing, “My pain is a 10.” It took until mid-June for him to get another appointment with the nurse practitioner.
“Every day my leg is getting worse…. Something is seriously wrong with my leg. This is not normal,” he wrote in a July 4 sick call message.
“I still haven’t been seen for my leg. I need emergency outside medical attention. I can barely walk and move my leg. It has to be blood clots. I keep telling the nurse and writing sick calls and they are doing nothing about it,” he wrote July 13. “I need to find out what’s wrong with me before it becomes life-threatening. How many times do I have to tell you all I need help?”
His third trip to the nurse practitioner July 15 ended with him getting Advil and an order for X-rays.
But the pain continued, and on July 31 he wrote, “I don’t know how many times I have to keep telling you people I need emergency outside medical attention. My leg swells up every day. I can barely walk.”
On Aug. 5, after months of sick call requests about his leg, he wrote “I need to see a doctor ASAP,” and he got the reply, “Please be more specific. What do you need to be seen for?”
“My leg. I keep telling you people the same thing,” he responded. “Now I have a big knot on my thigh. I think it’s a tumor or excessive bone.”
Finally, on Aug. 8, he was hospitalized after an appointment with Bialor.
During the hearing, Pickett said he wouldn’t have even been sent to the hospital if he hadn’t fallen out of his cell bunk.
“Besides that, they wouldn’t even assist me. Like nobody came to see me or nothing,” he told the judge. “Like, that’s the only reason I even got to see the doctor and anything is I fell off my bed and I couldn’t get up and walk.”
Neither Bialor nor Timothy were present for the Monday hearing. Rather, the jail sent two lawyers and its health care administrator, none of whom could answer whether they thought his care was “constitutionally adequate.”
“I am not clinical, that’s not my role to make that decision of whether it was clinically appropriate. That’d be for like a peer review or something of that sort,” the administrator, Robert Beddoe, said.
When the judge pressed jail lawyer Sophia Papapetru with a similar question, she answered, “I am not at liberty to say. I can’t make that determination without a clinical assessment.”
Beddoe pointed out that on March 5, Pickett refused to get an X-ray, which would be a precursor to getting an MRI. In Pickett’s most recent visit with the nurse practitioner in July, Timothy made a “detailed assessment” and noticed no tumor, only that his leg was tender to the touch and slightly swollen.
Sean “Diddy” Combs the newest resident of the infamous Brooklyn MDC.
“It’s certainly detailed. I mean, it’s wrong, because he’s got a tumor,” the judge responded.
She also dismissed the idea that a refused X-ray excused what happened next. “What happened after March? Did anyone go back to him and say, ‘Maybe you should see a doctor, like a real doctor, not just an RN or a nurse practitioner? Maybe you should go to the hospital? Let’s get you this MRI.’”
Beddoe told the judge that Bialor described the cancer as rare, “like, he’s never had a case like this before where it is this rare.”
After the hearing, Morrison blasted the Bureau of Prisons in writing on the court docket for not coming equipped with adequate answers and for sending “only an administrator from Health Services who lacked both the necessary knowledge and expertise to address the adequacy of the Bureau of Prisons’ response.”
Morrison is set to hold another hearing Thursday as she determines how best to proceed with Pickett’s sentencing as he gets chemotherapy and surgery for his cancer.
“There’s a disturbing pattern emerging here,” Wells, Pickett’s lawyer, told Morrison. She pointed to the case of Terrence Wise, whose lung cancer doubled in size while jail staff ignored his calls for help and failed to look at the result of a CT scan.
Wise is now undergoing a near-daily regimen of chemotherapy and radiation.
He first became ill last fall. A chest X-ray on Nov. 7 showed no mass in his chest but his doctor was concerned enough about Wise’s symptoms to call for a CT scan. It took until Feb. 28 to send Wise out for his scan, which showed a 3.2 centimeter mass in his chest.
But for months, nothing happened, despite repeated requests by Wise and complaints about pain and coughing up blood.
The jail apparently got the report about his scan results on March 11 and Bialor signed the report a week later, according to Wise’s lawyer’s filings. Timothy deemed the mass “benign” on April 26, court filings show.
The mass was not benign. On May 3 a needle biopsy showed its mass had grown to 6.3 centimeters. A MDC representative described the delay in treatment as “unfortunate” in a summary later given to prosecutors.
“I can tell you from my personal experience with that case, (Wise’s) treatment options became significantly different and more complicated because the tumor doubled in size,” Federal Defenders attorney Mia Eisner-Grynberg, who represented Wise and is also helping to represent Pickett, told the judge on Monday during Pickett’s hearing.
Partial view of The Metropolitan Detention Center, (MDC Brooklyn) a United States Bureau of Prisons administrative detention facility in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.
“It is especially concerning because that all happened between November of 2023 and April of 2024, and also involves Nurse Practitioner Timothy failing to correctly read a record or bring it to Dr. Bialor’s care, events that were known to the MDC Health Services staff prior to this.”
Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman Donald Murphy wouldn’t comment on whether Bialor or Timothy face any internal action or investigation.
The federal prison system has created an “urgent action team” in an effort to fix its severe staffing issues and has raise correction officer salaries and boosted both medical and correction officer staffing levels in recent weeks, Murphy pointed out.