Mother Fights To Learn How Son Died

Linda Rowell will not rest until she knows what happened to her son Vincent.

He was 21 years old in September 2009, when he stole a municipal dump truck in Birmingham and drove it west to visit some friends in Mississippi. He was arrested after a late-night police chase through two counties, booked on three felony counts and placed in the Walker County Jail in Jasper, Ala., population 14,000.

Six days later, he was found dead on the floor of his cell.

What Linda Rowell cannot understand, and what no one can explain to her, is why. "There's holes everywhere in this story," she said.

Rowell said she has been suspicious from the start, since she got the late-night call from the Walker County coroner saying that her son was dead.

"He told me that my son died of an enlarged heart," she said. "Then I get the death certificate, and it tells me that he died of an accident."

For more than two years, authorities in Walker County have ignored her repeated requests for information about her son, Rowell said, and have never provided an investigative report into the circumstances of his death.

With the help of a legal team, the information coming out shows inconsistencies and outright conflicting information. What is disturbing is that it has been requested and stalled. This woman has the right to know what happened. If she can bring this to trial then documents will have to be released and investigated, and officials would have to risk perjury because their testimony will be under oath. That alone should discourage anyone with something to hide. Still, what we do know is a young black man died on the floor of his jail cell after a week of pain and begging for medical attention. Anyone within range of this is going to be splattered with guilt.

The injury that ultimately caused Rowell's death was a dinner-plate sized bruise on his hip, which led to massive internal bleeding and the formation of a large blood clot in his abdomen. "The clot broke off and went to his lung and that's what caused him to die," Ward said.

But it is not the injuries that truly haunt Linda Rowell, although she believes they were inflicted deliberately by police, not in any accident. It is the thought that her son's slow and painful death came on the floor of a jail cell, while he begged for help that never arrived.

Despite her repeated inquiries, she said, jail officials will not explain why her son died in his cell, and not in the county hospital, just five minutes down the road.

"They knew he was bleeding and he was hurting," Rowell said. "They walked by him like he was nothing."

But Vincent Rowell's pleas for help were heard by Andy T. Sanford, an inmate in the next cell over, awaiting transfer to state prison after a theft conviction. According to Sanford, Rowell begged for medical care, but was mocked and berated by jail staff. He did not eat for nearly a week, Sanford said, a claim backed by the autopsy, which found his stomach totally empty.

"He said that he needed help. He was scared. He was scared that there was something real bad wrong with him," Sanford said in an interview with Doyle. "You could tell this kid was hurting."

Ward, the medical examiner, agreed that Rowell would have been in significant pain before he died. Timely medical intervention would probably have saved his life, she said.

Those are some pretty damning facts. But without facts of any kind this poor woman has had to imagine what her son suffered before he died. It's time for the truth to come out.