Bonnie Rocheleau died of double pneumonia last March at Pulaski State Prison and now her family is looking for $1 million in damages following her death.
For months, 58 year old Rocheleau from Valdosta uffered from COPD, yet it wasn’t until she almost stopped breathing entirely that the prison medical staff decided she should be hospitalized.
The family is suing the Georgia Department of Corrections and Georgia Correctional Health Care and the branch of Augusta University that contacts with the DOC to operate and staff prison medical units and states that the failure to obtain Rocheleau medical attention caused her death along with nine other women while at the Pulaski and Emanuel Women’s Facility.
Rocheleau died as she was nearing the end of a seven-year sentence for vehicular homicide. She pleaded guilty to that charge in 2009 after an accident in which the vehicle she was driving crossed a highway median and struck an SUV carrying seven people. One was killed.
Rocheleau visited the infirmary at Pulaski to complain that she couldn’t breathe three days in a row before she died. Each time, the document says, she was returned to the general prison population after receiving drugs or breathing treatments. On the third day she was transferred to Taylor Regional Hospital for a chest X-ray but returned to the prison infirmary and then it was decided to return her to hospital again but it was too late, she died.
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