Mourning mother wants pope to bless ground where son died

MOST PEOPLE would do anything to get out of prison. Karen Brady would do anything to get in.

When the Queens, N.Y., woman heard that the pope would visit the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility this Sunday morning, she saw it as divine providence.

Four years ago, her son Mike, a CFCF inmate sick from detoxing from the drugs that had bedeviled him for years, died after correctional officers answered his request for medical treatment with brute force and pepper spray. His family won $300,000 in a 2013 wrongful-death lawsuit that claimed prison staff showed "negligence and deliberate indifference to a serious medical need."

As if the circumstances of his death weren't upsetting enough, Karen Brady - a lifelong Catholic - had always regretted that her son died without last rites.

If she could get into CFCF, she said, she would ask Pope Francis to consecrate the ground where her son breathed some of his last breaths.

But the pope's prison visit is not open to the public. About 100 inmates; the families of five inmates; prison staff; the pope's entourage of public and church officials; journalists; and the families of wardens Patrick N. Curran and Robert F. Fromhold - murdered at Holmesburg Prison in 1973 - will greet Francis, prisons spokeswoman Shawn Hawes said.

So Karen Brady now plans to stand vigil outside the prison.

If security is so tight she can't get close, she'll stand wherever she can - and take comfort in Francis' presence there, even if she never even catches a glimpse of him or his motorcade.

"Pope Francis could have gone anywhere in the world, but he's going there," said Karen Brady, 63. "I feel like he was sent there for a reason, and the reason for me is that he's blessing the ground that my son died on. Just his presence there is a blessing. I definitely have a sense of peace knowing that my son is getting a blessing, even though he never got last rites."

Mike Brady, a longtime drug addict jailed on drug charges, died May 21, 2011, after he got sick from detoxing and went to CFCF's infirmary. Returning to his cell, he felt sick again and asked the correctional officers escorting him to go back to the infirmary. They refused. And when he collapsed, unable to walk, they pepper-sprayed him and dragged him barely conscious back to the infirmary, where alarmed staffers called 9-1-1, sources said. He died at the hospital.

Prisons officials blamed his death on a heart problem, and the city Medical Examiner's Office declared the death "natural," caused by hypertensive heart disease, records show. Neither mentioned the guards' role in his death.

On Twitter: @DanaDiFilippo

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