{"id":450661,"date":"2025-12-16T09:44:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T09:44:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/450661\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T09:44:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T09:44:28","slug":"federal-inmate-dies-in-custody-after-mdc-brooklyn-accused-of-botching-cancer-diagnosis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/450661\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal inmate dies in custody after MDC Brooklyn accused of botching cancer diagnosis"},"content":{"rendered":"

A federal inmate who was given five years to live after his defense team says staff at the MDC Brooklyn jail ignored his cancer diagnosis<\/a> for months has died in custody, less than halfway into his prison sentence.<\/p>\n

Terrence Wise, 56, tried in vain for months at the MDC Brooklyn jail to get proper treatment as he complained of chest pain and coughed up blood, but the jail\u2019s medical officials sat on his CT scan results for weeks, allowing a cancerous mass in his chest to balloon unchecked, court records show.<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr. Philip Hoffman, a cancer expert and professor at the University of Chicago who reviewed Wise\u2019s medcial records for the defense, said the delay cost him his chance at surviving the cancer.<\/p>\n

Had the tumor been caught in time, he would have had an 80 % chance of living past five more years with surgery alone, Hoffman said. But the delay cut that survival rate to 41 %, Hoffman wrote in a Nov. 25, 2024 letter to his sentencing judge.<\/a><\/p>\n

Wise didn\u2019t make it to Thanksgiving. He died Nov. 2 at the federal medical center facility in Butner, N.C., and his cause of death was Stage IIB Non Small Cell Lung Adenocarcinoma, or lung cancer, his lawyer, Mia Eisner-Grynberg wrote in a Nov. 25 court filing.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re devastated by Terrence Wise\u2019s premature death in custody. Terrence died because MDC Brooklyn admittedly botched his medical care, allowing a mass on his lung to triple in size while they failed to read his CT report,\u201d Eisner-Grynberg told the Daily News Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was finally receiving cancer treatment at Maimonides Medical Center when he was abruptly moved to FMC Butner, where he died within seven months. Terrence\u2019s death was preventable and his loss profound.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wise had already spent more than two years behind bars when Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Diane Gujarati sentenced him on Jan. 22 to seven years in a Molotov cocktail firebombing case.<\/a><\/p>\n

Eisner-Grynberg was asking the judge sentence him to time-served or 36 months, and requested he remained he locked up near New York City until the end of his cancer treatment at Maimonides, which was expected to last through October.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy life is at the mercy of the Court, and I don\u2019t want to die in prison away from my family, those that I have left,\u201d he told Gujarati. \u201cI know I get a sentence from the Court. I expect it. I\u2019m not innocent. I\u2019m not. But I got a sentence that I didn\u2019t ask for, that my mind telling me to keep fighting the battle, but my body telling me something different, because I\u2019m aging and I\u2019ve been through a lot. My body don\u2019t want to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gujarati took almost two years off Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Roddin\u2019s requested 105-month sentence, but didn\u2019t go further because of \u201cthe seriousness of defendant\u2019s criminal conduct and his extensive criminal history.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also rejected the defense attorney\u2019s request to have him incarcerated in New York until his cancer treatment was completed. \u201cI don\u2019t think it is appropriate to tell the Bureau of Prisons where they need to take somebody for medical treatment or not,\u201d Gujarati said.<\/p>\n

MDC Brooklyn, the city\u2019s only federal jail, has long been plagued by delays in medical treatment, sick calls ignored by staff and botched diagnoses. In another case last year, the jail\u2019s medical staff largely ignored an inmate\u2019s medical complaints<\/a> for months as a cancerous tumor grew in his leg.<\/p>\n

Wise first became ill in fall 2023. A chest X-ray on Nov. 7 of that year showed no mass in his chest, but his doctor called for a CT scan. He didn\u2019t get that scan for nearly four months, on Feb. 28, 2024, and the results showed a mass in his chest.<\/p>\n

Even then, his chances of survival would have been much higher, had medical staff at MDC Brooklyn not \u201csomehow missed\u201d the results, as was described in a summary by the MDC last year, which described the delays as \u201cunfortunate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News<\/p>\n

The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. (Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News)<\/p>\n

The jail apparently got the report about his scan results on March 11, 2024 and the MDC\u2019s clinical director<\/a> signed the report a week later, according to Wise\u2019s lawyer\u2019s filings, but nothing happened for weeks, despite Wise\u2019s repeated inquiries. He was later bounced between nursing homes and hospitals, and the MDC before being sent to Maimonides for his outpatient immunotherapy regimen. He was moved to Butner on April 8.<\/p>\n

Wise was arrested after he threw a Molotov cocktail at a van parked in Brooklyn in November 2022, then returned three days later to set the same van on fire. Two days after his second attempt, he lit a U-Haul van he was driving on fire after he got into an argument and someone rammed it.<\/p>\n

He tried to flee cops in another U-Haul van before his arrest that December and bragged in a recorded phone call about throwing away components of a gun he had in the van, according to the feds.<\/p>\n

His defense lawyer said personal tragedy and a friend\u2019s overdose led him to the commit the fiery crimes, and he was targeting the van of a drug dealer who secretly laced crack cocaine with fentanyl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal inmate who was given five years to live after his defense team says staff at the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":450662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,1121,2451,3059,5295,1370,728,405,403,5294,50,5226,5225,5228,5227,5293,5321,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-450661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-brooklyn","10":"tag-city","11":"tag-county","12":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","13":"tag-latest-headlines","14":"tag-local-news","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-city","17":"tag-new-york-county","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-newyork","20":"tag-newyorkcity","21":"tag-ny","22":"tag-nyc","23":"tag-nyc-crime","24":"tag-sub-county-region","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-united-states-of-america","27":"tag-unitedstates","28":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","29":"tag-us","30":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115728605620586032","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}