A man, who escaped death row in Louisiana in 2012, has died of COVID-19, according to the attorney who worked to free him. 

Damon Thibodeaux was exonerated by DNA evidence in the case of the murder of his 14-year-old step-cousin.

 Thibodeaux’s death earlier this month was “so unfair,” according to his attorney. Thibodeaux spent 16 years behind bars, including 15 on death row, after he was convicted in the 1996 murder.

“I am struggling to make peace with it, but you cannot,” the Associated Press quoted Steve Kaplan, the now-retired lawyer, as saying. Kaplan helped clear Thibodeaux in the case and assisted him in moving to Minnesota to restart his life.

Thibodeaux, who eventually settled with his family in Texas, was a long-haul trucker who landed in Jacksonville, Florida hospital with the coronavirus in early August. That was a few days after getting his first vaccine shot against the virus. After three weeks in and out of intensive care, the 47-year-old Thibodeaux was expecting to come home.

“Bro, I am ready to get out of this place and come home,” he told his younger brother, David Thibodeaux, on the evening of September 2. But within a few hours, David’s phone rang again with a doctor asking for permission to stop resuscitation on Damon after his lungs had collapsed and his heart had stopped, the Star Tribune reported.

“My heart sunk. I wasn’t just being asked to let my brother go. You’re asking me to let my best friend go,” David said in an interview with the Star Tribune.

Growing up, the brothers endured abuse from their mother’s ex-husband. Damon also was sexually abused by the man and later by another relative, a neighbor, and eventually his grandfather.

“We shared a lot of hardships together,” David said about the experience.

Damon Thibodeaux was a 22-year-old deckhand on a Mississippi River barge in July 1996 when his 14-year-old step-cousin went missing while Thibodeaux was at her family’s apartment. After the girl’s body was discovered along the river, Thibodeaux was subjected to a grueling interrogation that pushed him to confess to a crime he did not commit. A year later he was sentenced to die.

Kaplan and others from the Minneapolis law firm Fredrikson and Byron helped prove Thibodeaux’s innocence, noting that his confession did not match the physical evidence, that witness statements were inconsistent and that DNA tests showed no connection between him and the murder. The district attorney’s own expert concluded that Thibodeaux had falsely confessed to the crime

The conviction was overturned and he was set free in September 2012.