After serving her three-year prison sentence, Patsy Sibley Barry was released this week from the Virginia Correctional Center for Women. She was delighted to see her aunt, who came to bring her home, but they couldn’t embrace or even get within 6 feet of each other.
Barry had tested positive for COVID-19 the previous week. Physical distancing was a must.
Traveling home to Alton in Halifax County in the camper attached to the back of her aunt’s pickup truck was “heartbreaking,” she said.
The women’s prison in Goochland is now the site of the state prison system’s largest outbreak. According to the Virginia Department of Correction’s online case tracker on Friday, 13 prisoners had tested positive — including three who had been hospitalized. Thirteen staff members also had tested positive.
The most cases at any other Virginia prison was two.
On Friday, Gov. Ralph Northam said he plans to ask the General Assembly to release state prisoners with less than a year on their sentence to help stop the virus from spreading.
Barry, 55, long knew she would be released this week. But then she started feeling sick on April 1.
“I was just so scared I was going to die before I got home,” she said.
Barry was having body aches, chills and a headache, and was taken to the medical unit where she took a flu test that came back negative. From there, officials took her directly to a building that had been turned into a temporary coronavirus unit, she said.
“When we entered the restricted area and I saw the COVID-19 signs I said, ‘hold on, I haven’t been tested yet,'” Barry said.
But an officer brought her in and left anyway, she said.
In her new cell, the virus started to take hold.
“It felt like my body was in a vise grip,” she said.
The symptoms would change every few days. Somewhere around day six she said she lost her sense of smell and taste. Another day it “felt like an electrical current running through my body.” She came down with a fever and a bad case of diarrhea. And all the time, body aches and exhaustion made it hard to move.
She’d been tested on the second day and a few days later the results came back positive, she said.
Medical officials at the prison came by bringing Tylenol and advising the women to drink water, she said. “I didn’t have the energy to get up and draw my own water,” she said.
Lisa Kinney, a spokeswoman for the state corrections department, said in an email that the agency could not discuss anyone’s medical information.
In general terms, however, she said medical staff conducts rounds in at least four hour intervals.
“When someone has a fever, hydration is very important and staff may decide the fever needs to be kept down with Tylenol,” Kinney wrote. “Stable patients are kept on site, and when it becomes necessary … to take someone to the hospital, then we take them to the hospital, as has been done with more than one COVID positive offender at” the Goochland prison.
One day, Barry said she heard a woman who had a high fever and elevated blood pressure fall to the ground and start coughing up blood. The doctor came by and advised her to drink water. Later, the woman was taken to the hospital, she said
“It was the next thing to a nightmare, hearing what everyone was going through,” Barry said. “And I can see the light at the end of the tunnel because I’m getting out.”
But she started to fear she might suffocate first. Aside from breathing issues brought on by the virus, she said the room where the women were housed had little air circulation and felt like a basement.
Kinney said the entire facility has central air.
The women talked to each other for support, Barry said.
“We said, ‘how you feeling today?’ We tried to lift each other up.”
Before leaving, Barry promised them she’d try to help when she got out.
“I feel so obligated to help because we couldn’t breathe in there,” she said.
Back in her house in Alton, Barry now finds herself trying to adjust back to normal in a world that is anything but.
Her aunt stocked her refrigerator with food, but she’s living alone. She still feels weak and nauseous and doesn’t have the energy to clean a home that’s sat pretty much untouched for years. She’s working on one chore at a time.
Barry was locked up in 2017 on charges of malicious wounding, reckless handling of a firearm and use of a firearm to commit a felony.
Upon release, she was told to go straight home and quarantine, she said. The prison has notified the health department, which is supposed to follow up with her soon, according to her probation officer.
When a COVID-positive offender’s release date comes, Kinney said, the department’s policy is to coordinate the release with the state health department.
“Home plan development takes into account the offender’s living situation given their COVID status,” she said, explaining how it’s done in coordination with the probation and parole office.
The department is “working around to clock to plan for every possible contingency and have myriad plans in place for COVID, from changes to pill lines at the facilities to giving offenders three months’ worth of medicine when they are released.”
For Barry, it’s hard to tell which feelings are from coronavirus and which stem from a transitional anxiety. She recently had a video call through the Houseparty app with her three grown children and grandchildren, but it was “bittersweet” not to be able to touch them.
“I don’t know how much is from going from a little cell to a big house again,” she said. “I don’t know what’s normal.”
Katherine Hafner, 757-222-5208, katherine.hafner@pilotonline.com
