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In court, mother of slain inmate recalls her last conversation with him

Lisa Brown testified Friday in Plymouth Superior Court about her son Joshua Messier and the day he died at Bridgewater State Hospital.Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff

PLYMOUTH – The mother of a young man who died after being restrained by guards at Bridgewater State Hospital in 2009 softly told a hushed courtroom Friday about the evening she visited her troubled son at the medium-security prison and told him she loved him, only to learn hours later that he was dead.

“I visited him for about 45 minutes. He cut the visit short because he was upset about something we were talking about,” said Lisa Brown, of Wilbraham, during testimony in Plymouth Superior Court, recalling her final conversation on May 4, 2009 with 23-year-old Joshua K. Messier. “I told him I loved him, and he said he loved me. It was the last thing we said to each other.”

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Three guards — Derek Howard, John C. Raposo, and George A. Billadeau — are facing charges of involuntary manslaughter and criminal civil rights violations in connection with the death of Messier in the trial, which began Tuesday.

Brown also recalled the strange behavior Messier began to exhibit as a freshman at UMass Dartmouth, leading to a later diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and the time he was charged with hitting staff at Harrington Memorial Hospital, where he had been hospitalized several times and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation at Bridgewater.

Messier had been at Bridgewater for just over a month when he started a fight with two guards in a break room. He was subdued by about six other guards, escorted to Bridgewater’s old Intensive Treatment Unit, and died after a second violent encounter where a half-dozen guards struggled to strap him to a small bed by his wrists and ankles.

Brown’s moving testimony, however, is likely to have little bearing on the central arguments in the case — which are over the precise cause of Messier’s death during a violent, chaotic evening, the training the guards received, or didn’t receive, in the use of four-point restraints, and whether they were briefed on regulations designed to govern use of force in Massachusetts prisons.

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The case also features crucial video evidence, including a 54-second segment that appears to show two of the guards – Howard and Raposo – pressing down on Messier’s back and folding him over at the waist in a maneuver, sometimes called “suit-casing,” that is banned because of the risk of suffocation. The third guard, Billadeau, was the acting lieutenant in charge and is accused of failing to adequately supervise Howard and Raposo.

Mindy J. Hull, the state medical examiner who ruled Joshua’s death a homicide, testified she was unable to identify a precise cause of death and attributed Messier’s demise to the entire string of events.

“In its totality, I consider that a single event that led to his death,” Hull said.

Ultimately, she said, the violent confrontations led Messier into an agitated state that caused his heart to malfunction and stop beating.

However, Edward T. McDonough, an outside medical examiner from Delaware retained by the prosecution, said that while he generally agreed with Hull’s conclusions, he would put “a little more emphasis” on the suit-casing and chest compression, which could have made it difficult for Messier to breathe.

McDonough said he agreed with Hull’s additional findings, including that several pre-existing conditions Messier had might have contributed to his death. Among those conditions were a toxic, and perhaps lethal, level of the anti-psychotic medication clozapine, and his schizophrenia.

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“Clozapine is a risk factor, just by taking it, of sudden death,” Hull said.

Schizophrenia has been associated with sudden, unexplained death, Hull said, although evidence is anecdotal.

The prosecution and defense attorneys sparred over what training the guards had received. Defense lawyers have said the guards had little training in the use of four-point restraints and dealing with patients suffering from mental health conditions.

Special prosecutor Martin F. Murphy presented testimony and documents showing that the three guards during their initial training had received copies of the state regulation that prohibits them from putting pressure on a restrained patient’s back and that they had received additional refresher training.

But William Dupre, a Department of Correction official in charge of training for all guards in the department, said training prior to 2009 did not include guidelines on how to put a struggling patient into four-point restraints.

Guards are now all trained in a new and safer procedure for putting a struggling patient in four-point restraints.

“It was a direct result of what happened to Mr. Messier,” Dupre said.


Michael Rezendes can be reached at michael.rezendes@globe.com.