GATESVILLE TEXAS

by Tina Williams

A 37-year-old woman died Friday morning while incarcerated at the Lane Murray Unit in Gatesville, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed. The department identified the deceased woman as Elizabeth Hagerty. Staff found her unresponsive and initiated life-saving measures before she was pronounced dead at 12:48 a.m., according to a department spokesperson. The cause of death is still pending and an investigation is underway. Hagerty is one of at least three people in their 30s to die suddenly in the last week at a prison without full air conditioning. —Nexstar, June 30, 2023 

Inmates are dying in stifling Texas prisons, but state seldom acknowledges heat as a cause of death. 

—The Texas Tribune, June 29, 2023

two weeks 

after our last class

with the women in white

news comes that someone

on the unit has died 

with no cause given 

for her death 

but it may have been cancer

or a work-related incident 

or a weak heart 

with guards finding her bent 

over a commode

scrubbing her uniform but

let us consider 

why she is here

and how we reap

what we sow 

she from what perhaps 

an uncle sowed 

which was destined 

not to grow a child 

but something harder 

with teeth 

until one day 

she lifts a necklace

or moves heroin

or simply waits in the car as told

and by the time 

she figures out the pop 

someone is screaming drive

and the road leads

to the Lane Murray Women’s Unit

in Texas where the heat is 100 

and the senate 

sees scant need for AC 

in a concrete block

on the last day in June

when she dies at 37 

with no cause given 

for her life 

either

Author’s Note:  I volunteer with a non-profit organization that offers trauma-informed classes for women in several prisons in Central Texas. The class I facilitated at the Lane Murray Unit ended in March, but another of our classes there ended two weeks before the reported death of a 37-year-old woman on the Lane Murray unit. I used the article and my experience working with women in Texas prisons to tell an Everywoman story. My poem imagines the way a woman may have been found, the childhood trauma that may have led her life to spiral, the crimes that may have led to her incarceration, and the circumstances that may have contributed to her death. 

Editor's Note: Nexstar reported that 64-year-old woman died at the same facility one week earlier: "Inmates expressed concern Thursday afternoon that the deceased became ill due to heat, according to a member of Texas Prison Community Advocates and former Murray Unit inmate in communication with people on the inside."

Tina Williams lives in Austin, Texas, and has had poems published in Borderlands and The Concho River Review.

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