When Junior Avellaneda finally got to see his father after weeks of thwarted attempts, the man Lowndes County Jail staff wheeled into the visitation area was a frail, barely responsive shell of himself.
Junior’s father, 68-year-old Abelardo “Lalo” Avellaneda-Delgado, would usually be up by 5 or 6 a.m. for his daily walk to the nearby gas station to get coffee and chat with family, friends, and neighbors in his tight-knit Statenville, Georgia community.
On April 9, Avellaneda-Delgado was arrested by the Echols County Sheriff’s Office for an alleged probation violation. He had been healthy and active at the time of his arrest, according to his family.
But on the morning of Sunday, May 4, Avellaneda-Delgado could not stand, speak, or even pick up the telephone to hear his son on the other side of the glass. “I’d never seen my dad like that,” Junior recalled. His father was unable to make eye contact or communicate at all during their brief visit.
“I couldn’t take my cell phone back there because of the rules,” Junior said. “If I could, I’d have taken a picture to show his condition.” Instead, Junior called his older sister, Nayely, as soon as he left the jail.
Nayely recalls answering the phone to her brother crying about their father’s condition. The next morning, Nayely drove to the jail in Valdosta and demanded to see her dad and to know her father’s medical status. Jail staff refused, claiming federal privacy laws prevented them from releasing medical information to anyone.
Around the time Nayely was in the jail’s pushing lobby for information about her dad’s condition, Lowndes County jail staff was handing him over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractors for transportation to the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. She left without seeing her father or even knowing his whereabouts.
Later that day, Nayely got a call from the Mexican Consulate in Atlanta. The caller gave her the news that left her in shock: “We are sorry to inform you that your dad passed away earlier today.”
Neither Nayely nor any member of her family has received any additional details about Avellaneda-Delgado’s death from federal or state officials in the month since they lost their beloved patriarch.
