By Dan Kane
The Charlotte Observer
RALEIGH, N.C. — Blair Medford was beginning his sixth month locked inside the Wake County Public Safety Center when he blocked the view into his cell with a jumpsuit.
Over the next two hours, detention officers passed by four times on their rounds, but they didn’t open the cell to take the covering down or check on him, state records say.
At 8 p.m., when cell doors opened for recreation time, other incarcerated men found the 37-year-old hanging by a sheet attached to the ceiling. Medford, who struggled with drug addiction for much of his life, left behind five children, four of them minors, on Feb. 29, 2024.
State regulations require that jail inmates be checked at least twice an hour, and as much as four times an hour if an inmate is infirm or unstable. Medford was on a twice an hour watch, according to state documents.
After investigating Medford’s death, the state Department of Health and Human Services reported the supervision failures to the Wake County Sheriff’s Office, the chairwoman of the Wake County commissioners and the county manager six weeks after he died. The sheriff dismissed three detention officers and promised to put body cameras on corrections staff.
No one told Medford’s family in his hometown of Gastonia about the supervision failure, said Jean Medford, Blair’s mother.
She she said first heard of it from The News & Observer, which obtained records on 2024 jail deaths statewide from the DHHS.
“It makes me mad,” she said.
Lack of supervision in jail
Wake County Sheriff Willie Rowe and Detention Director Dail Butler declined to be interviewed about Medford’s death. But in a statement released Friday, Rowe reported the three employees were fired after an internal investigation. He also provided dismissal letters dated June 5, 2024.
“We take seriously the responsibility to ensure the safety of all individuals in our custody and will continue to advance that priority,” Rowe wrote in the statement.
After DHHS noted a supervision failure related to Medford’s death, Butler wrote the agency that the sheriff’s office was in the process of obtaining body cameras for all detention officers. That would improve supervision of staff to reduce such risks, he wrote.
“Body Worn Cameras will have the ability to playback all daily incidents,” Butler’s letter said. “Any incidents found unreported, not documented, or alerted to supervisor may result in recommendation of disciplinary action up to dismissal.”
Butler’s letter to DHHS also said there would be retraining on how to do supervision rounds.
The DHHS accepted Butler’s plans to address the problem.
Jail deaths draw lawsuits in NC
Reporting by The N&O, beginning with its Jailed to Death investigation in 2017, has documented other cases where staff failed to make sure cell windows are not blocked in North Carolina’s jails.
In 2013, for example, an inmate placed a towel over his cell window at the Durham County jail and then hanged himself. He went unobserved for nearly six hours, the DHHS found. The detention officer who was supposed to be checking the inmate was fired, a Durham jail official said.
In 2019, an inmate was beaten and asphyxiated by another inmate while both were in a Cleveland County holding cell with a window so badly cracked that no one could see into it.
Failing to check on inmates as required can prove costly for North Carolina jails in the form of lawsuits. In the Cleveland County case, the county paid the inmate’s estate $347,500 to settle a wrongful death claim.
Earlier this year, Davie County paid $250,000 to settle a claim involving the suicide of Victoria Short in 2016. DHHS had cited the jail for not putting her on a heightened watch and for failing to notify the state about her death. In that case, her attorneys won a federal appellate court opinion that said jails can’t escape claims of deliberate indifference to excessive risks of harm to inmates.
“They have an obligation to have good policies that everyone knows about and enforces, and in this case they actually had a perfectly fine policy,” said Ellis Boyle, one of the attorneys representing Short’s husband, of the Davie County jail. “If they had complied with their policy, this person who suffered from drug abuse and mental health problems wouldn’t have died that morning.”
Now Medford’s family is considering finding an attorney to help them figure out what to do next.
“I don’t want another family to go through this because of negligence,” his mother said. “I don’t want another mother to get a knock on their door in the middle of the night because of somebody not doing their job.”
Medford is one of 62 inmates that jails reported had died last year, according to state records.
That 2024 death total dropped slightly from 63 the previous year, which was the first decline in jail deaths since 2016, DHHS records show. The 43 inmates who died in jail custody, rather than out of custody in hospitals or other locations, are three fewer than those who died in custody in 2023.
In 17 of the deaths last year, the state found supervision failures, including one in the Sampson County jail where a detention officer lied about making inmate checks, state reports say. That’s more than a third of the deaths last year, a percentage that the jails have repeatedly reached or exceeded over the past decade.
Wake is the only Triangle county that reported jail deaths in 2024. Three more people died in Wake’s jail last year but the DHHS found no issues with their supervision. A fourth inmate, Ralph Pope Jr, 76, who faced a murder charge died in Central Prison in Raleigh.
Suicides remain a leading cause of death in North Carolina county jails, with 12 last year.
A life marred by drug use
Blair Medford’s sister said he began using marijuana and cocaine in high school in Gastonia. After graduating, he never held a steady job, she said. He was arrested several times on drug-related charges over the years, and was being held on cocaine trafficking and possession charges.
Despite the drug abuse, her brother could tell a story like no other, she said, and he befriended any pet he encountered.
“You couldn’t even go up to a dog park with him because every dog would come up to him,” his sister Ashley Rimmer said.
He had moved to the Raleigh area roughly 15 years ago, and his family did not see him much after that, she said.
“He had a very hard life,” Ashley Rimmer said. “It doesn’t mean he should have died in jail.”
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