Her father died at a Nebraska prison. She won’t stop fighting until the Legislature acts to prevent the next death

Mateja Weindorff sat in front of the Nebraska Legislature’s Judiciary Committee in late January with her father’s ashes in a silver charm around her neck.

“I'm here today not as a lobbyist, but as a mother, a daughter and a student,” she began. “My father, Robert Weindorff, should still be alive.”

Mateja was 18 years old when her father died while incarcerated at the Work Ethic Camp, a state-run minimum-security prison in McCook. In the first call from the warden, Mateja said, she was told that her father had “fallen.” When she called the McCook Community Hospital, she was informed that Robert had died of cardiac arrest brought on by untreated diabetes. He was 47 years old.

“If my father had walked into any emergency room in this state instead of a prison infirmary, he would have lived,” Mateja said. “He didn't die because diabetes is complicated. He died because in prison, medical care requires permission. And permission came too late.”

In the three years since her father’s death, Mateja’s grief and anger has driven her to action. When the Office of the Inspector General for the Nebraska Correctional System struggled to obtain Robert’s medical records from the prison, she hired a lawyer and obtained them herself. She contacted attorney after attorney seeking to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the state. Eventually, the timeframe to file a claim closed in 2024.

So she turned her efforts to the Legislature.

“I started reading bill drafts, because there’s a lot of those on the internet, and I compared some of the drafts that I found to actual bill language in the Legislature right now,” Mateja said. “And I created my own draft. And then after that, I started emailing senators.”

Mateja said she wasn’t sure at first if the bill would get any interest from legislators. But it did. She began meeting with senators and revising the language. Eventually, she ended up meeting with her own representative, George Dungan of Lincoln.

“As a legislator, we get a lot of folks reaching out to us with bill ideas, which is one of my favorite things,” Dungan said. “But it is rare that somebody reaches out, I think, with both that level of personal experience and that level of detail in their proposal.”

“I would say Ms. Weindorff understands the ins and outs of the Legislature better than a lot of people that are even inside this building,” he said.

Legislative Bill 902, or the Weindorff Medical Act, has four main components. It would require the prison’s medical director to develop “standardized medical care protocols” for the treatment of chronic and acute medical conditions, to include routine screening and early detection procedures for inmates. It would also require that each facility establish a maximum timeframe – not longer than 48 hours – for medical staff to complete an initial assessment into an inmate’s health complaint.

The bill would require department employees or contractors who witness or suspect medical neglect to report their concerns to the Inspector General of the Nebraska Correctional System. And it would expand the Inspector General’s duties to include investigations into medical neglect, and require that the office releases a public report if it investigates a death and concludes that medical neglect was “suspected, alleged, or reasonably indicated.”

Mateja said each of the provisions included in the bill are a reflection of her father’s story.

“The entire bill is my story – it’s my dad’s story,” she said. “There is a person behind every single policy.”

Robert's story

Robert was gentle and kind, Mateja said, and he raised his four children on loyalty and “a lot of structure.” When he died, she said the other inmates asked for a video of his funeral service.

Robert struggled with drug addiction for much of Mateja’s life. Court records show he was in and out of jail and on and off of probation for much of the 2010s, primarily for convictions related to methamphetamine.

“My mom kept it a secret for as long as she could,” Mateja said of her father’s addiction. “But it was definitely something he struggled with for a while.”

The arrest that would ultimately lead to Robert’s incarceration and death occurred on July 2, 2021, according to court records. He was sleeping in his car outside of a Gibbon gas station, and when police ran the license plates, it came back with an active warrant for a probation violation. They found methamphetamine and syringes on the floor of the driver’s seat.

By December 2021, he pleaded no contest to distribution of methamphetamine, and the next February, he was sentenced to three to 10 years in prison.

Mateja said her father was transferred to the Work Ethic Camp, which was then a minimum-security prison and is now a state-run federal immigration detention center, about a month before his death. At the prison, according to medical records provided by Mateja, Robert was being treated by medical staff for hypertension, or high blood pressure.

While Mateja said her father had been told once that he was “pre-diabetic,” he wasn’t being treated for diabetes on the outside or while incarcerated.

“None of us have had diabetic issues, so we weren’t aware that there was any underlying health issues that were a problem until it was too late,” she said.

On Dec. 3, Robert wrote what’s known as a “kite,” or a request to prison staff. He requested an A1C, or blood sugar, level check and recorded the following symptoms: “Unquenchable thirst, frequent peeing, excessive tiredness, dry mouth, out of breath for past 3 or 4 days.” Those symptoms are associated with diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially life-threatening complication of diabetes.

A nurse responded on Dec. 5 that they would ask the doctor for an A1C test on Dec. 7. In messages sent to loved ones and provided to Nebraska Public Media by Mateja, Robert wrote about feeling ill from Dec. 4 until Dec. 7.

“My body is falling apart,” he wrote on Dec. 4.

At 6:27 p.m. on Dec. 7, he said in a message that he was “99% sure it’s diabetes.”

According to prison medical records, Robert received a glucose test at about 11 a.m. on Dec. 8. After a finger prick test showed high levels of blood glucose, a urinalysis was ordered, which showed moderate ketones and very high glucose levels. Robert was then transported to the hospital.

Labs collected at the hospital at about 12:30 p.m. on Dec. 8 confirmed that Robert was suffering from diabetic ketoacidosis, according to medical records. His glucose level was recorded as “too high to read.”

He died in the hospital at 12:14 p.m. on Dec. 10, 2022. On Robert’s death certificate, his cause of death is listed as cardiac arrest due primarily to uncontrolled diabetes and secondarily to cardiovascular disease.

Bill draws opposition from Corrections

At a lengthy Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 23, members of the committee appeared to support the bill’s intent while pressing Dungan to make some definitions more specific and loosen some of the parameters.

Some of the discussion centered on the fiscal note submitted by the Department of Corrections, which estimated that the changes would require an additional 38 full-time employees and increase annual costs by $5.6 million. Dungan said that estimate is the result of a “fundamental misunderstanding” from the Department about the intent of the bill.

“I'm not saying that these people who are in custody need to have a doctor by their bedside 24/7,” Dungan said. “I'm not saying they have to be prescribed medication the second they ask for it. What we're asking for is basic human dignity to get the care or attention you need when requested.”

Several people in addition to Mateja testified in support of the bill, including the ACLU of Nebraska and two former physicians within the Nebraska prison system who were fired in recent years. Doug Koebernick, the Inspector General of Corrections, testified in a neutral capacity.

Rob Jeffreys, the director of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services, testified in opposition and said existing regulations are sufficient. He also defended the estimate of 38 additional positions, and said that number would be in addition to existing vacancies. Three Nebraska prisons – including Tecumseh and the Nebraska State Penitentiary, which each house more than 1,000 people – do not currently have a physician working there, according to Jeffreys. That’s despite a state law that requires each prison with more than 500 inmates to have one full-time physician who primarily works at that location.

Dungan emphasized his willingness to work with members of the committee to tweak language in the bill to make it more likely to pass.

“There are sometimes bills that are introduced to ‘start a conversation,’” he said. “This is not one of those. I want to get this done, and I think that this is something we actually can get done, and I know that everybody on this committee cares deeply about making sure that people receive care when it's necessary.”

The Judiciary Committee did not take any immediate action on LB 902. It will likely go through revisions before the committee votes on whether or not to advance it to general file.

If the bill doesn’t progress this session, Mateja has a promise for legislators.

“I’ll be back,” she said. “I’ll be back, for sure.”