On July 25, I attended a memorial service for my friend Jacob Harper-Leonard. He had died almost four months earlier.
Jacob was the third person who died this year in Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, where I am incarcerated. During the summer, prison administrators finally agreed to schedule a memorial for all three men. Each dead man was allotted 20 minutes for remembrances.
I suppose we were meant to feel comforted by the memorial. But the event felt more like an afterthought, the prison’s attempt to sanitize our grief and check off the last box in what they hoped was a tidy way to deal with all the death.
At the service, we exchanged memories about the people we lost. I wasn’t there when Jacob died, but dozens of people who lived in the 100-man dormitory witnessed the final minutes of his life, when he fell from a chair to the floor, quietly gasping for air. That’s part of why Jacob affected so many people. They saw him die.
Grieving is different for incarcerated people. We cannot visit the deceased’s family and offer condolences. We don’t have the phone numbers of a spouse or distraught mother to call. Prison jobs don’t come with benefits like bereavement days or paid time off. Indeed, in prison, showing emotion can be seen as a weakness.
The week after Jacob’s death, we did our best to cope. Those of us who knew him passed around sheets of paper to write our thoughts and memories of him. Our plan was to collect the notes and send them to his mother, Jackie. One of his friends knew her address.
Passing notes in prison is forbidden, but we managed to avoid the authorities.
“I thought we had more time,” read one of the notes, which were scribbled on plain white copy paper with blue Bic pens.
“He was a worthy friend,” said another. “I remember his smile.”
A third commented: “Jake was genuine and always himself, an unapologetic country boy from Oregon.”
I never heard from his mom afterward, and I don’t know if the letters ever reached her. They may have been flagged and destroyed by our prison’s mailroom. We’ll probably never know.
Jacob was 40 and kind of odd by prison standards. Freckled, red-bearded and overweight, he was the rare White guy who got along with Black and brown people as easily as he did with Whites. He wore an orange guitar pick on a chain around his neck and played in a punk rock prison band called Against the Grain. He grew up in small farming-logging towns across the Pacific Northwest and loved Johnny Cash as much as Green Day.
Jacob was my “ginger, hillbilly cousin,” said Walter Thomas, a Black prisoner from Georgia.
Thomas, who plays drums, worked with Jacob in the sewing department. They bonded over their shared passion for country music. His death hit home for Thomas, he said, when he saw Jacob’s empty desk at work the day after he died.
Jacob was unabashedly a momma’s boy, which was kind of charming. He was usually disheveled — a partially untucked shirt, wrinkled clothes, stains on his jeans. But when his mother came to visit, he combed his hair, trimmed his beard and made sure to pull out her chair before she sat down. He fetched her lemonade when she got thirsty and picked out a shady area in the yard for her to sit when she got hot.
When I met Jackie during a prison event in the summer of 2025, she reminded me of my own mom in some ways. Jackie was older, in her 60s or 70s. She wore glasses and kept her graying hair in a loose bun. She doted on Jacob, touching his face after they hugged. At the time, I hadn’t seen my mom in six years, so her visit hit home even harder.
According to a survey by the Prison Policy Institute, nearly 70% of prisoners do not receive a visit in a typical month. In this way, Jacob was lucky. Jackie visited often.
Why Jacob died is still a mystery. In television and film, prison deaths are gory and violent — assaults, suicides, drug overdoses. In reality, prisoners usually die from cancer, heart disease and other maladies that kill most Americans but that incarcerated people are particularly vulnerable to. Outside of prison, the sick count on doctors to give them the attention and care they need; in prison, it’s a lot more complicated.
We figure Jacob died from a heart attack, but I doubt we will ever know. The state medical examiner determines the cause of death rather than the Oregon Department of Corrections, and the DOC does not report why incarcerated people die, which unfortunately is common. Street Roots, a Portland-based newspaper, reported that the department failed to list a cause of death for more than 63% of in-custody deaths in 2020, 2021 and the first two quarters of 2022.
What we do know is this: Before Jacob died, he was gobbling down aspirin, ibuprofen and antacids “by the handful,” said Luis Del Rio, a friend of Jacob. On the day he died, Del Rio said he saw him return from a visit to the infirmary.
Jacob had chest pain and asked medical staff for help. On his return from the infirmary, he walked down two flights of stairs and up three more to reach his dorm, which would have been taxing for an overweight man even in good health.
About an hour after returning from the medical visit, Jacob fell to the floor of his dorm. One of his friends, Jamie Gomez, quickly realized he was in dire condition.
“His face and hands were blue,” said Gomez, who had CPR training before coming to prison.
While they waited for medical personnel, Gomez performed chest compressions for 30 seconds until a guard forced him to stop and put him on his side. The guard thought he was choking.
Nurses and paramedics arrived around seven minutes later, said Gomez, who tracked the time on a wall clock. Gomez remembered from his CPR training that the first minutes after an incident like this were critical.
As Del Rio came in from the recreation yard, he passed Jacob and overheard a disagreement between a nurse and a nurse practitioner, the highest-ranking medical staff in the prison. It appeared to him that the nurse was upset that the nurse practitioner had diagnosed Jacob with heartburn and sent him away during his medical visit before he collapsed.
While a paramedic performed chest compressions on Jacob, Del Rio said he heard the nurse yell: “Does this look like heartburn to you?” at the nurse practitioner.
According to the incarcerated men I spoke with, the paramedics worked on Jacob for about 45 minutes. He was pronounced dead at 3:28 p.m., less than two hours after he visited the infirmary.
Missed diagnoses are far too common in prison. Similar health care-related failures have cost the department enormous sums in recent years, including a $3.5 million settlement in 2024. The case stemmed from a situation in which nurses thought a man’s heart attack was simply gas, according to The Oregonian.
Some prisoners shook Gomez’s hand and thanked him for performing CPR on Jacob. At least he had tried. But others thought he was foolish to intervene and told him he might be seen as liable for Jacob’s death, making him vulnerable to more criminal charges. Good Samaritans in prison have to worry that helping out could wind up lengthening their sentence.
Soon, operations at the facility were halted so paramedics could remove Jacob’s body. There was no official announcement, but news of his death spread quickly. I learned he died around 4 p.m.
About an hour later, the prison was running as usual. The dinner service ran on time. Recreation areas reopened. Night classes for the prison’s college students went on as planned. Jacob’s bunk was cleaned out that night.
On the day Jacob died, Gomez wrote in his diary a description of the purple-blue color of Jacob’s face and hands when he couldn’t breathe. In Gomez’s small script at the top of his description is the word “seven.”
Seven. To remember the minutes he counted while his friend lay on the ground and died.
Phillip Luna, 39, is incarcerated in Oregon. He has served 11 years of a 34-year sentence for sexual abuse of a minor. His work has appeared in the Portland Mercury, East Oregonian and the Prison Journalism Project. He is editor-in-chief of award-winning prison publications The Echo, a monthly newsletter, and 1664, a magazine published in several Oregon prisons.
The Oregon Department of Corrections’ communications manager stated that the details surrounding Harper-Leonard’s death and infirmary visit that day are not publicly available, stating that a public records request would need to be submitted for that documentation. That request to the Oregon Department of Corrections remains pending.