Inmate on dialysis bleeds to death while serving life sentence in Missouri prison

by Rudi Keller, Missouri Independent
February 6, 2025

James Pointer’s life sentence in the Missouri Department of Corrections ended abruptly last week when he bled to death from an opening in his leg used to administer dialysis treatments.

Pointer, 76, was housed at the Moberly Correctional Center, where the state prison agency keeps offenders with kidney disease because it has a dialysis center, department spokeswoman Karen Pojmann wrote in an email to The Independent.

Pointer was pronounced dead at 5:13 p.m. last Friday and “had been on dialysis for many years, had been incarcerated since 2009 and had been at Moberly Correctional Center for 10 years,” Pojmann wrote.

Pointer was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2009 after pleading guilty in the murder of his estranged wife in St. Louis.

An autopsy has been ordered, local law enforcement was notified and an investigation of the death is underway, Pojmann wrote.

Pojmann did not share any information regarding the manner of Pointer’s death. The Independent learned how he died from Déna Notz, a former corrections officer who founded an organization called Collectively Changing Corrections. Notz shared an email from a man incarcerated at the Moberly prison who saw Pointer bleeding.

“Friday night I witnessed a man I loved, James Pointer, a Vietnam veteran, bleed out from his femoral artery on a cold, dirty prison floor,” the inmate wrote. “It took medical so long to get to him that he died.”

The email was chilling, Notz said.

“It doesn’t surprise me because of all the stuff I hear,” she said,“but I still cannot believe that something like this happened.” 

The description of events was confirmed by Tammy Mogab, a woman whose brother Shawn Scrivens is an insulin-dependent diabetic housed at the Moberly prison. Scrivens told a Phelps County judge he had not received an insulin shot in 124 days when he pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Mogab said she spoke to her brother on the telephone on Saturday as well as other men incarcerated at the prison.

“There are witnesses to the death of Mr. Pointer,”  Mogab said, “and now all the dialysis patients are afraid to take their treatments.”

The Randolph County Ambulance District received an emergency call for the prison at 4:37 p.m. Friday and arrived on the scene at 4:49 p.m., district Superintendent Clay Joiner said.

“We did everything we could in this situation,” Joiner said.

Dialysis treats kidney failure and over time, preferred access points in a person’s arms can become scarred or otherwise unusable. A permanent catheter inserted into a blood vessel in the upper leg is a last-resort method.

Rapid bleeding can occur if the access port at the end of the tube becomes dislodged and there is no clamp to close off the tube.

The femoral artery is one of the largest in the human body. A person can bleed to death in 2 to 5 minutes if no action is taken to staunch the flow of blood.

Joiner said he has responded to similar emergencies among dialysis patients in their homes.

“When your femoral artery is bleeding out, you have very little time,” Joiner said.

Randolph County Coroner Charlie Peel will rule on the cause of death for Pointer. He said that he is not ready to release any information about what he observed or was told by the department.

“We are in the middle of an investigation,” Peel said.

Many of the autopsies on people who die in the custody of the department are conducted at the Boone County Medical Examiner’s office in Columbia. Autopsy records obtained by The Independent for deaths at the Algoa and Jefferson City correctional centers show that in the past two years, the time elapsed from the date of the death to a completed report has ranged from 30 to more than 250 days.

There were 11 deaths at Moberly Correctional Center in 2024, fifth most among the 19 adult prisons operated by the department. The prison system recorded 139 deaths in 2024, the highest number of deaths in custody in its history.

The inmate who wrote to Notz stated that it was the fourth time in the past month that Pointer’s access point opened. He blamed medical staff working for contractor Centurion Health, not department officers.

“How inept does a nurse have to be, does a company have to be, to allow this man to bleed out of an open artery four times in one month?” the inmate wrote. “DOC staff is not to blame for this atrocity.  Medical staff is responsible and they alone must pay.”

Health care in Missouri’s prisons is performed by Centurion Health under a contract, recently renegotiated, that pays the company $21.65 per day for each person in custody. 

The state will pay Centurion approximately $203 million in the coming fiscal year, an increase of about 11% from the previous rate.

Centurion did not respond to telephone and email messages seeking comment.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.