You may know Raynah Rey's voice from listening to 96.3 R&B, a sister station of KMOX. But recently, she's been dealing with a situation with her son, who was detained in the Jefferson County jail for nearly a year on a robbery charge until recently.
Last week, Raynah found out that her son had overdosed and was in the ICU — and that information did not come from the hospital or the jail. Jefferson County Sheriff Dave Marshak tells KMOX that jails do not have to notify family members when inmates are transferred.
"I think it's important to recognize what a jail facility is. There's misconceptions out there. It's not a daycare," he said. "I mean, we have more than 300 felons in our custody, and most of them, under Missouri Supreme Court bond rules, have given the court some serious concern for violence in our community. Otherwise, they'd be free walking around, we have operational security controls in place."
The doctors told Raynah that her son had overdosed on fentanyl — but she says that according to the medical records she got from the hospital, the blood tests do not positively say that fentanyl was in his system.
"What it says is it's 'presumptive positive.' Which, what I understand from showing these medical records to a medical professional, is what they write when your blood test comes back and they do not cannot concisely say this is in your system. But they're going to treat you as though it's in your system," Raynah explained.
Her son was given Narcan, which helps reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, but Raynah points out that just because someone is administered Narcan doesn't mean they had overdosed on fentanyl.
The information she has, she said, is that her son was checked on at 10 p.m. last Monday, then he collapsed in his cell at some point between 10 p.m. and midnight.
"I also know this from his medical records: that he had a heart attack, that he is in kidney failure and on dialysis that he is suffering from sepsis and pneumonia. My son was incredibly sick for a very long time," Raynah said. "I just heard the sheriff say that they have a right to medical care. I don't know how you can be that sick in their care and collapse and die."
"And to me," she said, "it seems like rather than say, 'We did not give him the medical care that he deserved, and he was so sick that he literally died in our custody,' let's just say he overdosed on fentanyl."
Raynah said she and her family have been video conferencing with her son every day, and that he's been sick for weeks. She said her sister told him three weeks ago that he should see a doctor, and that her son has had issues with addiction in the past, but went to rehab and got clean.
"My son has lost two people who have died of overdose," she said. "His frame of mind, the son that I know right now, would never jeopardize losing his life because he has a four year old daughter and her mother is gone. She's lost her mother, he would never do something to remove the only parent that child has."
Hear more from 96.3's Raynah Rey as she seeks more information about her son's hospitalization:
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