Michael Taylor thought he might die alone in the Shelby County Detention Center.
Taylor had been sick with the coronavirus for weeks. It was early March, and he was living in a cell with 19 other people, some of whom had not yet tested positive for the virus. Taylor’s symptoms got worse and worse until medical staff quarantined him in the cell usually reserved for people in solitary confinement.
On March 3, the first night he spent in what he calls the hole, Taylor said he was having trouble breathing.
“I could die in here and nobody’s ever even come around and said anything,” Taylor said the next day, when jail staff let him out for an hour to make phone calls. “I feel like this little sentence that I got just turned into a life sentence.”