An aerial view of Moberly Correctional Center in Randolph County (photo by Missouri Department of Corrections on Facebook).
James Pointer’s life sentence in the Missouri Department of Corrections was abruptly terminated last week when he bled to death from an opening in his leg used for dialysis treatments.
Pointer, 76, was housed at the Moberly Correctional Center, where the state prison agency keeps offenders with kidney disease due to its dialysis center, according to department spokeswoman Karen Pojmann in an email to The Independent.
Pointer was pronounced dead at 5:13 p.m. last Friday and “had been on dialysis for many years, had been incarcerated since 2009, and had been at Moberly Correctional Center for 10 years,” according to Pojmann.
Pointer was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2009 after pleading guilty to the murder of his estranged wife in St. Louis.
An autopsy has been ordered, local law enforcement has been notified, and an investigation into the death is currently underway, according to Pojmann.
Pojmann provided no information about the manner in which Pointer died. The Independent learned about his death from Déna Notz, a former corrections officer who founded Collectively Changing Corrections. Notz shared an email from a Moberly prisoner who witnessed Pointer bleeding.
“Friday night I witnessed a man I loved, James Pointer, a Vietnam veteran, bleed out from his femoral artery on a cold, dirty prison floor,” the inmate wrote in his journal. “It took medical so long to get to him that he died.”
The email was chilling, Notz admitted.
“It doesn’t surprise me because of all the stuff I hear,” she said, “but I still cannot believe that something like this happened.”
Tammy Mogab, a woman whose brother Shawn Scrivens is an insulin-dependent diabetic housed at Moberly Prison, confirmed the account. When Scrivens pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm, he informed a Phelps County judge that he had not received an insulin shot in 124 days, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
On Saturday, Mogab said she spoke on the phone with her brother and other men incarcerated at the prison.
“There are witnesses to the death of Mr. Pointer,” Mogab informed the crowd, “and now all the dialysis patients are afraid to take their treatments.”
The Randolph County Ambulance District responded to an emergency call for the prison at 4:37 p.m. on Friday and arrived at 4:49 p.m., according to district Superintendent Clay Joiner.
“We did everything we could in this situation,” Joiner explained.
Dialysis treats kidney failure, and over time, preferred access points in a person’s arms may become scarred or unusable. A permanent catheter inserted into a blood vessel in the upper leg is a last resort.
Rapid bleeding can occur if the tube’s access port becomes dislodged and there is no clamp to close it.
The femoral artery is among the largest in the human body. A person can bleed to death in 2 to 5 minutes if no action is taken to stop the flow of blood.
Joiner stated that he has responded to similar emergencies among dialysis patients at their homes.
“When your femoral artery is bleeding out, you have very little time,” he said.
Charlie Peel, the Randolph County Coroner, will rule on Pointer’s cause of death. He stated that he is not prepared to release any information about what he witnessed or was told by the department.
“We are in the middle of an investigation,” Peel told reporters.
The Boone County Medical Examiner’s office in Columbia performs many autopsies on people who die while in the department’s custody. Autopsy records obtained by The Independent for deaths at the Algoa and Jefferson City correctional facilities show that in the last two years, the time elapsed between the date of death and a completed report has ranged from 30 to more than 250 days.
In 2024, there were 11 deaths at Moberly Correctional Center, ranking fifth among the department’s 19 adult prisons. In 2024, the prison system recorded 139 deaths in custody, the highest number in its history.
According to the inmate who wrote to Notz, Pointer’s access point has opened four times in the last month. He blamed medical staff employed by contractor Centurion Health, not department officers.
“How inept does a nurse have to be, does a company have to be, to allow this man to bleed out of an open artery four times in one month?” The inmate wrote. “The DOC staff is not responsible for this atrocity. Medical personnel are responsible, and they alone must pay.”
Centurion Health provides health care in Missouri prisons under a recently renegotiated contract, with the company receiving $21.65 per day for each person in custody.
The state will pay Centurion approximately $203 million in the upcoming fiscal year, an 11% increase over the previous rate.
Centurion did not respond to phone or email messages requesting comment.
