For the second time in a year, staff at MDC Brooklyn — the troubled federal jail where Sean “Diddy” Combs is now locked up — largely ignored an inmate’s medical complaints for months as a cancerous tumor grew in his body.
Dwayne Pickett, 29, who’s awaiting sentencing in a gun trafficking case, asked for medical help 17 times between January and August, desperately describing extreme pain in his leg.
He was seen just three times by a nurse practitioner, who made no note of what would turn out to be a growing tumor on his right leg, according to federal court records. Finally, he saw a doctor at the jail on Aug. 7, and was hospitalized a day later.
“He was given nothing more than Advil when it turns out he has cancer. By the time the MDC took him to a doctor, he had a 7-centimeter tumor bulging out of his leg,” his lawyer Kyla Wells of the Federal Defenders told the Daily News. “Nobody from the MDC has been able to explain the constitutionally inadequate medical care provided here. It’s inexcusable.”