It took nearly three weeks, but Donna Coma did finally get to hear her son’s voice after he suffered an unexplained injury while serving time at the U.S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg.
The brief phone call late last week, however, didn’t put Coma at ease or answer any questions about what happened to her 47-year-old son, Charles “Chucky” Coma inside the maximum security prison on Feb. 26.
“It didn’t sound like him. He didn’t know who I was,” the 73-year-old told The Daily Item Tuesday morning in a phone call from her Washington state home. “He’s not Chucky.”
Even more disturbing was her son’s comment that he saw his father, who passed away eight years ago.
Charles Coma remains in an unidentified hospital recovering from unknown injuries following the late February incident that prison officials said is under investigation by the FBI. The inquiry is ongoing, prison spokesman Shawn Barlett said Tuesday.
Donna Coma has been in turmoil since receiving a call Feb. 27 from the prison that her son was in the hospital and may not survive. It wasn’t until days later that she got a follow-up call with the news that he was improving.
Beyond that, Donna Coma said she’s been kept in the dark pending the outcome of the federal investigation.
Requests for her son’s medical records and if available, a videotape of the incident, have been denied, she said.
Since publicly complaining about the lack of information regarding her son, a military veteran with mental health issues serving time for bank robbery, Donna Coma said she’s been receiving two calls a week from inmate case manager Matt Edinger.
She appreciates the calls, but remains troubled about her son’s condition and the mystery surrounding it.
Dave Sprout, a paralegal with the inmate advocacy group, the Lewisburg Prison Project, said he’s received information about what allegedly happened to Charles Coma but hasn’t been able to confirm it.
“My son went through two wars and ends up like this?” said Donna Coma. “Why wasn’t he taken better care of?”