At least 253 people have died in SC jails since 2009. ‘Why was nobody looking?’

At around 2 a.m. on a May night in 2017, a knock on her door roused Lila Crow. It was the coroner.

Her son, Adam Crow, had left her house that afternoon to check himself into a crisis hospital in Aiken. Instead, he ended up in a jail.

In a holding cell, he covered a camera lens and used his pant legs to hang himself. It took 61 minutes for jailers to realize, Crow said.

“Why was no one looking?” she asked. “That was the one place that always kept him safe from himself.”

“They took that safety away.”

That night, Adam Crow became one of at least 253 lives lost in the custody of S.C. jails during the past 12 1/2 years, according to a public tally of these incidents by The Island Packet that aims to fill a void left by inconsistent government tracking of inmates’ deaths in the state’s detention centers.

Among them: A white Rock Hill man who died strapped to a chair after slamming his head against a wall, following a nearly two-hour struggle with guards in 2013. A Black teenager not yet old enough to vote who hanged himself with a blanket, alone in a Chesterfield County jail cell in 2014. And this year, Jamal Sutherland, a Black man with a history of mental illness, died of a “cardiac event” after being tased, pepper sprayed and pressed to the floor by deputies in a Charleston County lockup.

Sutherland’s January death in North Charleston sparked protests and put pressure on officials to release footage of his final moments, viewed on news broadcasts across the country. County officials approved a $10 million settlement with his family, who ultimately watched as a top prosecutor declined to pursue criminal charges against jail officers involved.

But dozens of others have died with little or no acknowledgment from jail administrators, let alone any public scrutiny of their passings.

Unlike prisons, which hold people already convicted of serious crimes, the roughly 60 locally run detention facilities in South Carolina house thousands who have been arrested and are awaiting their day in court. Innocent in the eyes of the law, they are incarcerated because they can’t afford to pay their bond and be released before their case is tried, advocates say.

Others in the jails are serving sentences for minor offenses.

The federal government tracks jail fatality data but keeps facility-by-facility figures secret, leaving residents in the dark about deaths in local jails in communities across the country. And no S.C. state agency has an accurate count of deaths in the state’s lockups during the past decade, the newspaper found.

A decades-old state law compels jails to report to the S.C. Department of Corrections any time an inmate dies in custody. But at least 30 times since 2009, they have not, records show. And the one-page death reports that are sent to the agency gather dust.

The law requires SCDC, which inspects jails, to house the records. But the department has “no investigative authority” over them, said agency spokesperson Chrysti Shain. The department doesn’t know about deaths unless jails self-report them.

To some, this sounds like a missed opportunity to improve conditions in locally run detention facilities.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Michele Deitch, a University of Texas at Austin senior lecturer who studies prison and jail oversight. “It’s a reason for the (state) legislature to direct them to do something with that information, both in terms of analyzing it and looking for systemic issues.”

The incidents compiled by the reporters reveal an average of nearly 20 deaths a year over the past decade. They took place in the custody of 45 detention facilities spread across 38 S.C. counties and funded by local tax dollars.

The names, compiled and published here for the first time publicly in searchable format, were drawn from records held by two state agencies, documents obtained directly from jails, data published by national news organizations, court records and local media reports.

The database, while more comprehensive than any existing public tally, is likely incomplete. And there’s no requirement that state police investigate these incidents, though that is common practice in many parts of the state, where local sheriffs control the jails.

Aiken County jail death leaves mother grieving her son

Adam Crow was happiest at the lake, warmed by the flames of a bonfire licking the rim of a metal drum. He lived in a camper pulled behind his truck and bounced between work as a logger, carpenter and “jack of all trades,” his mother said.

When her son was a teenager, Lila Crow recognized symptoms of a mental illness she too suffered from. As an adult, Adam battled alcoholism, but never received long-term treatment, she said. Crow raised his two children.

One afternoon in May 2017, Adam told Crow he was feeling strange. He’d been drinking liquor and wanted to check himself into Aurora Pavilion, a short-term crisis hospital in Aiken. Adam hugged his mother and got in his truck, but refused to let her drive him, she said.

On the road, Adam collided with another vehicle. After taking him to the hospital, police charged him with DUI and, several hours later, took him to jail, a brick building rimmed in barbed wire. There, Adam was held alone in a holding cell near intake, records say.

Just after 7 p.m., surveillance footage from the jail shows him covering the lens of a camera in his cell with wet paper or cardboard, court documents say. An hour later, another camera captured his death by suicide. He was 36.

“I felt my heart break when they told me my son was dead,” Crow said.

People packed the church where his memorial service was held and peered in the windows from outside. Crow received condolence letters from friends of Adam’s that she had never met.

Crow blames the jail and the care Adam received. She has filed suit against its administrators, its private health care provider and the hospital that released Adam from treatment for contributing to his death.

All have denied fault in court filings, and the Aiken County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail, did not respond to a voicemail and an email requesting comment in June.

If you know someone in crisis, call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or the S.C. Department of Mental Health’s 24/7 crisis response line at 833-364-2274. Click here for more on how to help.

Racial disparities and missing information in jail death data

Adam Crow was one of three inmates who died at the Aiken County Detention Center that year. Across the state over the past decade, his experience is far from unique.

The dead identified by reporters range from teenagers to seniors. They were facing charges ranging in severity from shoplifting to murder.

Black people, disproportionately represented among incarcerated people, accounted for almost 41% of the deaths where race was available. That’s in spite of Black residents making up roughly 25% of the state’s population, according to recently released census counts.

Greenville County’s detention center, located in the state’s largest county by population, led with at least 27 deaths since 2009, with facilities in Spartanburg, Charleston and Richland counties each recording at least 18 deaths.

Nearly 1 1/2 times more people have died in jail custody in cases that went mostly unscrutinized than were killed in police shootings in South Carolina since 2015, according to a Washington Post tally of these incidents, which have routinely been evoked in calls for criminal justice reform.

In some cases, jail death records listed a cause of death. At least 33% of the jail deaths where this information was available were suicides.

Many of the deaths could be traced to medical issues and overdoses, some prompting lawsuits from family members alleging poor medical care in local facilities, which frequently turn to private health care providers to care for inmates.

In 2010, an inmate incarcerated in Berkeley County’s jail died of gastrointestinal bleeding after weeks of complaining of pain and bloody stools. He told his doctor he was vomiting blood and thought he was going to die, according to court documents. A jury awarded his mother a $2.95 million settlement.

Four deaths reporters identified were explicitly labeled as homicides in documents or media reports. Two of those cases involved other inmates, and two more involved jailers, including a pair of former Anderson County Detention Center guards who face involuntary manslaughter charges this year after performing a “leg sweep” maneuver on an inmate, who later died of a spine fracture.

But in 52 other cases, death reports were incomplete. They listed a dead inmate’s eye color but not the way they died.

And the forms and media reports used to identify the deaths rarely provide details on what led up to the incident.

The death report Charleston County deputies submitted the day after Sutherland’s death in January listed the cause as “unknown” and his condition upon admission as “aggressive.” It made no note of his mental health, despite the fact that he had been removed from a treatment facility hours earlier, or the struggle with jailers in his final moments.

That lack of information persisted during the pandemic, the documents show.

Just three of the deaths were identified as inmates with COVID-19.

South Carolina’s public health agency didn’t track the pandemic’s impact on jail populations, despite the increased risk in these congregate settings. There were no federal or state requirements for the facilities to report cases, according to a spokesperson for the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

In a study published this year, researchers gave South Carolina, and 39 other states, an “F” for failing to report statewide data from jails.

Hodge podge of government tracking of jail deaths

Spotty tracking of jail deaths, which are on the rise nationally, rankled legal observers.

“If there were 200 and something deaths in schools, in our elementary school or high school population, we would have a record of that, we would want to know that,” said Allie Menegakis, executive director of South Carolina for Criminal Justice Reform, a Charleston-based advocacy group.

“We as a society need to see those numbers, and we need to routinely see what’s happening in facilities,” said Anna Maria Conner, an attorney with Disability Rights South Carolina, which works to safeguard the rights of people with disabilities in S.C. facilities, including jails.

SCDC houses death records submitted from jails because of a law first passed in 1978, but that’s where its oversight of jail fatalities ends, according to Shain, the spokesperson. The law doesn’t require the agency to analyze the documents for trends.

When inmates die, criminal investigations are handled by police, who aren’t tasked with evaluating jail health care, staffing or other conditions that may have contributed to loss of life.

SCDC also doesn’t enforce the law, leaving jails to self-report deaths on their watch. Through other sources, The Island Packet identified at least 30 deaths that weren’t present in the agency’s files.

In a handful of cases, jails submitted the legally required reports only when contacted by SCDC after a reporter asked about specific cases initially missing from the documents.

Death reports housed in other state agencies are also far from comprehensive.

In 2020, the S.C. Department of Public Safety began collecting death-in-custody reports from local coroners to meet the requirements of a federal law. Passed in 2014, the law became bogged down and wasn’t implemented until last year.

But the new DPS data collection appears far from comprehensive. Records obtained by The News & Observer in Raleigh early this year and shared with The Island Packet show coroner’s offices reported just 2 of at least 23 deaths in S.C. jails in 2020.

Rachel Urconis, a DPS spokesperson, said in an email the agency would follow up on the missing reports, noting the process is new and “reports from 2020 are still considered preliminary data.”

The files of another statewide law enforcement agency, the S.C. Law Enforcement Division, or SLED, contain a wealth of information on deaths in local jails, because local police often call upon the department to investigate the cases.

But SLED doesn’t track deaths in jails and isn’t able to search its case system by in-custody deaths, according to spokesperson Tommy Crosby.

The deaths compiled by The Island Packet are a starting point to identifying red flags in local facilities, from deficiencies in inmate healthcare to policies around helping people in crisis, legal observers said.

A lack of data hinders efforts to rethink public safety systems, said Frank Knaack, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in South Carolina.

“The fact that we don’t know what is happening right now with regards to jail deaths is really unacceptable, that the state is not providing that information,” he added.

‘Housing units for the mentally ill’

One of the patterns that emerges from The Island Packet’s data collection is undeniable: At least a third of jail deaths identified by reporters where manner of death was available were suicides.

At least 66 people have died by suicide in jails charged with safeguarding inmates’ well-being since 2009.

“Jails and prisons are the largest housing units for the mentally ill in our country,” said Menegakis, the criminal justice reform advocate. Yet these facilities are ill-equipped to take care of these inmates, she said.

S.C. jail standards require training in suicide prevention, but don’t specify exactly what kind. And many facilities are stretched thin.

In 2015, a 34-year-old inmate in the Pickens County jail was held in an arraignment room converted into a makeshift cell. When he was found hanged in the middle of the night, the jail was over double capacity with just four officers keeping watch over 208 inmates, according to records and local news reports.

Corrections facilities in South Carolina hold an estimated five times the number of mentally ill individuals than the number of patients in psychiatric hospital units, a national study found.

Some inmates died waiting for specialized care.

In January, a 73-year-old man incarcerated in Oconee County’s jail died while in line for a bed in a S.C. Department of Mental Health facility, after being declared incompetent to stand trial, records show. He suffered a cardiac arrest and kidney failure, also testing positive for COVID-19, according to documents the jail submitted to SCDC only after a reporter asked the agency about the incident.

Jails are also likely to house society’s most vulnerable, Menegakis said.

Among the jail deaths documented by reporters were inmates identified on paperwork as homeless or “transient,” who suffer from serious mental illness at higher rates than the general population, research has shown.

In local jails, many are held pre-trial, innocent until proven guilty, purely because they can’t afford to pay a bond to be released, advocates said. For 87% of the 236 deaths where custody status was available, inmates hadn’t been convicted of a crime.

“They’re not there because they pose any danger to society, but purely because they’re too poor to pay their bond,” said Knaack, with the ACLU. “We have a wealth-based detention system in South Carolina.”

For advocates and researchers, understanding the death toll in local jails is a starting point to preventing future tragedies.

“Administrators of corrections agencies everywhere need to be looking at how can we bring these numbers down,” said Deitch, the University of Texas researcher and corrections specialist.

“It is unacceptable to have people die on our watch.”

Nick Sullivan, an intern with The State Media Co., contributed reporting. Reach Lucas Smolcic Larson at lucassljournalist@gmail.com.

This story was originally published September 19, 2021 at 5:00 AM.