West Virginia Jail Deaths Under Investigation
By Kris Maher | Photographs by Kristian Thacker for The Wall Street Journal June 13, 2023 10:00 am ET BECKLEY, W.Va.—When Alvis Shrewsbury walked into the Southern Regional Jail and Correctional Facility in Beaver, W.Va., last August, he told his family not to visit while he served his short sentence for driving under the influence. “I’ll see you when I get out,” said the 45-year-old logger, whom family members describe as a loving grandfather of seven who was battling addiction. On day 12 of his 90-day sentence, he appeared with a black eye on a video call with his family, explaining he had been jumped in his cell the night before by three inmates who had stolen noodles, beef jer
By
Kris Maher | Photographs by Kristian Thacker for The Wall Street Journal
BECKLEY, W.Va.—When Alvis Shrewsbury walked into the Southern Regional Jail and Correctional Facility in Beaver, W.Va., last August, he told his family not to visit while he served his short sentence for driving under the influence.
“I’ll see you when I get out,” said the 45-year-old logger, whom family members describe as a loving grandfather of seven who was battling addiction.
On day 12 of his 90-day sentence, he appeared with a black eye on a video call with his family, explaining he had been jumped in his cell the night before by three inmates who had stolen noodles, beef jerky and Jolly Ranchers. He said it hurt to breathe and he couldn’t have a bowel movement, his daughter Miranda Smith recalled.
Seven days later, Shrewsbury began to bleed from his rectum as cellmates called for help, according to affidavits from several inmates who were present. Nurses arrived, but Shrewsbury was soon dead. It was his 19th day in jail.
Built on a mountaintop 40 miles from Virginia, the Southern Regional Jail was one of the deadliest jails in America last year on a per capita basis. In 2022, 13 inmates died at the facility, which regularly held about 700 men and women. By comparison, 19 detainees died last year in New York’s Rikers Island with a population of nearly 6,000.
West Virginia’s correctional system, dealing with a staffing crisis, overcrowding and the long-term failure to maintain buildings, faces litigation and investigations. A Justice Department probe into one death at the Southern Regional Jail comes amid state investigations into other deaths there and a civil lawsuit about conditions at the jail brought on behalf of more than 1,000 current and former inmates.
State lawmakers have questioned whether the governor misappropriated funds that could have been used to address some problems, while some former officers and inmates allege that a jail and state official tried to cover up conditions at the Southern Regional Jail.
The high rate of violence in the jail occurred in an environment where inmates were crowded together, toilets often didn’t function, many locks on cell doors didn’t work and overworked officers were spread too thin, former officers and inmates say.
The West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation declined to comment on the conditions or any deaths at the jail. “We do not comment on matters under investigation,” a spokesman said.
Accounts of conditions there are based on interviews with former corrections officers and photos and videos taken inside the jail that were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, including some that are part of the lawsuit brought by inmates against corrections officials.
The Southern Regional Jail and Correctional Facility in Beaver, W.Va., was one of the deadliest jails in America last year.
“We have to get a hold on what’s going on at Southern Regional Jail,” said Ben Hatfield, the prosecuting attorney in Raleigh County, where the jail is located. “If you ask me what’s wrong, it’s not a single thing but a thousand little things.”
This month, Hatfield charged two inmates with the murder in October of a 79-year-old man who was in jail for failing to make a court appearance after being charged with domestic battery. One inmate previously allegedly bragged about killing a man named Shrewsbury, according to a witness cited in a criminal complaint. Hatfield said the Shrewsbury death is under investigation.
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He is also investigating the November death of a woman who was arrested for shoplifting and died at the jail after she was sexually assaulted by female inmates who allegedly had been told by an officer that she had hidden drugs inside her body.
Hatfield said he referred a separate case involving the death of Quantez Burks, a Black man who died less than 24 hours after he was brought to the jail, to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Burks’s family alleges that he died after being restrained by guards.
The civil-rights division is conducting an investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter. The office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia said it had received a request for an investigation.
Gov. Jim Justice and state lawmakers have acknowledged a statewide corrections crisis. The governor has used National Guard troops to address the critical staffing shortage at jails. By last year, deferred maintenance costs at the state’s regional jails had reached $277 million, including $27 million to fix broken locks, state officials have testified.
Justice has been criticized by state lawmakers for spending $10 million in unused Covid-19 relief funds on a new baseball field at Marshall University, his alma mater, instead of using the money on jails.
In March, West Virginia state Sen. Eric Tarr, a Republican, asked the Treasury Department’s Office of the Inspector General to investigate whether the governor misappropriated federal funds. He said the governor had put a total of $28.3 million in unused Covid-relief funds into a discretionary fund; the transfer was described as reimbursement for Covid-related expenses within the corrections system.
Members of the governor’s communications staff didn’t respond to requests for comment. The governor’s chief of staff has said the actions were vetted by an accounting firm and a law firm, and the administration’s general counsel has said that once the funds were transferred they could be used for other purposes.
Gov. Justice asked Jeff S. Sandy, the head of the state Department of Homeland Security, to investigate the Southern Regional Jail. The resulting April 2022 report concluded that inmates and their family members were making false claims about conditions to local media to gain sympathy.
Since then, former officers and inmates have alleged that Sandy, the state homeland security official, and Michael Francis, the jail superintendent at the time, offered promotions or shorter sentences to people who would say conditions at the jail were in fact good. The allegations are part of the lawsuit filed by inmates, which alleges that corrections officials, medical providers and officials in seven counties that send inmates to the jail violated inmates’ Constitutional rights. The defendants, including Sandy and Francis, have denied allegations in court filings.
Andy Malinoski, a spokesman for the state division of corrections, didn’t comment on the allegations that preferential treatment was offered. Sandy referred an interview request to the state division of corrections. An attorney who represents Sandy and other state corrections officials in the litigation declined to comment. An attorney for Francis, the former superintendent, didn’t comment.
Kimberly Burks said her son was arrested after he fired his gun into the air following a dispute with a neighbor.
His fiancée, Latasha Williams, said she called the jail the next morning and was told that Quantez had died. Burks said she has never been contacted by a state official about her son’s March 2022 death, and said she couldn’t locate his body until a local funeral home director retrieved it from the state medical examiner in Charleston.
Latasha Williams, Quantez Burks’s fiancée, and Kimberly Burks, his mother, on the front steps of his home in Beckley, W.Va., on Thursday.
When the funeral director saw the body, he took photos and told her to call a lawyer, Burks said.
She and Williams sat in the living room of Quantez Burks’s Beckley home on a recent night and looked at those photos. A state exam concluded he died of natural causes, according to a person familiar with the report.
The photos show deep wounds on both of his knees and black bruises across the right side of his face. “What’s natural about that?” Williams said through tears.
Videos of Burks’s death haven’t been released by the state. Alex Webb, a former inmate, said he saw officers drag Burks across the floor, holding him by his arms handcuffed behind him, and that his head dropped to the floor when officers released him.
“When his face hit, there was no reaction,” Webb said.
Webb described a jail in which inmates could roam between cells and mete out justice as they saw fit, sometimes at the encouragement of officers. Inmates disabled locks, he said, by placing a book near the hinges of a door and slamming it shut, or putting a plastic cap at the bottom of the door so that a sensor would incorrectly register it as being locked.
Troy Carter, a former officer, said he often worked multiple 16-hour shifts in a row. He said he hesitated to enter inmate areas because most cells didn’t lock and he feared for his own safety.
“I felt like I had a right to go home to my family,” he said.
He confirmed accounts by Webb that up to five inmates sometimes shared a cell meant to hold two people, that broken sinks in cells led inmates to swing water bottles to each other using torn sheets, a practice known as “fishing,” and that when toilets broke, inmates would sometimes defecate in showers.
Photos and videos that Carter and other officers took of broken sinks and toilets, mold on walls, broken windows and inmates sleeping on floors with only a blanket have become part of the lawsuit filed against corrections officials on behalf of more than 1,000 current and former inmates, including Webb.
Miranda Smith said she called repeatedly to get nurses to check on her father, Alvis Shrewsbury, but that he would later report that they hadn’t.
“Never seen a soul,” she recalled him saying.
Write to Kris Maher at [email protected]
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