After prison suicide, inmate advocates question conditions

A former New Hampshire man serving a life sentence for murder hanged himself Sunday at the maximum-security prison in Shirley in what an inmate advocacy group called the fifth suicide in a Massachusetts prison in 13 months.

Michael Keohane, formerly of Exeter, N.H., was found hanging from a torn sheet in his cell at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center about 11:25 p.m., said Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Correction. He was pronounced dead at Leominster Hospital at 12:45 a.m. yesterday, Wiffin said.

Keohane, 27, left notes that ''revealed that he was distraught over a personal relationship" outside the prison, said Wiffin. Prison officials and the Worcester district attorney's office are examining the notes as part of their investigations of the suicide.

Keohane was being held in a segregated special management unit for prisoners with disciplinary problems, said Wiffin, who declined to give more details.

An Essex County jury convicted Keohane in 2000 of first-degree murder for bludgeoning Michael Monahan, 22, to death with a baseball bat in 1999 in a Salisbury motel room. The two had argued over money.

Jean Fielding, a Greenfield lawyer who unsuccessfully helped appeal Keohane's conviction to the Supreme Judicial Court last year, said she was stunned to learn of his suicide.

''It's very sad," she said. ''It's a very hard circumstance for a person to lose hope, to be facing life in prison and have their appeal denied . . . It's got to be as discouraging as it could be."

Keohane's suicide was the fifth in the prison system since March of last year and the second at Souza-Baranowski, said Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services. She said it was preventable.

''This is a high-tech super-max prison with lights and cameras and electronic surveillance equipment," she said. ''This is one building, one unit. Nothing happens in that unit without those guards knowing about it."

Walker said at least one inmate from the prison called her office yesterday to say Keohane had hung from the sheet for more than a half-hour as guards and medical staff stood outside his door, Walker said.

Wiffin denied that. She said that medical staff began giving Keohane cardiopulmonary resuscitation after arriving at 11:27 p.m. and that emergency medical technicians responded to the prison at 11:45 p.m. and transported Keohane to the hospital at 12:15 a.m. ''We're standing by the timeline," Wiffin said.

Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services says three of the four suicides last year in Massachusetts prisons, as well as the lone suicide in 2004, involved inmates who had been diagnosed as mentally ill. Keohane had no history of mental illness, Wiffin said.

Testifying before a legislative committee last month, Walker said that all the mentally ill inmates had deteriorated rapidly after they were placed in highly restrictive segregation units where they had little or no access to personal belongings or treatment.

Walker has urged the prison system to create specialized housing for mentally ill inmates, who account for about 16 percent of state prisoners across the country, according to a 2000 US Justice Department study.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.