By Peter Dujardin
Daily Press
PORTSMOUTH, Va. — The interim head of the Hampton Roads Regional Jail said Friday that he’s pushing jail staffers toward more transparency and improved operations — and said he welcomes a possible U.S. Justice Department investigation into the facility.
Norfolk Sheriff Bob McCabe — a board member of the regional jail and its acting superintendent for the past two weeks — distributed DVDs to the media with 12 hours of video footage outside the cell in which a man died in custody in August 2015.
McCabe also released the names of 18 inmates who died at the regional jail since January 2012, along with the date and official cause of death. And he said he’s working to ensure that calls from inmates’ families are promptly returned.
Throughout the news conference Friday morning, McCabe sought to impart that significant changes are underway at the regional jail where two inmates — 24-year-old Jamycheal Mitchell of Portsmouth and 60-year-old Henry Clay Stewart Jr. of Newport News — died under questionable circumstances over the past 13 months.
“We’re all stakeholders,” McCabe said of he and four other local sheriffs on the jail’s board. “We’re sending people over here from our jurisdictions. We want to make sure that whoever we’re sending over here is getting the quality medical care and supervision that we would expect in our own jails.”
Today’s briefing was run by Norfolk’s Sheriff Bob McCabe and acting superintendent of Tidewater Regional Jail during Press Conf. in Portsmouth, Va. He’s been on the job since Monday the 12th.of Sept.
But James Boyd, the president of the Portsmouth chapter of the NAACP who attended Friday’s news conference, criticized McCabe’s statement to the media that no jail staffers had been fired or demoted on account of the recent deaths.
“To hear you say that there’s been nobody held accountable for what happened to Jamycheal is, quite frankly, disturbing,” Boyd said. “You have said that these are good employees, but you haven’t been on the ground in the jail to actually know it.”
Boyd then urged McCabe to back a federal investigation into the facility, saying that “you need an independent look at it.”
That’s something Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring also has requested, though the Justice Department hasn’t yet responded to his request earlier this month for a federal investigation.
“We welcome the state and the federal” investigations, McCabe responded. “The (state police) are already in here. The (state) inspector general is already in here. I welcome that. ... I’ve always been transparent as a sheriff in Norfolk to say, ‘Here’s what’s going on.’... Sometimes it’s not good, but we gotta own it.”
The Hampton Roads Regional Jail, with just over 1,100 inmates, is a publicly owned facility in Portsmouth that houses inmates from Newport News, Hampton, Norfolk, Chesapeake and Portsmouth. Its governing board is appointed by those five cities, which also provide most of its funding.
Two inmates died at the jail in questionable circumstances over the past 13 months.
Mitchell, 24, of Portsmouth, was found dead in his cell bunk in August 2015, after losing 36 pounds in just under four months in custody. At the time, he was awaiting a hearing on misdemeanor larceny and trespassing charges -- accused of stealing less than $5 worth of snacks from a Portsmouth 7-Eleven.
When he was found dead -- of a possible heart problem and a “wasting syndrome” -- urine and feces lined the cell, according to a lawyer for his family.
It was later discovered that court clerks and staffers at Eastern State Hospital had bungled the paperwork needed to get Mitchell transferred to the state hospital for court-ordered psychiatric treatment, including for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Then Stewart died at the jail in August of this year.
He had been arrested in May outside the family’s home on 31st Street in southeast Newport News, picked up on a warrant charging him with violating the terms of his probation on a 2011 shoplifting conviction out of Hampton.
On Aug. 4 — in a one-page “emergency grievance” form at the jail — Stewart begged jail staffers for help. He wrote that he had “blacked out twice in less than 24 hours,” but didn’t know why, adding that, “I can’t hold water down or food.”
“I need emergency assistant right away,” Stewart wrote in larger lettering. Another inmate would later tell the Daily Press that Stewart had been coughing up blood for weeks, and had fallen and hit his head on the jail’s concrete floor the day of the Aug. 4 grievance.
But a jail staffer determined that Stewart’s request was “not an emergency.” Two days later, on Aug. 6, he was found dead in his cell.
After Stewart’s death received widespread media attention — and after Herring’s Sept 2 call for a federal investigation — the jail authority’s board’s personnel committee called for a special meeting.
They voted to accept the already-planned Oct. 1 retirement of former Superintendent David L. Simons. They then voted to put McCabe in place as interim superintendent rather than the previous plan to have Simons stick around until his replacement was found.
On Friday, McCabe said Stewart’s death is still being investigated.
When the board learned of the death at an August meeting, Simons told board members that Stewart’s death “was a natural death, and that there was nothing out of the ordinary,” McCabe said.
Because the jail houses many inmates with health issues, he added, “that’s what we accepted.” But shortly after taking the helm of the jail as the interim, McCabe told the Daily Press that “now I’m not so sure.”
He said Friday that the investigation is ongoing. “That review is not completed because I’ve asked them to look at some other things,” McCabe said. “But we’re getting a new set of eyes on it,” and “investigations, they go where they lead you to.”
McCabe also said he recently discovered that Stewart filed “more than a couple” emergency grievances in the weeks leading up to his death. “It was several,” he said, saying he didn’t have an exact number.
The State Examiner’s Office still has not released a cause of death in Stewart’s case.
When asked if he’d make the internal investigation report public when it’s finished, McCabe hesitated, and then said, “Possibly ... yes.”
As for the jail’s internal report into Mitchell’s death, Herring asked in June that the report be publicly released — or at least made available to other state agencies — given that it had been 300 days after the death.
But Simons rebuffed the attorney general’s request, citing the Mitchell family’s $60 million lawsuit in federal court. He also didn’t share the request with the jail’s 15-member board.
On Friday, McCabe said he would still not publicly release that report, also citing the suit. But he said he would “absolutely” release the report to the AG’s office so it could be shared with other state agencies conducting their investigations.
“I will probably be in touch with them next week,” he said.
Aside from vowing to improve transparency, McCabe said he would be making other operational changes at the jail in the coming weeks. One, he said, would be to revamp the system inmates use to ask for medical help.
“Medical (grievances) isn’t one of those things that you should be putting down on a piece of paper,” he said. “If it’s an emergency medical situation, that’s when someone should pick up the phone and call medical -- and not put it in a form to where then it goes through the route and so forth.”
Another thing McCabe promised the jail would do better on: Calling back inmates’ families when they call the jail with concerns about their loved ones. He said he “spent the first week calling inmates’ families who said they had a hard time getting through to folks.”
“I’m trying to make sure that everyone here is on board with the philosophy that you got to get back to people,” McCabe said. “Even if you’re busy, and you’ve got stuff going on, you gotta get back to the family members. A lot of times they don’t get the answer that they want, but you’ve gotta get back to people.”