Ricky James
Photograph of Ricky, obtained from his WriteAPrisoner profile.
Ricky James loved to love, and had a lot of love for a lot of things: “fishing, traveling, bowling, movies, shopping, dancing and listening to music,” not to mention “pets, dogs, birds (African Grey, Parrots), and exotic animals.” On April 3, 2020 at Mid-State Correctional Facility in Fort Dix, New Jersey, Ricky died, after showing symptoms of COVID-19. He was 36 years old.
Ricky was born on September 15, 1983. He spent his youth in Passaic, New Jersey before moving to Menifee, California to attend high school. After graduating, he attended Georgia Southern University and then headed back to his home state. He worked a number of jobs and specialized in customer service and accounting. On his WriteAPrisoner pen-pal page, he described himself as an “outspoken, loyal, honest man,” who enjoyed “making others laugh [...] no matter the situation.”
“For me, smiling and laughing take away a lot of pain and negative things that may be going on in life,” he wrote.
In the days before he passed away, Ricky told his mother, Gwendolyn Davies, and his girlfriend that he suspected he had Covid-19: he had night sweats, he had chills, and he was coughing a lot. Despite his requests, Mid-State Correctional Facility never gave him a test for the virus.
Nor did they call his family after he died. Instead, his friends in prison reached out to his mother to notify her themselves. She immediately called the prison for more information, then spent half an hour on hold before being told what she already knew: her son was dead.
“It broke my heart into pieces,” she said.
Photograph of Ricky, obtained from his WriteAPrisoner profile.
The prison wing where Ricky lived was locked down on the day of his death. As of July 15th, 60 prison employees and 72 people incarcerated at Mid-State had tested positive for the virus, and at least one person besides Ricky had died.
Ricky’s family couldn’t afford a $5,600-dollar independent autopsy to determine what caused his death — his burial and funeral expenses alone totaled $12,000.
And, even after spending all that money, Ricky’s father, Eddie James, couldn’t attend his son’s funeral. Flying from California to New Jersey just wasn’t safe.
He and his son had fallen out of touch for some years, but they had recently begun to send emails back and forth.
"We were just starting to talk,” Eddie said. “We were just starting to bond.”
This memorial was written by MOL team member Jordan Cutler-Tietjen with information from reporting by Joe Atmonavage of NJ.com, Nicole Lewis and Maurice Chammah of The Marshall Project, and Alice Speri of The Intercept, and from Ricky James’s WriteAPrisoner profile.
