At night, he prayed. To 35-year-old Ideare Bailey, it seemed like the only thing he could do. He was arrested on a theft charge on April 6, and placed in a Dallas County jail pod with 63 other men. Jail didn’t bother him, but his bunkmate did. Ever since Bailey arrived, the man had been coughing, and on the outside, COVID-19 was all anyone talked about. The virus is particularly dangerous in prisons, and Bailey had heard about a recent outbreak in the Dallas County jail.
In Bailey’s pod, separation was impossible. There were no cells or doors, only cots on bunk beds in tight-knit groups of four. Soon, Bailey started to develop his own symptoms. He says he told officers that his head was throbbing and he thought he had a fever, but they wouldn’t take his temperature.
On April 10, two days after first expressing concerns to jail officers, he was taken to the infirmary. His fever was 106 degrees, and he tested positive for COVID-19. When Ideare phoned his wife, Kivia, to share his diagnosis, she collapsed. The couple hadn’t planned to pay Ideare’s $100,000 bail, but, shaken by the possibility of her husband dying, Kivia scrambled to get enough cash for a bail bond. But paying his cash bail wouldn’t be enough to get Ideare out of jail: A judge also required Ideare to wear an electronic leg monitor, and pretrial services, which supervise defendants before their court dates, refused to get near him.
