MUSKEGON -- It began with blurred vision.

In July, Raymond Jones, an inmate at the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Facility, told his cellmate he was seeing double but shrugged it off.

"You know guys," his cellmate, Jessie Hawkins, said. "We think things will go away. I guess he thought it would go away on its own."

It didn't. His vision continued to fade, and Jones, 32, began having trouble walking. In late August, he sent a message -- a "kite" in prison lingo -- marked "urgent" asking for help. A week or so later, the prison's medical staff called him over, concluded he was dehydrated and sent him back with some pain pills, Hawkins said, although Jones had not complained of pain.

By then, other inmates were concerned. Normally outgoing and athletic, Jones was becoming sullen and withdrawn. He stopped eating. He stopped talking. He wouldn't come out of his cell.

Inmate Troy Rienstra called his mother, Carol Rienstra, in Grand Rapids and asked her to intervene. She contacted Doug Tjapkes, head of Innocent, a prisoner advocacy group in Muskegon, who sent an e-mail to Corrections Department officials through Penny Ryder, another prisoner advocate at the American Friends Service Committee in Ann Arbor.

"I have been alerted by some reliable people and good friends that a prisoner in Brooks in Muskegon is failing fast," Tjapkes wrote. "According to an inmate who can be trusted, Mr. Jones has been losing control of his muscles, his eyes roll back in his head, and now he's in a wheelchair because he can no longer walk."

Nancy Martin, risk management coordinator for the department's health care service in Lansing, sent back an e-mail, saying Jones' symptoms "are not as dramatic or as described. He is being seen and is being treated."

Two weeks later, Sept. 25, Jones died. Prison officials still don't know why. An autopsy was conducted, but the report is not finished, spokesman Russ Marlan said. A corrections official was told it might have been encephalitis.

Martin declined to comment. But Marlan said Martin reviewed Jones' medical record and talked with the prison's clinic staff before concluding Jones was being treated properly.

He 'begged for his life'
Whatever killed him, Jones' friends, family and others wonder if he would still be alive if the prison's medical staff had taken his complaints more seriously.

"The man begged for his life, and they turned him away," said Kenneth Mazurek, another inmate who tried to get him help. "He was literally dying right in front of everybody's eyes."

Mazurek, an aide to handicapped prisoners, repeatedly wheeled Jones to the prison's clinic. A health care worker once refused to allow Jones to use a wheelchair and insisted he walk.

"He said, 'I can't go. I can't walk,'" Mazurek said. "Every time I pushed him over there, he asked to go to the hospital. When she (a nurse) came out, he said, 'Can't you just take me to the hospital?' She said, 'No. You don't have life-threatening symptoms.'"

The prison's nurses, unlike the doctors, are state employees, not outside contractors. Twice in September, the nurses did send Jones to Hackley Hospital in Muskegon, but both times the hospital sent him back the same day.

His family had no idea he was sick, not until he went to the hospital a third time. On Sept. 24, Keri West, Jones' common-law wife and mother of his two children, was notified, and she and other family members and friends rushed to Muskegon from their homes in Battle Creek. By then, Jones was in a coma and likely brain dead. Even the Corrections Department Web site already was listing him as "discharged," the euphemism used when an inmate dies, although he was still on life support.

By the following day, he was dead.

Looking for answers
West sat in her Battle Creek home recently, holding a collage showing Jones from childhood to prison. She had it assembled to display at his funeral.

She last saw him Aug. 23, when he was in a Battle Creek court to withdraw a guilty plea to an earlier drug-dealing conviction. He was looking forward to a new trial and didn't mention any health problems, she said.

She has talked to an attorney and is planning to sue the state.

"I won't be at peace until I get some answers," she said.

Six weeks after Jones died, inmates in Brooks don't talk about him much unless asked.

"It's almost like he never existed," Troy Rienstra said. "That's how the people deal with their emotions in here."

It's not that easy for his family. His mother, Yvette Jones, caught a bus from her home in Alabama when she heard he was in the hospital, but she arrived too late.

"I just want to know what was the reason my son died -- a perfectly healthy young man," she said.

Hawkins, his former cellmate, thinks he knows.

"I've never seen so much apathy in my life," he said. "Somebody should have made some special effort to see he got the proper care, but that didn't happen.

"We may be in prison, but we're still human beings."