Mark Jimmerson was serving time in Oklahoma County Jail for robbery. He suffered from Asthma, a condition that in most cases is completely manageable with the right care.

His family, particularly his mother knew how to care for her son, who had recently turned 21.

Mark had been calling his mother for complaining of breathing and she was talking to the prison to try and get them to help him, his breathing got so bad that Mark’s cell-mate started calling his mother because Mark could not get out of bed.

Then she went to the prison with inhalers and a nebulizer, to try and get the prison to give them to him. They refused and said the prison doctor would see him.

The next day, he was dead.

Mic.com reported:

Ultimately, an authority at the jail rebuffed the offer from Jimmerson’s mother on Friday, Shaprese Wilson said, promising that Jimmerson would be seen by the jail’s medical personnel.

“They told her it was going to cost,” Jimmerson’s sister said, crying. “They told her it was going to cost $60. She was like, ‘I don’t care how much it costs. It’s not about the money. He has $60 on his books. Take it from his commissary.'”

“Sixty dollars?” Shaprese Wilson said. “For my brother’s life. Are you serious?”

The next morning, police officers showed up at Tonya Wilson’s home. Jimmerson had been pronounced dead overnight, they said.

Mark Opgrande, spokesman for the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office, said Jimmerson was found unresponsive inside his jail cell sometime after midnight. He was pronounced dead around 2:30 a.m. Saturday at a local hospital. The medical examiner was expected to determine the cause of death, while a state investigation got underway, the spokesman said.

Family members and community advocates say what happened to Jimmerson is a result of persisting dysfunction in the criminal justice system and a lack of accountability for the leaders charged with overseeing it. In recent years, the Oklahoma County Jail — described by a December report from the Vera Institute for Justice and Greater Oklahoma City Chamber Criminal Justice Task Force as an overcrowded facility that disproportionately incarcerates the area’s black population — has been rocked by an alarming number of in-custody deaths. There have been at least three deaths reported at the jail in 2017. In 2016, there were at least nine deaths, according to an Oklahoman report: Many were ruled suicides and the others the result of natural causes.

But whatever comes of the ongoing state investigation into Jimmerson’s death, the family wants to make it clear that lives don’t stop mattering when they cross the gates of a jail or prison.

“As soon as you enter the doors — really, as soon as you enter the court system — you are automatically dehumanized,” Candace Liger, a community organizer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma who is working with Jimmerson’s family, said. “You become incarcerated, and, sadly, the community no longer sees you as one of us. But it doesn’t justify a death, not on our watch.”

Read the full story on Mic.