Celebrity: “Do You Know Who I Am?”

On April 17th, Ken was transferred to the jail’s medical unit, where he was no longer permitted to receive visitors or make calls. A day or two later, Fay’s phone rang. “Please, Mom,” Ken told her when she answered, “get me out any way you can. I don’t think I’m going to make it out of here.” Fay heard shouting in the background. The line went dead.

Fay started a new round of frantic phone calls. Medical staff at the jail told her that privacy laws precluded them from speaking to her. But on April 21st, Fay was able to speak to the doctor at the prison. According to Fay, he asked her at one point how old Ken was. She said 39. “That’s a long time for someone with CF to live,” she says he told her.

On April 23rd, Fay received a call that Ken had been transported to Riddle Memorial Hospital.

When she got to his room, she found two guards posted outside the door. Placards were affixed, warning of infectious disease. She was told to don a mask before entering. A ventilator clicked and hissed, breathing for Ken. IVs and tubes snaked from his inert body, and he was unconscious. A nurse yelled in Ken’s ear that his mother was there. “And he tried to open his eyes, but they just rolled back in his head,” Fay recalls. She lifted the bedsheet to discover his naked body “reduced entirely to skin and bones; he was less than 100 pounds.” Crying, she told him she loved him. “Try to get better,” she said. “We’re gonna get you out tomorrow.” She held his hand; it seemed to flutter. Then the guard summoned her, telling her she’d been there for over an hour, that time was up and she needed to leave.

At 7:05 the next morning, Kenneth Keith Kallenbach was dead.

THE DELAWARE COUNTY medical examiner, Fredric Hellman, initially declined to conduct an autopsy; Riddle had determined that Kenneth Keith Kallenbach died from pneumonia and septic shock due to complications from cystic fibrosis. It was not until Fay Kallenbach began raising questions that he had a change of heart. A spokeswoman for Hellman explained that the medical examiner performs autopsies depending on circumstances, and that the doctor had decided to conduct Kallenbach’s, which took place six days after his death — after the body had already been embalmed — because of “family concerns.”

I called Cyril Wecht — the former Pittsburgh-area medical examiner and among the most famous and respected forensic pathologists in the world — to ask his opinion. He called Hellman’s decision not to immediately autopsy Kallenbach “fucking amazing.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “there’s just no question at all that every jail death — I don’t give a shit if a guy’s had cancer for 35 years — that an autopsy must be done. It’s like wiping your ass when you go to the bathroom. When you’re a medical examiner and you have a death of someone in prison custody, you do an autopsy immediately.” Embalming should never be permitted, as it can seriously “compromise or obfuscate” toxicology as well as microscopic analysis (the results of which were still pending as of this writing, along with Hellman’s final determination about the cause of death).