GULF SHORES, Ala. — A Gulf Shores family is mourning the loss of a child today and is asking questions about the mysterious series of events that led to her death.

Cayne Michelle Miceli, 43, died Jan. 6 at a New Orleans hospital following what has become a hazy incident, her father said this week as he prepared a memorial service.

“Cayne was having breathing problems and she woke one of her housemates up,” Mike Miceli said recalling what he has pieced together. “He said at that time her lips were turning blue.”

Mike Miceli said the housemate dropped his daughter off at Tulane Medical Center around noon Jan. 4 for her to seek medical attention for her lifelong asthma. Mike Miceli was told the hospital staff wanted to prescribe Prednisone to his daughter, which in the past has given her a bad reaction. From there he said the accusation’s of the hospital are just that. He believes his daughter tried to deny the Prednisone.

In 2007, Cayne Miceli was arrested and charged with a DUI and taken to the Orleans Parish jail. The charge was dropped, but Mike Miceli said the fear of returning to the jail stuck with her. This recent brush with the law, he believes, left her in an asthmatic panic. 

“When she gets to a point with this asthma and can’t breathe, it gets critical and she gets panicky,” he said. “And I don’t know what happened after that but a policeman got involved.”

At some point during the day on Jan. 4 Cayne Miceli made a call to a friend telling him she was accused of biting an officer on the ankle but couldn’t recall doing it. Mike Miceli challenges that accusation, rhetorically asking how his daughter’s head wound up meeting the officer’s ankle. 

She was transported to the Orleans Parish jail the following Sunday afternoon and placed into five-point restraints in a psychiatric cell after an alleged suicide attempt, according to a Jan. 17 Times-Picayune report.

Early Monday morning on Jan. 5 Cayne Miceli was taken from the jail to University Hospital, where according to hospital staff, she was “nonresponsive,  unconscious, had no pain reflexes and … had her breathing with a heartbeat," Mike Miceli said. 

Because the police station did not give University Hospital his daughter’s drivers license or identify her, it took them almost 36 hours to contact Mike Miceli. 

Mike Miceli arrived in New Orleans that evening to find his daughter unconscious and dependent on a respirator.

After consultations with the doctor and his two daughters he removed Cayne Miceli from the respirator and she died almost instantly.

“As soon as we did her little chest just stopped and the heart monitor just faded out,” Mike Miceli said.

A conversation with Dr. Frank Minyard of the Coroner’s Office of New Orleans led to no immediate answers. Minyard said it would be mid-February before Cayne Miceli’s autopsy report returned to the office. Since Hurricane Katrina the coroner’s office has been forced to send off their autopsy findings to a lab in St. Louis. Minyard did say there was no evidence of trauma found during the autopsy.

In less than one week a second inmate died, at the jail, while waiting to be booked, The Times-Picayune reported. The American Civil Liberties Union is investigating both cases.

“Once those people are in the custody of the government, the government has a duty to provide adequate care,” Marjorie Esman, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told The Times-Picayune. “Two deaths in one week suggest that the care is not adequate.”

Orleans Parish jail, which houses more than 2,300 people usually, lost its accreditation by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.

Attempts to contact Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman were unsuccessful, however, Gusman said in an interview with The Times-Picayune the jail has worked to improve its standards, saying it was trying to get back to pre-Hurricane Katrina status.

Contact was made with Tulane Medical Center but no response was made by presstime.