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Dad was a police chief in a St. Louis County municipality. Her younger brother was a police officer in the city of St. Louis.

Law enforcement was in her blood.

A couple of years ago, their kids grown, Fowler and her husband moved to Monroe City to take care of a rural property owned by her father. “I wanted a change in my life,� she says, after a career in office management and human resources.

So she applied to be a corrections officer in the Moberly Correctional Center in mid-Missouri, about 50 minutes southeast of where she was living, a straight shot down Missouri Highway 24. In April, on her first full day as a corrections officer, after several months of training, she was assigned to the medical unit, and she was exposed to a detainee who had been tested for COVID-19.

At the time, and for most of the coronavirus pandemic, there was very little mask-wearing or social distancing in Missouri’s prisons. Fowler was moved from the medical unit to another wing, but she was still around detainees and fellow employees.

“I was never instructed to wear any (personal protective equipment),� Fowler says. “The other officers weren’t being protected. We weren’t being ordered to wear masks. I was around everybody. This just didn’t seem right to me.�

So Fowler made a decision on her own. She was going to quarantine at home until the COVID-19 test from the detainee she had direct contact with came back negative. There was a time when a new employee like Fowler making a decision to protect her fellow employees would have had the backing of the , the union for such employees. But because of Gov. Mike Parson’s efforts to de-certify the union, Fowler didn’t even know it existed.

For years, the executive director of the union, Tim Cutt, would attend the training academy to give new corrections officers information about the association. The Department of Corrections cut those visits off last year, as the union and the state were unable to come to an agreement on a new contract. In past years when that happened, the state and union would operate under the old contract until a new one was completed. Parson just stopped recognizing the union.

“There has been a concerted effort to get rid of the union,� Cutt says.

So Fowler didn’t join. She wasn’t aware that when she was disciplined for quarantining on her own to protect her fellow officers and the detainees from the spread of COVID-19 that she could have a union representative with her.

So she got disciplined. Then she missed some work for a medical reason and she got disciplined again. She spoke out against poor COVID-19 procedures and became a target, Fowler said, making it impossible to do her job. She resigned in June, citing in her resignation letter that her employment took a downward turn after she was disciplined for trying to protect the health of her fellow employees. Since then, COVID-19 has raged through Missouri prisons like a wildfire, killing at least four corrections’ staff members and 27 detainees. At one point in November, there were as many as 1,500 detainees and 500 staff members infected with the virus.

“There was nothing they were doing that would really protect the prison from COVID,� Fowler says.

The Department of Corrections has defended its COVID precautions, in part by pointing out early testing. Of the recent spike of prison deaths, corrections spokeswoman Karen Pojmann has suggested many of the deaths were due to other co-existing conditions.

That’s not how Cutt sees it. Many of the deaths, among staff and detainees, were caused by the department’s poor procedures, he says. “They are just not doing a very good job,� Cutt says of the Department of Corrections. He points to transfers made from several prisons that led to spikes at other prisons, like earlier this summer when about 200 women were transferred from Vandalia to Chillicothe, and a COVID-19 outbreak followed.

Corrections staffers have started referring to such moves as “transfer the virus day,� Cutt says.

Fowler wishes things would have worked out differently for her. She was working in a prison where most of the people behind bars would, at some point, end up back in their communities after doing their time. She wanted to make a difference in their lives. Instead, her law enforcement career was cut short, in part because she tried to stop the COVID-19 spread that has turned into a silent killer in prisons.

“People need to know what’s going on in those facilities,� Fowler says. “They didn’t take COVID seriously at all.�