When Garry Gadberry II left prison in 2012, he was convinced he could start fresh.
Things went well, for a little while. He worked some, but he wasn’t earning enough money to support himself.
He persuaded his father, Garry Gadberry Sr., that he would turn his life around. So the older Gadberry, a Vietnam veteran who had retired from his union electrician job, agreed to let his son move into his home in Knightstown, in central Indiana.
Garry II had fooled himself, he says now, believing meth could give him a little edge as he restarted life. He began cooking the stuff for his own use among some trees behind his father’s house.
He persuaded his younger brother, Michael, who was living about a half-mile away, to buy what was needed from local drugstores. Indiana State Police followed the pattern of Sudafed purchases and arrested the brothers.
A search yielded meth-making supplies in the garage. So Garry Sr., also was arrested and taken to the Henry County Jail on July 7, 2013. He was sentenced in November to three years in prison for maintaining a common nuisance.
Not long before his arrest, the older Gadberry had visited the VA hospital in Indianapolis, where a lung scan had come back as abnormal. VA doctors scheduled a CT scan for later in July.
Henry County Jail contracts with a private company, Quality Correctional Care, to provide medical services to inmates. Although the staff did not take Gadberry to his original CT scan appointment in July, documents show he was given the test two months later at Henry County Hospital. The scan revealed a 3 cm mass in the right upper lobe of his lung, which doctors said was potentially cancerous.
Jail staff, a federal lawsuit alleges, failed to further address the mass during the nearly four months before his move to the Indiana Department of Correction.
Gadberry and both sons ended up in the Plainfield Correctional Facility.