The man with no legs - Caesar Rodney Institute

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The man with no legs
By Lee Williams
Quinetta Muhammad’s father Benjamin Sudler is an inmate in state custody. Muhammad has
been fighting the Department of Correction to improve her father’s medical care. As of last
week, both of Sudler’s legs were amputated because his diabetes was allowed to go unchecked.
CRI Photo by Carla Varisco-Williams
WILMINGTON -- Benjamin Sudler III walked into prison 18 months ago.
He will never walk out.
Last month, Sudler’s left leg was amputated above the knee. Last week, doctors removed his right leg.
Sudler’s legal guardian, daughter Quinetta Muhammad was under tremendous pressure from the Department
of Correction to allow them to remove her father’s remaining leg.
Sudler has been held for more than a year -- since 2008 -- on felony charges, even though three hearings
have determined he is mentally incompetent to stand trial.
He’s suffered strokes and heart attacks while an inmate that like his diabetes, went untreated by the state’s
prison medical vendor.
Delaware Department of Correction Commissioner Carl Danberg refused to comment for this series. Nor
would Danberg allow the Caesar Rodney Institute to interview Sudler, even though Muhammad granted her
consent for the interview with her father.
Sudler has a laundry list of medical ailments. He is a diabetic and a stroke victim who also suffers from
hypertension. He’s been diagnosed as bipolar and schizophrenic.
“A few months before he was arrested, he was going back and forth to MeadowWood,” Muhammad said.
“Since his stroke he couldn’t write and he was incontinent at times.”
With no one watching out for him, Sudler began losing weight.
“He was a big man when he went in to prison,” Muhammad said. “He weighed 240 pounds. Now, he doesn’t
even weigh 100 pounds. He lost more than 140 pounds in prison, in 18 months. That right there should have
told them something was very wrong.”
Muhammad visited her father regularly. She watched him deteriorate before her eyes.
“The first time I visited, he walked to the visiting room. Within months, he came down in a wheel chair.
He’d get out of the chair and onto a stool,” she said. “A few months later, he couldn’t get out of the chair.”
The decline was rapid. No one monitored her father’s diet.
She checked his commissary spending and discovered he’d
been subsisting on snack cakes, cookies and cola – poison for
a diabetic.
“It was frustrating. It was not a slow process,” she said. “I
saw the weight loss and the fact he could no longer walk. I
tried talking to the prison about it. They didn’t care.”
Amputation
On July 14, Sudler told his daughter they were going to
remove his left leg. A diabetic ulcer on his heel had gone
untreated, turned septic, and was endangering his life.
She visited her father at a Dover hospital before the surgery,
and saw the wound on his heel.
“They had it bandaged. They let me see it. When they took
the bandages off, right away the stench lit up the entire
room,” she said. “My father could barely speak, but he told
them to cover it up. He was embarrassed by the smell. He
still had some dignity. The smell was something I had never
Benjamin Sudler III
smelled before. It smelled like rotten blood, garbage and death. The wound was the circumference of the
entire heel. I have never seen anything so gruesome. How could the prison have let it get so bad? Why didn’t
they intervene before it got so bad?
“He’s an elderly man. He hasn’t been convicted of anything. Who are they to inflict physical pain on
anyone?”
The cold, dispassionate surgeon’s report states what occurred next.
“The patient was brought to the operating room. There was difficulty in getting the blood pressure on the
patient with a cuff. Anesthesia therefore requested an A-line. They attempted to do an upper arm A-line and
were unable to do this… The left leg was then prepped and draped in the usual sterile fashion. An incision
was made approximately four inches below the knee anteriorly. And then I went approximately seven inches
posteriorly creating a flap, went through the skin, subcutaneous tissue using a Bovie coagulator on the
muscle, tied off all vessels and then used a power saw to cut through the tibia and fibula…”
Who’s responsible?
Marvin Sudler has fond memories of his brother before the mental illness took hold.
“He was a great guy, funny, always laughing, always willing to help out,” Marvin Sudler recalled. “He loved
his family and supported his family 100-percent.”
Both Marvin and Muhammad say there’s a dual standard of care in Delaware prisons: one for AfricanAmericans and one for everyone else.
“Race played a role in this,” Marvin Sudler said. “You always see this kind of stuff happening on TV. We
never thought it would happen to us.”
Muhammad agrees.
“I think health care in Delaware state prisons is looking for an easy way out,” Muhammad said. “Patients
who require care don’t get it. They allowed him to deteriorate. If I wasn’t making noise about it, they
wouldn’t have done anything except watch him die.”
Contact investigative reporter Lee Williams at (302) 242-9272 or lee@caesarrodney.org
The Caesar Rodney Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-partisan research and educational organization and is
committed to being a catalyst for improved performance, accountability, and efficiency in Delaware
government.
© Copyright 2009 by the Caesar Rodney Institute