Kenneth Johnson was slowly suffocating to death.

Johnson, 60, was in a Vermont prison awaiting trial in December 2019. Despite repeatedly complaining that he was struggling to breathe, he was misdiagnosed and largely ignored by the prison’s correctional and medical staff, according to a lawsuit his family filed in 2021.

His condition worsened. When he finally was admitted to the prison’s infirmary, staff members never checked his airway — despite his plummeting oxygen levels, according to the lawsuit.

Instead, it says, a nurse accused him of faking it and told him he was “acting like a . . . 2-year-old.”

He eventually stopped breathing, was found without a pulse and pronounced dead. Medical examiners later identified a previously undiagnosed cancerous tumor pressing on his airway as th

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