‘Near total deprivation’: Lawsuit alleges mistreatment in Dauphin County prison ‘hole’
Penn Live, 12/17/24: “For weeks, Sylvia Morales spoke to her husband, Hector Ramos, over the phone while he was incarcerated at Dauphin County Prison.
The two were set on remaining connected despite being apart.
Then one day in November 2023, Morales’s phone went silent.
‘It’s just one day I didn’t hear anything from him,’ Morales said. ‘It made me worried because I’ve heard things happening at DCP, people dying and stuff. We have kids together. He has kids. It was bad.’
Since January 2019, twenty-two people have died at Dauphin County Prison, and county Coroner Graham Hetrick has come under scrutiny by experts who said he has not properly investigated the deaths.
Morales had no idea what had happened to her husband.
A few weeks later, a letter from the jail, scratched out using a piece of pencil lead, arrived in her mailbox.
It was from Ramos.
‘I hope that by the time you receive this kite [prison message] it finds you in the best of health spiritually as well as mentally,’ he wrote. ‘Baby, get the media involved to have people come in here. They took all legal mail, our sneakers, cosmetics, everything. This is illegal what they are doing.'”