A federal inmate who was given five years to live after his defense team says staff at the MDC Brooklyn jail ignored his cancer diagnosis for months has died in custody, less than halfway into his prison sentence.
Terrence Wise, 56, tried in vain for months at the MDC Brooklyn jail to get proper treatment as he complained of chest pain and coughed up blood, but the jail’s medical officials sat on his CT scan results for weeks, allowing a cancerous mass in his chest to balloon unchecked, court records show.
Dr. Philip Hoffman, a cancer expert and professor at the University of Chicago who reviewed Wise’s medcial records for the defense, said the delay cost him his chance at surviving the cancer.
Had the tumor been caught in time, he would have had an 80 % chance of living past five more years with surgery alone, Hoffman said. But the delay cut that survival rate to 41 %, Hoffman wrote in a Nov. 25, 2024 letter to his sentencing judge.
Wise didn’t make it to Thanksgiving. He died Nov. 2 at the federal medical center facility in Butner, N.C., and his cause of death was Stage IIB Non Small Cell Lung Adenocarcinoma, or lung cancer, his lawyer, Mia Eisner-Grynberg wrote in a Nov. 25 court filing.
“We’re devastated by Terrence Wise’s premature death in custody. Terrence died because MDC Brooklyn admittedly botched his medical care, allowing a mass on his lung to triple in size while they failed to read his CT report,” Eisner-Grynberg told the Daily News Monday.
“He was finally receiving cancer treatment at Maimonides Medical Center when he was abruptly moved to FMC Butner, where he died within seven months. Terrence’s death was preventable and his loss profound.”
Wise had already spent more than two years behind bars when Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Diane Gujarati sentenced him on Jan. 22 to seven years in a Molotov cocktail firebombing case.
Eisner-Grynberg was asking the judge sentence him to time-served or 36 months, and requested he remained he locked up near New York City until the end of his cancer treatment at Maimonides, which was expected to last through October.
“My life is at the mercy of the Court, and I don’t want to die in prison away from my family, those that I have left,” he told Gujarati. “I know I get a sentence from the Court. I expect it. I’m not innocent. I’m not. But I got a sentence that I didn’t ask for, that my mind telling me to keep fighting the battle, but my body telling me something different, because I’m aging and I’ve been through a lot. My body don’t want to fight.”
Gujarati took almost two years off Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Roddin’s requested 105-month sentence, but didn’t go further because of “the seriousness of defendant’s criminal conduct and his extensive criminal history.”
She also rejected the defense attorney’s request to have him incarcerated in New York until his cancer treatment was completed. “I don’t think it is appropriate to tell the Bureau of Prisons where they need to take somebody for medical treatment or not,” Gujarati said.
MDC Brooklyn, the city’s only federal jail, has long been plagued by delays in medical treatment, sick calls ignored by staff and botched diagnoses. In another case last year, the jail’s medical staff largely ignored an inmate’s medical complaints for months as a cancerous tumor grew in his leg.
Wise first became ill in fall 2023. A chest X-ray on Nov. 7 of that year showed no mass in his chest, but his doctor called for a CT scan. He didn’t get that scan for nearly four months, on Feb. 28, 2024, and the results showed a mass in his chest.
Even then, his chances of survival would have been much higher, had medical staff at MDC Brooklyn not “somehow missed” the results, as was described in a summary by the MDC last year, which described the delays as “unfortunate.”
Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News
The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. (Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News)
The jail apparently got the report about his scan results on March 11, 2024 and the MDC’s clinical director signed the report a week later, according to Wise’s lawyer’s filings, but nothing happened for weeks, despite Wise’s repeated inquiries. He was later bounced between nursing homes and hospitals, and the MDC before being sent to Maimonides for his outpatient immunotherapy regimen. He was moved to Butner on April 8.
Wise was arrested after he threw a Molotov cocktail at a van parked in Brooklyn in November 2022, then returned three days later to set the same van on fire. Two days after his second attempt, he lit a U-Haul van he was driving on fire after he got into an argument and someone rammed it.
He tried to flee cops in another U-Haul van before his arrest that December and bragged in a recorded phone call about throwing away components of a gun he had in the van, according to the feds.
His defense lawyer said personal tragedy and a friend’s overdose led him to the commit the fiery crimes, and he was targeting the van of a drug dealer who secretly laced crack cocaine with fentanyl.
