Dionne Alexander spent the morning of Aug. 7 sitting on a hard wooden bench in a downtown Jacksonville courtroom waiting for her husband, Maurdrik, to show up for his hearing after he was arrested more than two months earlier.
Eventually, Alexander said, a bailiff told her and her husband’s lawyer that Maurdrik Alexander’s hearing would be postponed: He had collapsed on his way to court from the Duval County jail and was rushed to UF Health Jacksonville.
In the panic that erupted after that announcement, Dionne could never have imagined the wall of institutional silence she would face when trying to figure out what had happened to her husband. Maurdrik lay in a hospital bed for days while his wife and children feared for his life and were denied the chance to speak with him or learn about his condition.
“I’m his wife,” she said. “Don’t I have the right to know what’s happening?”
According to experts and those taking care of Maurdrik, the answer is no. For the Alexanders and four other families in similar situations that The Tributary identified, jail officials don’t need to divulge information about an incarcerated person’s medical status to their next of kin — and they often don’t, citing HIPAA and other privacy policies.
Tyler Gates, the vice president of the Northeast Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said there doesn’t seem to be a policy for communication with lawyers or families when an incarcerated person is hospitalized. He has represented four hospitalized clients in Duval and Clay counties and received “no communication at all” in three of those cases.
While acknowledging that privacy laws exist and must be followed, Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, said it’s inhumane that families are left in the dark about the health status of incarcerated loved ones.
“It is absolutely a reflection of the inadequacy of the medical care provided to people inside [jails],” Deitch said.
She said it depends on whether the incarcerated person has submitted forms indicating whom should be notified in the case of a medical emergency, noting communication about medical issues without that form’s authorization would likely violate HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
“There needs to be a better process making sure that information is collected up front,” Deitch said. “The policy should be very clear that any medical thing that’s significantly out of the ordinary or that renders the person unable to communicate on their own… the person’s medical contact should be notified.”
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office did not respond to The Tributary’s email and phone requests for comment, but Paddi Hurley, a spokesperson for the jail’s medical provider, Naphcare, explained its own policy in an email. Detainees, Hurley said, need to give the provider permission to release their health information to families, which requires them to sign a release-of-information form.
If a patient goes to the hospital, Hurley said the hospital is charged with handling any release of information to family in consultation with the sheriff’s office. Citing privacy concerns, UF Health Jacksonville declined to comment.
The Tributary confirmed the release-of-information form is given to detainees as needed, rather than included in their intake paperwork. As a result, detainees who are unexpectedly incapacitated can’t sign the form, leaving relatives frustrated and desperate, as was the case with the Alexanders.
Dionne Alexander said she spent a month trying to find out what was happening with her husband. It was only because Maurdrik was a previous UF Health patient that Alexander was able to find out what was happening — she realized she could log into his MyChart account, where a doctor had noted Maurdrik had abdominal surgery and was alive.
Less than six weeks after his emergency surgery left him with an open wound across his stomach, Maurdrik was sent back to the jail on Sept. 20. The Tributary was unable to speak with him.
The Alexanders’ story shows the difficulties families face when their loved ones fall sick behind bars and they can’t get updates on their conditions.
Maudrik’s medical issues
Maurdrik was arrested May 31 in the backyard of a Jacksonville home, where police found drugs, money and a gun inside. He was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and eight counts of drug offenses, including trafficking in fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine.
He pleaded not guilty on every charge and was held without bond on the fentanyl-trafficking charge for two weeks, until the state assigned a bond of over $1 million on the charge. His bond totaled nearly $2 million for the nine charges he was facing.
When he was initially arrested, Maurdrik told his wife that he had high blood pressure and was put on medication to control it. Two months later, a water pill was added to his regimen, she said.
Alexander talked to her husband daily, and he complained to her about stomach problems he had after he started the medication, she said. He told her that jail officials gave him Pepto Bismol, but the pain continued.
She said she called the jail but was told she couldn’t receive information about his condition. When she spoke with him for the last time on Aug. 5, he again complained of pain.
Two days later, a bailiff told Alexander and her husband’s attorney, Anthony Rosati, that Maurdrik fainted.
Alexander immediately left the courthouse and went to the hospital.
“I get there, they tell me nothing,” she said. “After I sat in the hospital for maybe an hour or two, they sent a chaplain downstairs because they saw I wasn’t leaving.”
The chaplain confirmed Maurdrik was alive but told Alexander she should call the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office to learn more. She called JSO and again was denied information.
Rosati was the only person allowed into Maurdrik’s hospital room. He told The Tributary he wasn’t sure how to navigate visits with Maurdrik because he’d “never had a case like this.”
Still, it was Dionne Alexander who ended up providing Rosati with health updates, thanks to an unexpected source: MyChart, an online patient portal used by UF Health, where both Dionne and Maurdrik were registered patients.
Using Maurdrik’s credentials, Dionne was able to access his MyChart account and monitor his status. Checking the platform multiple times daily, Dionne learned on Aug. 19 that Maurdrik was “critically ill,” requiring “intensive support of his organ functions,” after a major surgery to remove a bowel obstruction. His chart also listed a ventral hernia and acute kidney injury.
Maurdrik’s chart doesn’t say what caused the initial bowel obstruction or when it began.
Families in the dark
Richard Forbus, the vice president of program development for the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, said the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office’s decision to withhold information regarding Maurdrik’s health wasn’t unusual, especially in light of HIPAA, which protects people’s health information.
“Patients may consent to a release of information through a signed waiver that outlines their rights under HIPPA [sic], and names an authorized person or persons who their information can be released to,” Forbus wrote in an email. “If a form is not signed, and authorization is not given, information related to a medical condition or treatment would not be released under any circumstances, even to a spouse.”
The Tributary confirmed that the HIPAA waiver is given to detainees if they need medical care rather than when they are first incarcerated at the Duval County jail. The failure to obtain a HIPAA form and emergency contact information from each person can “very predictably lead” to the kind of situation Dionne Alexander faced, Deitch said, where “families are not notified about medical emergencies” and may not be able to “even say goodbye to their loved one in the case of a person who is dying.”
The NCCHC does not set national standards for visitation, phone calls or communication with families when an incarcerated person is hospitalized, Forbus said. Those decisions, he said, are left up to the facility itself. He wrote that the Duval County jail’s approach to Maurdrik’s treatment was “not unusual from a liability and security perspective.”
The lack of communication about Maurdrik’s condition was “a reflection of the lack of respect and dignity with which families of incarcerated people are treated,” Deitch, of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, said. But she conceded the jail may not have had a legal responsibility to inform Dionne of her husband’s condition.
Gates, the vice president of the Northeast Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, suggested one of the likely reasons the jail denies incarcerated people in the hospital access to phone calls is security, although JSO did not confirm this or state its policy on inmate communication.
Daniel Leveton, the media relations manager at UF Health Jacksonville, said he couldn’t comment on specific cases due to HIPAA protocols, but that patients brought in by JSO are under its jurisdiction and the hospital follows JSO procedures.
“Every communication coming out of the jail would be recorded unless it’s with an attorney phone number that’s specifically permitted, and obviously they can’t have the capability to do that in the hospital,” he said. “I get that they have security protocols… but there should be some way that family can find out what’s occurring.”
Withholding medical information from families isn’t a policy unique to Duval County’s jail. In one of Gates’ cases, a man incarcerated in Clay County in 2023 spent several days in the hospital before his family even found out he had left the jail. He died in the hospital shortly after being admitted without having spoken to any of his family members, Gates said.
Maurdrik was sent back to jail less than six weeks after his surgery with the promise of a spot in the jail’s medical ward, where he would be taken care of as he recovered. According to a motion filed by his lawyer, Maurdrik was thrown into the general population almost immediately after his return to jail, and a necessary check-up for his incision was skipped.
After learning about the extent of Maurdrik’s health issues, Maurdrik’s judge ordered that Maudrik be released, and he went home the following day, Nov. 7, to await trial. Dionne Alexander said she hopes no other family has to navigate the overwhelming silence she faced in an unending battle for medical information about their loved ones.
Bea Lunardini, a senior journalism student at the University of Florida, was a 2024 Investigative Reporting Fellow at The Tributary. You can reach her at bea.lunardini@floridatrib.org
