The still-unexplained death at a Florida jail in Duval County last week of a 31-year-old father was a searing reminder of the perils that lurk within the decades-old building: Jacksonville’s jail is a dangerous place, and often not because of its inmates.
Charles Faggart’s death, which prompted Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters to suspend eight corrections officers and one sergeant while a criminal investigation is underway, overlaps with years of scrutiny over the jail’s shoddy conditions, as well as high-stakes discussions among city officials about spending up to $1 billion for a new jail in the coming years.
Since 2010, more than 145 people have died in the Duval County jail. The jail’s troubles have not been secret, but city officials have been reluctant to confront the sheriff’s management of the facility or tie policy changes to funding for a new jail.
Faggart’s death could complicate that refusal.
“The problem is you’re not changing any of the systemic issues that have led to so many deaths in the jail that has led to this reputation of the Duval County jail being a death trap,” said Michael Sampson, executive director of the Jacksonville Community Action Committee.
Sampson helped lead JCAC’s latest rally outside of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office headquarters on Sunday, days after Faggart died in a local hospital. Police have not described why Faggart died, though his family’s attorney said he was “beaten” by correctional officers on April 7. Faggart had been jailed a week earlier on a misdemeanor battery charge and was given a $5,003 bond.
Conditions in the jail have been a subject of controversy for years.
In 2017, as previously reported by The Tributary, deaths in the jail tripled after JSO privatized its medical care. In 2023, one national accreditation agency placed the facility on probation after finding a slew of defects with inmate care, including JSO’s inadequate process of reviewing jail deaths.
The National Commission on Correctional Health Care lifted the jail’s probationary status last summer after JSO added 14 full-time medical staff.
But inadequate health care doesn’t fully account for the list of problems.
Eight correctional officers have been arrested by the department since 2017 in relation to their job duties, most stemming from allegations of abuse toward inmates. Only one person – charged with a nonviolent offense of bringing drugs into the jail – has been sent to prison, according to an analysis by The Tributary. Clashes between corrections officers and inmates sometimes leave severe injuries that later resurface in federal civil rights lawsuits against the agency.
At least eight people since 2022 have died with fentanyl in their system while incarcerated there, according to JSO and medical examiner’s records previously obtained by The Tributary.
Although JSO has made significant efforts to stem drug trafficking within the jail, it may still be struggling to get control of the problem: A heavily redacted report indicated that Faggart had taken fentanyl during his six-day stay.
At Sunday’s rally, a few people held signs admonishing the $1 billion price tag the city has given the potential future jail – though the conversation around Faggart’s death isn’t necessarily framed as stopping the project.
Councilmember Jimmy Peluso, who said he has spoken with Faggart’s family attorney, said he still believes Jacksonville needs a new jail that “makes more sense for the city” but that he wants to change who ends up in the jail.
“How do we make sure that the jail population is not so high in number, that we’re not overcrowding it and we’re not putting people in who are not violent, and adding more of a burden to the staff that’s there,” he told The Tributary. “How can we solve that?”
An ‘incident’ in the jail
When Sheriff T.K. Waters called for a press conference at 6 p.m. on April 8, Faggart’s family had no idea he was brain dead and dying at a local hospital, according to their attorney Belkis Plata.
The family was not notified for more than 36 hours that Faggart was hospitalized. The detective who called them on April 8 only suggested that they “watch the news,” Plata said.
Even then, the family didn’t learn anything about what happened with Faggart. At that press conference, Waters announced he had suspended nine employees who were involved in what he said was an “incident” that led to the “very bad” injuries of an unnamed inmate.
Waters, who often hails the department for its transparency, refused to name the detention officers or give any details about what happened. At 7:40 that evening, Waters requested Faggart’s bond be lifted so his family could visit him, according to court documents obtained by The Tributary.
A week later, on Monday, Waters announced the names of the suspended officers: Sgt. William Cox and officers Ty’reke Pennamon, Gecolbe Mckinnis, Devin Thomas, Matthew Sullivan, Preston Collins, Anthony Maygoo, Eldar Kurtovic and Jeremiah Bullard.
Waters also released a heavily redacted report of what his officers said happened that morning.
Plata said all of this was released to the public without any prior notice to Faggart’s family.
“They have learned everything they know alongside the rest of the community – and that is simply unacceptable,” she said. “To make matters worse, the Sheriff has now released a report based entirely on the accounts of the very officers who – according to our sources – the Sheriff himself has called to be criminally prosecuted. The fact that this is the narrative being presented to the public, while the family continues to sit in the dark is devastating.”
What JSO says happened
It’s often a mystery why people die at the jail.
Detailed information about those fatalities usually come from sources other than JSO, like medical examiner’s reports or lawsuits later filed by surviving family members.
JSO has only released information about Faggart’s death, which is the subject of a criminal investigation, piecemeal.
The redacted police report released Monday said at 7:04 a.m. on April 7, Faggart was handcuffed, though for reasons that are not explained, and that an officer was taking him to his dorm. The report said Faggart allegedly began to show “aggressive, erratic and disruptive behavior by thrashing his body, clenching his fist and pushing (and) pulling.”
Cox, the sergeant, deemed Faggart a “threat to himself and others” and ordered that he be placed in a restraint safety chair. The report alleges that Faggart continued to struggle with officers, though what the officers did to Faggart is redacted. The mental health director was called about 20 minutes after Faggart was restrained and she approved him to be placed in “self-harm housing.” Officers also placed an anti-spit mask on his face, according to the report.
The report notes that a nurse flushed Faggart’s eyes with saline solution at 7:28 a.m., which suggests Faggart was pepper-sprayed while in the restraint chair.
Faggart was removed from the chair more than an hour later, at 8:50 a.m. He was placed back into the chair a few minutes later, though the reason why is redacted. The rest of the report is also redacted.
The Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department arrived at the jail two hours later, at 9:05 a.m. and they started chest compressions 5 minutes later.
The officer who wrote the report said his ankle was injured.
The report says Faggart might have suffered a seizure.
Last week, Waters said he’d asked for “investigative assistance” from the FBI to look into Faggart’s death, leaving it unclear what the scope of federal involvement would be. The State Attorney’s Office typically investigates “use-of-force” incidents between police and civilians for potential criminal charges and details its decisions in lengthy reports.
Federal investigators generally do not release such details, particularly if they decide against pursuing charges.
Building a new jail
The jail does not have a full infirmary and likely could not have intervened even if Faggart suffered lesser injuries.
For that reason and others – which include the jail often being flooded during heavy rains – Waters has advocated for the city to build a new jail, blaming many of the facility’s problems on the deteriorating building.
At the request of then-City Council President Ron Salem, council members spent a year exploring options for building a new jail. At the inaugural meeting of the special committee in August 2023, Councilman Michael Boylan recounted a conversation he had with Fourth Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Lance Day, who told him the jail is “an incident away from a federal court order.”
Sampson believes a new jail is just a bandage on a much larger issue.
“The problems that exist today will exist in a new jail that has the same policies and procedures, the same lack of oversight and the same privatized health care that we all know plague this jail,” he said. “We will continue to push for civilian oversight.”
Using Day’s own words, Kelly Frazier, President of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville said it now appears Jacksonville has “that incident.”
“The U.S. Department of Justice should be next,” Frazier said in response to the FBI being called. “The officers responsible must be held accountable, along with the Sheriff who has mismanaged the jail. The taxpayers of Jacksonville again will surely be paying out millions in a settlement due to JSO’s actions. I reiterate that we must not only improve conditions in the jail and prevent further deaths, but also reduce the need for people to be in jail in the first place.”
Peluso said the building of any new jail is far into Jacksonville’s future – but decreasing the amount of people incarcerated in the current building is a problem for today. Duval County, he said, is home to the second most populous jail in the state.
“I and others have talked about civil citations,” he said. “There are policy changes that could be made, but we’ll need the buy-in of our sheriff and of the police force. Civil citations at the end of the day still need to be issued by law enforcement.”
ICARE, Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation and Empowerment, has spent years pushing Waters to introduce an adult civil citation program, which could reduce the number of people jailed.
Under such a program, adults who would otherwise be arrested on low-level, non-violent crimes would be sent to a pre-arrest diversion program. More than a dozen Florida counties — including many of the state’s most conservative counties — have started this type of program.
In 2017, Miami-Dade County issued about 8,900 civil citations preventing incarceration for crimes such as possession of drug paraphernalia and the consumption of alcohol in public, which kept people out of jail and allowed them to go through programs designed to keep people from committing the same offenses while saving taxpayer money.
State Attorney Melissa Nelson has said she supports adult civil citations, but she also said it’s up to the sheriff to decide if he wants to implement such a program.
Waters has vehemently opposed implementing the program.
Nichole Manna is The Tributary’s senior investigative reporter. You can reach her at nichole.manna@jaxtrib.org.
This article first appeared on The Tributary and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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