Left Behind ; Tammie Kahler Lost A Brother To Suicide In County Prison. She Wants Officials To Know How Those Deaths Affect Families And What Can Be… [Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, PA)]

Left Behind ; Tammie Kahler Lost A Brother To Suicide In County Prison. She Wants Officials To Know How Those Deaths Affect Families And What Can Be Done To Lessen Pain. Close Relationship Six More Deaths No One To Question

On Christmas morning, Tammie Hodapp Kahler will find a present from her only brother under the tree.

It will be the same gift, in the same gift wrap, that was under the tree last year and the year before that and every year going back to 2003.

James "Jay" Hodapp Jr. had purchased and wrapped and tagged the present for his "baby" sister that Christmas.

He never delivered the gift because he was sent to Lancaster County Prison in early December 2003. Eleven days before Christmas, he tied a sheet around his neck and hanged himself in his cell.

Kahler has never opened her brother's gift because it is a tangible reminder of him that she cannot face. The two were close - 23 months apart in age and rarely living apart, even as adults - and her loss still hurts.

Now, spurred by three suicides at the prison in recent months, Kahler hopes she can help cushion the hurt when it happens to someone else.

"Unless you have had a family member die in Lancaster County Prison, you cannot possibly understand what we go through," says Kahler, a tall, dark-haired 37-year-old sister with a cause.

"It seems that everybody who dies in that prison becomes just a statistic," she says. "They are individual persons and no matter why they're in there, they still have families."

Kahler, who lives in East Lampeter Township, wants the prison to begin showing more concern for those families.

"If they died in that institution, it is the prison's responsibility to make sure that these families are taken care of," she says. "No matter why they were in prison, it's not the (inmate's) kids' fault."

For starters, Kahler believes, when an inmate dies the warden should not notify the family by telephone. The warden himself, she says, shouldn't notify anyone.

Ideally, she says, a chaplain or a member of a prison-advocacy group should go to the inmate's home and break the news.

And another thing, she says: When an inmate commits suicide, the prison should send an official representative to the funeral.

"The warden should be going to every single one of those funerals," she says. "I don't care if the family is upset. He should be making an attempt to represent the prison. They died under his watch."

Those are two of several ideas Kahler took to a Lancaster County Prison Board meeting earlier this month. She discussed the matter further with county Commissioner Scott Martin, who is also prison board chairman, following the meeting.

She says Martin was receptive and has agreed to meet with her, Warden Vincent Guarini and other prison personnel to discuss her proposals.

"I think she has a lot of good points," Martin says of their preliminary discussion. "No one really ever thinks about how folks are impacted on the outside."

Pleased by Martin's response, Kahler expects changes to occur.

"I'm going to be there," she vows, "to make sure that they do."

Jay and Tammie Hodapp grew up in one big bedroom with a partial dividing wall. They shared a telephone line. They worked their first jobs in the same restaurant.

"Everything we did, we did together," Kahler says.

<p>But then Hodapp, who suffered from clinical depression, took up alcohol. His life changed.

While Kahler was graduating from Warwick High School and going to work, her brother was getting drunk and stealing things. He was in and out of prison on a variety of charges for a decade before he died.

"My brother was a mess. He was a good person, but he also was an alcoholic," Kahler says. "But whatever he did doesn't change who I am. I'm not a bad person. His kids aren't bad people."

When he was not in prison, Hodapp often stayed with Kahler, then a single mother, and her two young children, Tommy and Renee. Tommy was especially close to his uncle.

In September 2002, Jay Hodapp married Amy DeMascolo. He became stepfather to her three children, while remaining a significant figure in the lives of Tommy and Renee.

The next summer he got drunk and stole things. He was arrested and sent to prison. Paroled in November, he began drinking again and was returned to jail Dec. 4. Deprived of medication, he threatened to kill himself.

On Dec. 14, his 31st birthday, he acted on that threat.

DeMascolo filed a lawsuit in federal district court the next year, charging the county and the warden and other prison workers with physical abuse, medical negligence and administrative indifference.

Following years of legal maneuvering, the county's insurance company settled the lawsuit in January. DeMascolo received $122,500.

That resolved the legal issue, according to Kahler, but not the pain family members continue to feel.

"My mom has never recovered from it," she says. "My daughter is doing all right, but my son was only 6 when Jay died. He still goes and sees a counselor. They think he has post-traumatic stress syndrome."

Tommy's continuing pain has prompted Kahler to speak out about the prison's relationship with families.

"Just watching him struggle and go through eight years later what he's going through," she says, "I don't want anybody else to go through that. I don't want anybody to feel what my son feels."

Kahler tears up, but quickly recovers. She has other plans to improve life for families of jail suicides.

One is to create a support group. With the recent spike in suicides, she says, dozens of family members might benefit from talking about mutual concerns.

"I have talked with the family of one of the gentlemen who recently passed away," she says. "He had nieces and nephews, and they are struggling."

Since Jay Hodapp died, six inmates have killed themselves in Lancaster County Prison. The first two of those suicides have spawned federal lawsuits that have not been resolved.

Joseph Keohane, 22, hanged himself in his cell Nov. 23, 2006. His parents, Lawrence and Patricia Keohane, sued Lancaster County and prison personnel, claiming they failed to prevent his death.

The county denied all accusations and blamed Keohane for his own death.

Discussions have been held aimed at settling the lawsuit short of trial, but a trial is scheduled to begin Dec. 12.

Luis David Villafane, 28, hanged himself in his cell Nov. 19, 2008. His sister, Marva Baez, filed a lawsuit, claiming prison guards assaulted her brother and ignored him while he killed himself.

The county denied all charges.

In October, a federal district court judge dismissed the case. On Nov. 16, Baez appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

None of the families of the four most recent suicides has sued the county. However, the family of John Kruger, who killed himself in March, intends to sue, according to Lancaster attorney Michael Marinaro.

Kahler believes lawsuits are more likely if the prison alienates families of inmates who commit suicide.

What do prison officials expect, she wonders, when they provide no place for families to mourn and no person to question about how deaths occurred?

"When someone crashes on the road, you can go out and set a cross and flowers there," she says. "When we have a loved one die at the prison, where do you go?"

Because there is no access to the place where the person died and no one designated to answer questions, Kahler says, "all we can do is sit at home, and we get mad, and then we vent, and then there's lawsuits."

The prison may view communicating with families of suicide victims as a "liability," she adds, but "the prison was where our family members died, and there should be somebody there for us to talk to."

While Kahler wants the prison to change the way it treats families of inmates who commit suicide, she also plans to effect change herself.

She wants to counsel prison inmates about the importance of staying alive for the sake of their families.

"It's a very lonely place in there. It's a bad place," she says. "If I save one person from wanting to commit suicide because of my experience and telling them what my kids went through, it's worth it then."

Commissioner Martin says he supports Kahler's determination to counsel inmates and support families of those who have killed themselves.

"She has that inner drive to want to do what she can do to have a support group and have programs in the prison to hear her story and how suicide impacted her family," he says.

The only item on Kahler's list that Martin has reservations about is prison personnel attending funerals.

That must be determined on a case-by-case basis, he says, depending on the criminal charges, crime victims' concerns and the history of the family of the deceased.

"A funeral is not always safe territory for folks," he says.

But Martin is generally positive, and Kahler says she appreciates the changes he and the prison board have already made, including adding surveillance cameras and monitoring potential suicide victims more closely.

"They have to take each person seriously," she says. "In my brother's case, they say he was manipulative [when he threatened to commit suicide]. Even if he was, though, at the very end, he's dead. Who cares if they're manipulative? Someone has to watch them."

The county has a responsibility to keep inmates safe from harm, she says, and if someone commits suicide, the prison has a responsibility to pay attention to the family.

And now she is going to take on some of that responsibility herself.

"There are tons of negatives in that prison," she says, "but if all of us work together as a positive, maybe there won't be three suicides as there were this past year."