Thomas Eric Duncan faced prosecution if he had lived and returned to his home country of Liberia, the Associated Press previously reported. Liberian authorities said Duncan, who was traveling to the U.S. for the first time to visit family in Dallas, lied on his airport screening questionnaire about being in contact with Ebola patients. Duncan exposed 48 people to the disease before he was hospitalized, including his fiancée and two of her children.
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson met with members of Thomas Eric Duncan's family at the South Dallas Café
The family of Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan are venting their outrage that the late Liberian may not have received the same quality of care leading up to his death Wednesday morning as other patients treated in the U.S. for the dreaded virus.
'No one has died of Ebola in the U.S. before. This is the first time,' Duncan's furious nephew Joe Weeks told ABC.
Weeks and others in Duncan's family are calling his treatment 'unfair,' after seeing other patients pulled from the brink of death in government funded evacuation planes and using life-saving blood transfusions and cutting edge drugs.
Cleanup crew: Professional cleaners were called in to sanitize the Dallas apartment where Thomas Eric Duncan stayed before being admitted to the hospital. His soiled sheets and towels remained in the apartment for five days after he was hospitalized
The family's anger also stems from what happened before Duncan was seen by doctors but after he fell ill--when the Liberian was initially turned away by a Dallas hospital.
'What if they had taken him right away? And what if they had been able to get treatment to him earlier,' said Dallas pastor George Mason, a confidante of the family's, according to a CNN report.
While Mason told reporters that Duncan's fiance Louise Troh 'is not seeking to create any kinds of divisions in our community,' she has called for a full review of his medical care.
Condemnation: Reverend Jesse Jackson, seen here with Duncan's mother, raised the specter of a lawsuit and said Duncan's care was partially to blame for his death
And none other than the Reverend Jesse Jackson appeared in public with Duncan's mother, raising the specter of legal action against the hospital as he contemned Duncan's treatment.
'He got sick and went to the hospital and was turned away, and that's the turning point here,' the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a spokesman for the family, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
The family seem to be suggesting that further turning points would follow once Duncan finally received treatment.
When Duncan first went to Texas Presbyterian on September 25, he was sent home with a prescription for antibiotics and was never tested for Ebola, despite telling nurses that he had come from Ebola-stricken Liberia.
Never reunited: Thomas Eric Duncan was hoping to see his 19-year-old son Karsiah Duncan again, though he never got the chance. Duncan was medically sedated and unresponsive by the time Karsiah come to see his father in the hospital
Unlike Ebola victims Dr. Rick Sacra and NBC cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, Duncan did not receive a transfusion of blood from American Ebola survivor Dr. Kent Brantly after he was finally diagnosed.
Weeks says doctors told the family 'that the blood wasn’t a match.'
And unlike Brantly and his fellow missionary Nancy Writebol, Duncan did not receive the potentially lifesaving experimental drug ZMapp, which officials say has completely run out in the United States.
Instead, on Monday doctors began giving Duncan the experimental antiviral drug brincidovir. The newly approved drug--which was developed not for Ebola but for smallpox and cytomegalovirus, came too late.
Coming to America: Duncan, seen here with a female relative shortly after landing at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, traveled to the US to marry his longtime love Louise Troh
The man who brought Ebola to the United States from West Africa died two weeks after he began to show symptoms.
Thomas Eric Duncan succumbed to the virus at 7.51am today at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
Duncan, a 42-year-old Liberian national exposed nearly 50 people to the disease in America before he was put in isolation at Texas Presbyterian.
Speaking to MailOnline on Wednesday, Rev Jackson claimed that the treatment Duncan received contributed to his sad end.
He questioned whether there was really no more ZMapp left and why Duncan has received a drug that had never been tested on Ebola patients before, instead.
Speaking out: Louise Troh (left), Thomas Eric Duncan's fiancée, issued a statement calling for a full review of Duncan's medical care
'All I do know is that Mr Duncan received late treatment and not the best drug. They say that there is no more ZMapp. It’s hard for me to believe that there’s only enough ZMapp to treat two people in all of America.
‘All of his vital signs were improving yesterday, except for the kidney and the lung area. They tried an experimental drug other than Zmapp which has been used to treat others and it didn’t work.’
He said that there were ‘many questions’ to be asked regarding the protocol followed, and not followed, by medics at Dallas’s Texas Presbyterian Hospital.
The reverend said, 'He came to the hospital. He said he had come from Liberia, West Africa but they did not check for Ebola which his protocol. He came to the hospital and they sent him away with antibiotics, deathly ill.'
Rev Jackson’s echoed the ‘sorrow and anger’ expressed by Ms Trowh and raised the specter of legal action ahead, though he pointed out, 'That’s for the family not for me to decide.'
For now, he said, ‘We’re just grieving. It’s all so shocking. We really are in shock right now and grieving.’
President Barack Obama is seen here receiving an update about the Ebola outbreak in the United States
Rev Jackson spent yesterday in Dallas with Mr Duncan’s mother, Nowah Gartay, who had travelled from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina to visit the son she had not seen for 12 years, Duncan’s nephew Josephus Weeks and 19-year-old son, Karsiah . At a vigil outside the hospital in which Mr Duncan lay in his isolated deathbed, Rev Jackson led prayers and called upon others to ‘save Thomas Eric Duncan’s life.’
Karsiah had not seen his father since the age of three when his mother Ms Troh left Liberia for America after a falling out with Mr Duncan. The two reconnected over phone earlier this year and Mr Duncan described her as the ‘love of his life.’
Duncan's Ebola case drew widespread American attention to the West African epidemic that continues to spread like wildfire through Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea - three of the poorest nations in the world. More than 3,400 people have died from the virus and more than 7,500 have been infected.
Duncan landed in Dallas on September 20 after traveling from his home in Monrovia, Liberia. He is accused of lying to airport screeners about his contact with Ebola patients, though his family and friends say he had no idea he had been infected.
Ten people, including seven healthcare workers and three family members, are considered at high risk for Ebola after they were exposed to Duncan after he became contagious. Another 38 more are being monitors by the CDC for possible risk of the disease.
Duncan's fiancee Louise Troh, who is perhaps highest at risk of catching the disease after she cared for him at her Dallas apartment while he sweated and vomited through the early staged of the disease, says she does not blame him for possibly exposing her.
