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Donna Pickelsimer was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in state prison after Ocala police said she called 911 in the early hours of a Monday morning in October 2008 and reported stabbing her boyfriend, 45-year-old Shawn D. Haney, at their shared mobile home.

Responding officers found Haney with multiple stab wounds to his upper torso at the Oaktree Village mobile home park on Northwest Blitchton Road, according to the Ocala Star-Banner. A Marion County Fire Rescue paramedic pronounced him dead at the scene.

Police identified the caller as Pickelsimer, then 50. The newspaper reported she was found wearing blood-stained clothing and smelling of alcohol. When a 911 dispatcher asked who had stabbed Haney, she answered, "I did." Officers recovered a steak knife at the scene, and Pickelsimer was arrested on a charge of second-degree murder and booked into the Marion County Jail.

Court and news accounts show the relationship had turned violent before the stabbing. Haney had been convicted of domestic battery against Pickelsimer seven months earlier, in March 2008, after allegedly striking and shoving her during an argument. He served 22 days in the county jail on that charge.

Pickelsimer was 52 when she was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, according to a Palm Beach Post investigation into Florida's prison health system. She served her sentence at Hernando Correctional Institution in Brooksville.

The Palm Beach Post reported that for months, prison medical staff treated a persistent cough, weight loss and visible lumps under her skin with Tylenol, ibuprofen and warm compresses. An MRI in late May 2014 found a suspicious mass, and she was transferred to the state prison hospital at the Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler. She died there on June 8, 2014, at age 56. A chest scan confirming lung cancer arrived the day after her death.

Pickelsimer's sister, Beverly Clancy, told the newspaper that inmates deserved better medical care. "Animals are treated better," she said. Pickelsimer's case was cited in the newspaper's broader investigation of medical treatment under Florida's then-privatized prison health care system.