In Ward D, guards in "roving position" walk the halls. They check on patients and mark "narrative" logs with their observations — "resting" being a common entry.
Lola as a pigtailed eight-year-old
Daniel Rogers with his Rhodesian ridgebacks, Max and Grady
Daniel as a young boy
A twentysomething Daniel hams it up with friends
Cedric Robinson as a second-grader
Jacqueline Carini
Ruby Robinson, Cedric's older sister, looks at a high school
portrait of him
Cedric with Ruby's cat the only photo she has of her brother as an adult
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José Reigada, a former corrections officer who worked at Ward D for seven years until 2000, remembers flicking on room lights from the hallway to check patients through little door windows. Occasionally he would poke his head in and make small talk — the only visitor many patients ever had. Once, a middle-age Hispanic inmate confided he was dying of cancer. "How do you respond to that?" Reigada says, shrugging his wide shoulders.
Cedric Robinson never confided in his family that he was dying. Almost a year after Robinson's March 2005 death in custody, his sister Ruby Robinson and his 91-year-old mother Ruth Robinson assumed it was due to complications from diabetes. Cedric had told them little about his health, and they hadn't seen his medical records. He had died of AIDS — his last secret. When Ruby recently saw a copy of Cedric's autopsy report, she could only shake her head. "I didn't know that," she said. "I didn't know that."
The two had grown up close. As a young girl, Ruby would hold baby Ced on her hip as she made her way around the infamous James E. Scott Homes in Liberty City. "He used to think I was his mama," Ruby recalls. It was a violent and desperate place — a world unto itself, where family meant everything and happiness came in the smallest of packages. "We didn't know about white people," Ruby, now 55, recalls. "Those people in the projects, the children don't have a chance."
For a while, Cedric concentrated on school work. He would study the Bible and brush up on his responsibilities as an altar boy at the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church. He became an ace mechanic, repairing bicycles he found in the trash and fine-tuning friends' cars. For Cedric, Ruby, and older brother Isaac, presents were rare on Christmas, milk was powdered, and cornbread with bell peppers and onions was a meal. Cedric dreamed of more — a good job, a sweet ride.
Cedric, often the target of other kids' practical jokes and beatings, developed a hot temper. "They just didn't treat him good," says Ruth. He became a fighter, scrapping with other boys at the slightest provocation. Many times he would run home, trying to outpace a boy he had been fighting, and shout for Ruby to unlock the door.
As an adult, Cedric came to believe the door would always be locked. His world was circumscribed. "He don't know anything about out of town," Ruby recalls of her brother. "Only thing he known about is Miami." It was a revelation for Cedric when a friend of the family would bring over Chinese food or pizza.
After drifting in and out of several jobs, Cedric applied for a position with the city, a secure salary that would be his ticket out of the projects, he thought. He didn't get it. "That's when he went rock-bottom," Ruby says. "He figured no one wanted to hire him." So he began hustling for a big-time crack dealer named Ike. It wasn't long before he was making serious money. He was generous with friends and family, paying for his mother's myriad pills and medical procedures.
Soon, though, Cedric was smoking most of his earnings from a glass pipe. After defaulting on money he owed Ike, he found himself out of work, addicted to crack, and homeless. In the years that followed, Cedric became well acquainted with the back of a patrol car. He was arrested 26 times, mostly for trespassing — looking for a place to sleep — crack possession, and fighting. "I told him: 'If you keep going back [to jail], I won't go see you anymore,'" Ruth remembers.
In January 2005, Cedric was booked on crack possession charges. Ruby didn't bother to visit him at the Metro West Detention Center, figuring it was just another screwup for the troubled brother she loved. Why visit him if he insisted on doing this to himself? Ruby had seen Cedric about a month earlier. "He seemed to be all right," she says. "He had a cold at the time, but that was about it."
The cold may have been a precursor to the pneumonia Cedric would develop in jail. With his immune system too weak to fight, his health slowly deteriorated during the month he spent at Kendall Regional Medical Center. Ruby says she wasn't notified of her brother's death until a day or two later. Cedric had died alone.
