New Jersey DOC Sued Twice for Turning “Blind Eye” to “Pervasive” Drug-Smuggling Blamed for Prisoner Deaths
A suit filed in federal court for the District of New Jersey on February 19, 2025, accused officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) of failing to protect prisoner Phillip Kellerman from getting hold of the fatal dose of fentanyl that killed him at Northern State Prison (NSP) in January 2024. It was the second suit in six months making the accusation since an earlier complaint filed in state Superior Court for Union County on August 19, 2024, over the fatal fentanyl overdose of Michael Cassella at East Jersey State Prison (EJSP) in August 2022.
Cassella, 40, was in ESJP because of his drug abuse history; he was under the influence of a cocktail of illegal drugs when he drove his car head-on into a Mt. Arlington Police Department cruiser in October 2011, killing Officer Joseph Wargo. Entering a guilty plea in 2013, Cassella was sentenced to 20 years in prison for aggravated manslaughter.
The wrongful death complaint filed on behalf of his estate by his aunt, Donna McNichol, accused DOC officials of negligence and failure to protect him from a state-created danger by “routinely turn[ing] a blind eye” to “a pervasive and systemic pattern and practice” of drug-smuggling guards and prisoners.
The prisoner lay dead “awhile” before any medical staff saw him, the suit also claimed, because “the serious medical needs of inmates, including Mr. Cassella, are given cursory attention, when not entirely ignored, and when acknowledged at all, treated with slipshod, hasty, inefficacious, rubber-stamp patch-jobs, designed to quiet inmate complaints, rather than treat the medical needs of human beings.” McNichol is represented in her suit by attorney Brook M. Barnett of BMB Law Firm in Newark. See: McNichol v. Kuhn, N.J. Super (Union Cty.), Case No. LCV20242030543.
The more recent suit was filed on behalf of Kellerman’s estate by his sister, Danielle Mendes. She claimed that the 35-year-old’s drug abuse history was also known to DOC staffers; he was incarcerated for a 12-year term in 2017 for robbing a pharmacy of prescription pills the year before, when he also broke into two homes and stole property to fence for drugs. Nevertheless, the prison system housed him with other drug abusers, the complaint said, amid a “raging drug epidemic” at NSP.
DOC medical staff failed Kellerman too, the complaint continued, withholding Narcan overdose-reversal medication after he was found unresponsive in his cell—in violation of DOC policy. Mendes is represented in her suit by Philadelphia attorney Michael T. Van der Veen of Van der Veen, O’Neill, Hartshorn & Levin. See: Mendes v. N.J. Dep’t of Corr., USDC (D.N.J.), Case No. 1:25-cv-01345.
To stem the flow of contraband drugs, the state banned physical mail for prisoners in 2023, hiring out mail-scanning services from privately owned prison profiteer Pigeonly, Inc.—which has since filed for bankruptcy, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.35.] Yet Peter P. Adubato, a fellow attorney in Van der Veen’s firm, said that state lockups “have become drug havens,” even as prison officials “who allow drugs to enter into prison are rarely punished.”
Additional source: New Jersey Monitor
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login