Dadra Denise “Red” Porter
Photograph of Dadra Denise Porter, obtained from Watson-North Funeral Home.
The Porter family has recently suffered successive tragedies. It was shortly after burying family matriarch Martha Porter, that Dadra became ill. Dadra Denise Porter of Winchester, Tennessee, passed away on August 31, 2020. Both women passed away due to complications of COVID-19.
Dadra was preceded in death by her parents, Martha and James, her maternal grandparents, Louise and Hoyt Oliver, and her grandfather, Billy Wade Porter. She is survived by her children, Brittany, Keshia, and Hoye, alongside eight grandchildren.
When Dadra caught the coronavirus at the Tennessee Prison for Women, the facility was a hot spot for the virus. According to Dawn Harrington, the director of the Nashville-based advocacy group Free Hearts, Dadra wrote to the organization in May to seek help for her condition. Free Hearts was advocating for the release of individuals at risk of being affected by the virus, and Dadra knew she was one of them. “I am fifty years old and have severe medical issues,” she wrote. “If I get the virus, I won't survive.”
If the staff at the Tennessee Prison for Women had treated Dadra as an adult and provided her with medical attention when she needed it, things might have turned out differently. When Dadra fell ill, corrections officers dismissed it as grief over the loss of her mother. Women at the facility had to advocate for days before she received medical assistance. In the end, it was Dadra's cellmate, not the prison authorities, who told her daughter Keshia Porter that her mother was being transported to the emergency room.
After her death in August, Dadra’s friends were heartbroken and angered by her needless loss. Several wrote letters to The Nashville Scene about the conditions underlying her death. They described the difficulty they faced in getting medical attention for Dadra, despite her obvious respiratory distress and the hallucinations she had begun experiencing at the end of her life.
Dadra’s cousin Gwen, who was incarcerated with Dadra and saw her at the medical center every day, believes that the injustices Dadra faced are indicative of larger systemic failures within the facility. “I know Dadra begged those people for help, and in the end, the letter she wrote [to Free Hearts] came true,” Gwen said in a comment posted below an article in The Nashville Scene. “She cont[r]acted COVID-19 and died as she predicted because they do not take care of you medically. No one is held accountable for their actions.”
The Porter family already maintained firm bonds before these tragic losses, and they are becoming closer in the wake of their sorrow. Keshia's advice: “Hold the ones you love close—life is too short.”
Dadra will be remembered with love.
Photograph of Dadra (left) alongside Brittany and Martha Porter, by way of The Nashville Scene.
This memorial was written by MOL team member Shirley Anne McCulley with information from an article by Steven Hale of The Nashville Scene, an obituary from Watson-North Funeral Home, and a GoFundMe organized by Keshia Porter. Transcribed by Mirilla Zhu.
