By Kevin Shea | NJ.com
nj.com
BURLINGTON COUNTY, N.J. — Burlington County fired a corrections officer and disciplined two supervisors following the murder of an inmate in their county jail in 2024.
The punishment of the officers, Lt. Jonathan Carroll, Sgt. Terrance Benson and Officer Nicholas Morton, is detailed in the state’s Major Discipline Reporting for the calendar year 2025, which the state published last week.
The county fired Morton and gave Benson and Carroll each a 15-day suspension following the death of Kenneth Bulle, 74, in November 2024 .
Bulle’s cellmate, Rondale Holloman, 39, is charged with killing him and awaits a murder trial in Superior Court in Burlington County . His case has a hearing on June 29 , records show.
A Burlington prosecutor’s detective wrote in the charges against Holloman that the inmate punched Bulle several times and then strangled him with a T-shirt for about eight minutes.
Bulle was able to crawl back to his bed, Holloman confessed, during which Bulle died. Holloman then alerted jail officers at about 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 15, 2024 , that his cellmate was dead.
Holloman also told the detective that Bulle’s “soul was already dead” and he had an “immediate revelation to kill in the moment.”
He also said Bulle came at him with a makeshift knife, then retracted that part of the confession and said he made it up, the detective wrote.
A Burlington County spokesperson declined to comment on the discipline.
The state report, though, describes an internal investigation following the murder at the jail in Mount Holly .
The fired officer, Morton, worked the 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. overnight shift on that jail tier and failed to conduct security tours every half hour, including lapses of 58 and 53 minutes. Morton also neglected to inform his supervisors that both inmates had each made requests to move to cells away from each other, the report says.
The investigation found the sergeant, Benson, neglected to conduct a full and complete security tour of the facility.
And Carroll failed to respond to logbook entries made by his officers, allowed the crime to be improperly reported and made decisions that delayed jail and medical staffers from reaching the scene with proper equipment, the report says.
State and local corrections agencies make up the bulk of the major discipline meted out in 2025, with 416 of the 817 actions. The state Attorney General’s Office, which compiles and publishes the report, defines major discipline as termination, a reduction in rank or a suspension of more than five days.
The report also includes cases during which an officer resigned or retired with a pending matter with an outcome that would have required reporting.
The 817 actions in 2025 lists incidents from 169 agencies involving 654 officers that include 88 terminations, 111 resignations or retirements and 59 suspensions of 90 days or more.
Burlington County’s corrections department also demoted a captain for acts of sexual harassment, including discussing her sex life at work, and suspended another sergeant for 30 days for making a racially insensitive remark to a colleague, the report shows.
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