The Poisoned Pen of Fort Lyon Prison

However, DeFelice and other officials acknowledge that there have been situations, including the Dairy Barn fiasco, in which inmates or staff were accidentally exposed to asbestos. Several have been documented by state health inspectors investigating inmate complaints. The DOC administrators insist that these incidents are isolated and have been blown out of proportion; the procedures they've put in place since the Gobbell Hays inspection, they say, are more than adequate to prevent further exposures. But sealing off or removing the asbestos, a project that falls outside the prison's operational budget, is being done in incremental stages as funding becomes available and may take twenty years or more. And some prisoners who are knowledgeable about asbestos abatement claim the documented incidents are only the tip of a costly, pervasive problem at Fort Lyon that the DOC failed to adequately address in its eagerness to ship prisoners there.

History Lesson #2

In 1853 William Bent built a new fort several miles east of the old one. The location, not far from present-day Lamar, struck the Army as a good area in which to erect its own fort, a sandstone compound that could offer protection to travelers between Kansas and Santa Fe.

The construction of Fort Wise, named after Henry Wise, the fancy-pants, well-connected governor of Virginia, began in 1860. Soldiers called the place Fort Fauntleroy. The name was changed to Fort Lyon the following year, after the War Between the States made Wise a secessionist and claimed the life of Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon.

Troop strength at Fort Lyon dwindled during the Civil War, as many of its soldiers were sent elsewhere. But the holdouts did see some action against the Indians, including one of the most notable atrocities of the period. In 1864, Colonel John M. Chivington came to Fort Lyon to commandeer additional forces to aid his regiment of hard-drinking irregulars. With the blessing of his close personal friend, territorial governor John Evans, Chivington was on a mission to suppress troublesome Indian factions who were defying a treaty that had been signed at the fort in 1861. The Treaty of Fort Wise ceded vast stretches of land to the whites that had been guaranteed to the Plains tribes only a few years earlier.

The morning after his visit to Fort Lyon, Chivington staged a dawn attack on a peaceful, largely unarmed village of Cheyenne and Arapaho. Most of the village's adult males were out hunting. Although some soldiers refused to fire, Chivington's bunch slaughtered and mutilated hundreds of women, children and elders. Trophies from the raid, including scalps and genitalia, were displayed in saloons in Denver. Public revulsion followed, and the incident became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. William Bent's son Robert, forced to serve as a guide to Chivington, testified against him in the subsequent official investigations. But the colonel was never charged with any crime.

Still, some taint from the mass murder — bad karma, sin, a vengeful spirit or just rotten luck — seemed to find its way back to Fort Lyon. In 1867 a spring ice dam backed up the Arkansas River and flooded the post, forcing the Army to abandon it. The deluge also plucked the bodies of dead soldiers from the fort's cemetery. The waterlogged corpses were piled on wagons and put on a train, to be reburied at Fort Leavenworth.

Flaking Out

Lance Coats arrived at Fort Lyon in 2002, in the first wave of inmates who were put to work building a fence around the perimeter and renovating the cellhouses. He was handed gloves and a bucket, ordered to watch a training video, and informed that he was now a porter.

A nonviolent offender serving time for a telephone harassment case and parole violations, Coats was never officially assigned to renovation work. But his job sometimes took him into the construction zone. He remembers being called to one room to clean up blood after an inmate cut his hand while installing drywall.

"When I walked in, the place was so cloudy," he recalls. "Clouds and clouds of dust. They were breaking drywall and tearing the place apart. I asked, 'You guys don't wear masks?' They said, 'They don't have none.'"

No one could get away from the dust, he says — not just drywall dust, but airborne bits of pipe insulation, particles of torn-up flooring and so on. The inmates doing the renovations would come back to their four-man or eight-man rooms and shake their dusty clothes off in front of you. After they removed sections of the drop ceiling in the living quarters, stuff would flake off the exposed pipes above and drift down on you. When the wind blew hard, as it often did, the windows would rattle and the flakes would fall like Christmas in an old Jimmy Stewart movie.