As the cancerous mass that would ultimately kill him grew unchecked in his lungs, Terrence Wise desperately wrote message after message to the staff of the MDC Brooklyn federal jail, begging for medical help.
“I need to be seen by someone plz,” wrote Wise, 56, in a sick call request to staff at the Sunset Park jail, coughing up blood as he waited for weeks to get the results of a Feb. 2024 CT Scan.
“im coughing up blood still and i had told the officer that working my unit …..I’ve put in afew sick call slips about my medical issues and still haven’t gotten an response as yet …i need to see medical,” he wrote on April 22.
Those messages, and several others, were revealed in a federal lawsuit, filed Thursday by Wise’s longtime girlfriend, against the U.S. government alleging the jail staff’s gross negligence caused his death on Nov. 2.
“He was very afraid,” said Philease Martin, his longtime partner said. “He was just terrified, because he didn’t know if it was cancer. He didn’t know what it was.”
Wise, who was locked up pre-trial in a federal arson case, first became sick in fall 2023, and after chest x-rays that November found a nodule in his lung, he got a CT scan on Feb. 28, 2024. Almost two weeks later, on March 12, he wrote to Dr. Rame Awd, who works at the jail and had ordered the CT scan months earlier, “im writing to yu cause I was sent tou take two different xrays and need to know my results plz….” according to the lawsuit.
He got no response, and his lawyers with the Federal Defenders made multiple requests the next day for his medical records, including a subpoena, but also got no answer. Unbeknownst to him, the scan showed a 3.2 centimeter mass in his chest and MDC’s clinical director, Dr. Bruce Bialor, signed off on the results March 18, court filings show.
“Today I had coughed up blood a few times and I’m requesting to see medical,” he wrote again on April 11, addressing it to a nurse on duty. He had no idea that a mass in his chest was growing, the lawsuit states.
Once again, he received no reply, so he sent more sick call messages.
“I have a few medical issues.one im still coughing up blood out my mouth, two i have a bed sore on my right side of my leg, three having serve pain on the left mychest where my nipple isa and I’ve been writing doctor awd to find my results from the sonogarm and the mri abt a month.i need to be seen by someone plz,” he wrote April 17.
His defense layer, Mia Eisner-Grynberg of the Federal Defenders, reached out to the MDC’s legal staff April 24, but she got no response as well, the lawsuit alleges. Wise’s cellmate did his best to take care of him as he weakened, and Wise repeatedly asked Beverly Timothy, a nurse practitioner working at MDC, to give him medical help, “but she ignored his pleas,” the lawsuit alleges.
“On one occasion, Mr. Wise brought a cup full of blood to show Ms. Timothy how sick he was and how much blood he was coughing up. In response, Ms. Timothy threatened to pit Mr. Wise in segregated housing,” the lawsuit alleges.
Timothy saw Wise on April 26 after he’d complained of coughing up blood for a month straight. She deemed the mass “benign” without conducting a biopsy, legal filings related to the case have shown. Bialor finally ordered him hospitalized May 3, 2024. and a biopsy showed the mass essentially tripled in size from when the CT scan was taken, the records show.
MDC staff admitted they botched the diagnosis, saying in a statement provided by federal prosecutors,
“The results were somehow missed by the health services department, and the delay was unfortunate.”
For Martin, that statement still stings.
“They just don’t have no feeling behind it. They don’t care,” she said. “If you’re going to try and improve it, then get rid of the people who don’t care, because that’s the way to do it. These mistakes, these are not mistakes.”
Timothy and Bialor were also involved in overseeing the health of another inmate, Dwayne Pickett, who said he asked for medical help 17 times between January and August 2024 for a leg pain that turned out to be a growing, cancerous tumor, the Daily News reported in September 2024.
“Terrence Wise spent months begging for help as he suffered from undiagnosed lung cancer. He and his attorneys repeatedly sought answers and medical care, but were met with silence, delay, and indifference,” said Martin’s lawyer, Katie Rosenfeld of the firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP.
“Mr. Wise’s death is not an isolated tragedy. It is yet another devastating example of MDC’s chronic failures to provide safe, humane, and constitutional conditions to the people in its custody.”
A BOP spokesman declined to comment on the allegations in the lawsuit, but confirmed that Bialor is still the MDC’s clinical director, and Timothy and Awd still work at the jail.
The BOP also revealed that the jail has fewer nurses on staff now than it did at the time of Wise’s misdiagnosis — two doctors and five nurses as of June 26, compared to two doctors and eight nurses in spring 2024. The jail’s current population is currently 1,256, according to the BOP’s web site, compared to 1,352 on April 4, 2024.
Wise was sentenced to seven years in his Molotov firebombing case case. His lawyers have said he struggled with mental illness, and the 2020 pandemic and lockdown led his mental health to deteriorate. Threy described his actions, which involved trying to light a van on fire in Brooklyn and a subsequent flight from police, as “a series of ill-fated attempts” to stop a drug dealer after the fentanyl overdose deaths of one of his friends.
Martin, 56, his partner for a decade, remembered him as kind and romantic, describing their regular trips to Canarsie Park, where they would listen to Aerosmith and dance the waltz.
“We would dance at Canarsie Park all the time. We would go there and we would do our little box waltz, and we would have a good time. We would go watch Broadway shows,” she recalled. “No relationship is perfect. We certainly had our ups and downs, but through all of that, you know, our love that was for each other was very magnanimous. You know, it was big enough to forgive, strong enough to endure, and it was completely unconditional.”
