Family questions inmate’s sudden death

Detainee in Toronto South centre was waiting for urgent surgery that jail cancelled

Anthony Chatzimanolakis was hoping to be released on bail a few weeks from now. The 30-year-old, who needed abdominal surgery for injuries from a car crash that nearly killed him years ago, had all kinds of plans for his future including marrying his fiancée.

Instead, his devastated family and fiancée are planning his funeral.

Chatzimanolakis died at the Toronto South Detention Centre on Saturday. His family has been told it was a suspected overdose, but are waiting for an investigation to be completed on his sudden death.

“We are angry, upset, confused … how did Anthony lose his life in a facility that is meant to rehabilitate? To keep him safe and protect him?” said his aunt Sandra Mariani, speaking on behalf of Chatzimanolakis’s family. “Especially at the pretrial stage when he is presumed to be innocent.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Solicitor General said paramedics were called Saturday “after staff found an inmate unresponsive and in medical distress in his cell.” No further details could be provided due to ongoing investigations, the statement said.

The ministry does not proactively release information when an inmate dies in custody, unlike their federal counterpart. This practice has been criticized by academics and advocates for obscuring safety issues in provincial jails in realtime, and effectively evading public accountability. As a result, a group of prominent legal and prisoner rights groups have been calling for an independent provincial body dedicated to overseeing jails and quickly raising alarms, similar to the federal correctional investigator.

The statistics that are available are alarming. Between 2020 and 2021, researchers found that deaths in Ontario jails had doubled. A landmark coroner’s report released earlier this year found that 192 people had died in jails over eight years. Forty per cent were drug overdoses — a reflection of the known problem of a toxic drug supply smuggled into jails amid the ongoing opioid crisis.

“With very rare exception, almost every life lost in our sample could be deemed a preventable death,” the report concluded.

The report cited low staffing levels as a key factor in many of the deaths, affecting access to health care.

“It is not uncommon for personsin-custody to experience longer wait times to see health care providers, delays in prescription medication access while awaiting assessment, and an overall level of deteriorating care for people in custody due to large staff caseloads.”

Chatzimanolakis was arrested on Sept. 15 on charges including car theft and possession of a loaded gun. His case was still before the courts and, like more than twothirds of inmates in provincial jails, he was legally innocent and awaiting trial.

While he was in custody, a long incision in his torso had begun to open and his intestinal tract was bulging out in two places — a problem that stemmed from his injuries in a serious car crash in 2019, according to information that was about to be presented by his lawyer at a bail review hearing set for April 14. He needed corrective surgery and the jail had scheduled it at Sunnybrook Hospital for Nov. 2 — but then it was cancelled and he was told the jail “could not facilitate the procedure,” according to his lawyer, Carmelo Truscello.

The surgery had not been rescheduled, to his knowledge, despite his repeated requests, Truscello said.

Mariani said it was a “miracle” that Chatzimanolakis survived the 2019 crash — he was “in pieces” and the doctors had to sew him back together, she said.

When the incision opened, he told his family he was “in a significant amount of pain” that continued throughout his time in custody, she said. They still don’t know why his surgery was cancelled and why it wasn’t rescheduled.

“Where are his human rights?” Mariani said, almost at a loss for words.

Mariani says the family also does not understand how an overdose — if that is what happened — could have occurred.

“How are the drugs getting into the facilities to begin with?” she said, adding that if it is a known problem, how it is being allowed to continue?

“When tragedies like this occur, it speaks to a larger systemic issue that is rooted in poor staffing — among other things — which dilute the institutions’ ability to provide the level of care required to prevent these types of foreseeable harms,” Truscello said.

“It has been widely reported that drugs are an epidemic in our correctional facilities. More should be done in a proactive effort to ensure our institutions do not fail our citizens.”

Mariani said her nephew “had the biggest heart, full of love.”

She added: “He was a joker, jovial, happy.”

It is still hard for her to accept he will not be coming home.

“I want people to know these things are happening,” she said, of why the family wanted to speak publicly.

It should not be the case that a person going into jail could come out worse, or not at all, she said.

“What’s the point of it all?”