Family members of Amanda Cahill – the 31-year-old mother of two who died earlier this month in a Philadelphia jail – say their grief is compounded by their inability to get answers about how she died on the city's watch and by reports that people incarcerated with Cahill were clamoring to get her help.
Cahill was arrested on a drug charge Sept. 4 along with 33 other people during a sweep Philadelphia police conducted in Kensington. At the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, a nurse who performs narcotic withdrawal assessments saw Cahill at 1 a.m. Sept. 7 in her cell. Hours later, at 7:30 a.m., Cahill, 31, was found unresponsive, and when attempts to revive her failed, she was declared dead at 7:45 a.m., the Philadelphia Managing Director's Office said.
City officials have declined to comment on Cahill's cause of death because it is under investigation. Cahill's mother, Gina Clark, said she has hired an attorney.
"I feel like they think that my daughter was just another unloved junkie, and they were wrong," Clark said. "I think that they feel like it was going to be swept under the rug, like they weren't going to get caught in this one. But they were wrong, because I'm not going to stop until something's done about it."
On Tuesday night, Cahill's cousin Kayden Hujack and activists interrupted a panel discussion on mass incarceration, held at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Parkway Central Branch. Michael R. Resnick, commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Prisons, was among the guests sitting on the panel.
A video posted to Instagram by SOL Collective, a harm reduction group, show activists holding signs and chanting "One, two, three, four, open up the prison doors!" At one point, Hujack yells, "You took my cousin's life. She suffered for six hours and 45 minutes .... They all called for help. Nobody came. ... The PDP killed her."
Resnick watched for several minutes before walking out of the auditorium, the video shows. Activists chanted "justice for Amanda Cahill" in the hallway as attendees and other panelists, including criminal justice advocates, listened and then dispersed.
The Philadelphia Department of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the accusations made by activists at the library event.
Cahill, who grew up in Roxborough, had been in custody of the Philadelphia Department of Prisons since Sept. 5 before her death. Clark, her mother, said she was told her daughter, who had struggled with opioid addiction since her teens, was not among 11 people who were taken to the hospital after being arrested in the Kensington sweep. Someone delivered a food tray to Cahill's cell at 5:30 a.m. on the day she died, and Cahill was sleeping at the time, Clark said she was told.
Last week, a spokesperson for the managing director's office would not say if Cahill had been hospitalized after her arrest because it is "against PDP policy to address publicly an ongoing investigation.
"The City recognizes there are sometimes complex medical conditions and problems that occur within the population of individuals who are actively using narcotics and publicly possessing paraphernalia on our city streets," the spokesperson wrote in an email. "Pursuant to policy, Philadelphia Police transports medically unstable people who are arrested for unlawful behavior to hospitals to medically stabilize them. Whether a person is subsequently held or released is a function of the charging decisions by the District Attorney’s Office and the judicial system holds placed upon that person by other jurisdictions. For those who enter the custody of the Philadelphia Department of Prisons, PDP policy directs that they are seen by a medical provider within four hours of admission."
On Tuesday, Sam Lew, an organizer with the Abolitionist Law Center, a public interest law firm that advocates for the rights of people who are incarcerated, said she "heard from several incarcerated people that women were banging on the doors for hours, trying to get Amanda medical assistance."
"People are not getting the type of urgent medical care that they need, and the jails are a death trap," Lew said. "These are people who are under state care, essentially. No one should be dying in jail."
Cahill's death was 'entirely preventable,' advocates say
"We know from years of organizing in the women's jail that the Philadelphia Department of Prisons fails to address even the most basic health issues," said Rachel Santiago of Still We Rise Freedom Coalition, a group of formerly incarcerated women and allies. "Ms. Cahill's death was entirely predictable and preventable."
In 2020, 10 incarcerated people filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court against the Philadelphia Department of Prisons and the city over inhumane conditions and other civil rights violations. A 2022 agreement in the case appointed a federal monitor to oversee the city's implementation of specific improvements in the prison department.
But as recently as April, the prison department was not upholding its part of that agreement to improve conditions at the prison, according to the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, which represents the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit. Among the issues was the ongoing staffing shortage, including a job vacancy rate of more than 40% among corrections officers.
"Conditions and a staffing shortage has reached crisis levels and have left incarcerated people vulnerable to unsafe, unsanitary, and often deadly conditions," the PILP wrote in August when it sought to hold the city in contempt.
A judge found the city of Philadelphia in contempt for violating the 2022 agreement and ordered it to prioritize filling staff vacancies and pay $25 million into a fund to be used for improvements at the prisons.
According to prison department records obtained by the Abolitionist Law Center, three people died in city jails of drug intoxication in 2023, six in 2022, six in 2021 and three in 2020.
Mayor Cherelle Parker has vowed to close down Kensington's open-air drug market, the largest on the East Coast. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel deployed 75 new foot patrol officers to Kensington in June to crack down on drug use, prostitution and other crimes as part of a new "comprehensive safety plan." The city has conducted sweeps of homeless encampments in Kensington since the spring, during which people are being offered the choice between treatment or jail, city officials have said.
Arrests for drug offenses are up 5% in 2024 compared to last year, with a total of 3,182 arrests for drug crimes as of Sept. 16. That is 161 more arrests for drug crimes from the same time last year but down 152 arrests from Sept. 16, 2022, according to statistics from the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.
Overall, the population at Philadelphia's prisons was 4,811 in July, up by 96 people from April when it was 4,684 – but down 40.5% from 8,082 in July 2015, a report from the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania says.
In recent months, outreach workers have pushed back against the more stringent, law-and-order approach in Kensington, saying it could backfire if the city doesn't maintain an emphasis on harm reduction. People who work in harm reduction in Philadelphia have been vocal on social media about their grief and outrage about Cahill's death.
"I really want to see the city step up and take this as a sign to shift course," said Sarah Laurel, founder of Savage Sisters, which operates recovery houses and offers outreach services throughout the city. "We need evidence-based practices and compassion."
The prisons department does not have sufficient medical care, especially for people going into withdrawal from the increasingly poly-chemical nature of the city's illicit drug supply, said Thomas Frey, operations director at The Everywhere Project, another harm reduction organization.
"I mean, talk to anybody who's in any of the prisons," Frey said. "You have a headache. You can't even get an aspirin."
The Defender Association of Philadelphia provides legal representation and re-entry support, and advocates for adults and juveniles in the criminal justice system. It said the city's jails are not equipped to handle the surge of people with addiction entering the prison as a result of the city's sweeps in Kensington.
"Ms. Cahill's death is precisely the kind of tragedy that occurs when we use ineffective law enforcement tactics to address what is ultimately a public health issue," the organization said. "Arresting people suffering from addiction and placing them in jails that are unprepared to meet their many medical and mental health needs will only lead to more preventable deaths."
The spokesperson for the city's managing director's office wrote in an email that the "City is always in the process of considering any steps necessary to address the health concerns of people taken into custody; that ongoing process will continue to improve outcomes. The City will continue to push forward and stabilize conditions in Kensington and other neighborhoods for the people who live there, and that includes using every tool needed that involves prevention, intervention and enforcement, through the Police Department and every other relevant city department."
'I would go through it all again if I could have her back'
In the meantime, members of Cahill's family said they are struggling to wrap their heads around her death in jail and that they want people to know there was more to Cahill than her addiction.
Hujack remembers playing "Just Dance" on Nintendo Wii to the song "Apache" by The Sugarhill Gang with her and "laughing and laughing."
Hujack posted a video to TikTok that "sheds light on who Amanda was to me," she said. "She was actually a hilarious person and always made me smile," Hujack said, adding that Cahill's death has "rocked the neighborhood."
♬ How to Save a Life (Acoustic Live at Q101, Chicago, IL - 2006) - The Fray
"Had we had an accurate explanation as to how this happened, how they did this to my cousin, neglected the medical care that she needed, then we might be able to move on and be able to heal as a family," Hujack said.
Clark, who has custody of Cahill's 12- and 6-year-old sons, said that "even in addiction," her daughter "was still a good person. She was a good mom."
Cahill fought to get into recovery for years, but the disease overcame her, Clark said. "It's been hell, but I would go through it all again if I could have her back."