Wisconsin Prisoner Inhaled His Own Teeth in Fatal Beatdown
On January 8, 2025, Racine County Jail detainee Davonte Carraway, 29, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide in the brutal and fatal beating nine days earlier of state prisoner Joseph Lee, 35. Lee was found “stuffed into a garbage can” in a dayroom at the lockup, where he was being temporarily held for court proceedings, his former fiancée told the Racine County Eye.
Alyssa Sura, who is also mother of his three children, said that Lee was taken to a hospital but was brain-dead upon arrival. Defense attorney Jamie McClendon saw his client there and recalled that “one eye [was] bleeding, and his gold teeth were pushed all the way into his lungs. The doctors had to go in and take them out.” Lee apparently inhaled the teeth when they were punched out during a savage assault that happened when jail staffers rushed to respond to another incident, which was not described, and failed to lock down the pod where Lee was held.
The office of County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling pushed back on that report, insisting that a guard remained in the area but “security cameras within the dayroom revealed that the assault lasted less than one minute.” WITI in Milwaukee said that video from those cameras captured Carraway and Lee “exchanging words” before Carraway “was the first to swing,” repeatedly punching Lee, whose head “bounced” off the cell door before Carraway dragged him to the dayroom and stuffed him into the trash can, as Carraway’s criminal complaint described; he was seen afterward “shaking hands and joking” with an unnamed fellow detainee who cleaned up Lee’s blood.
Carraway, who was jailed at the time on an attempted homicide charge, told investigators that Lee threatened to put his “personal business out to others” and “hitched up his pants” as if to attack him, but they found “no indication” that was true. He appeared in court on February 1, 2025, to face the criminal allegation that initially landed him in the jail—shooting a man who had met him in October 2024 to buy a pair of sneakers.
Sources: Racine County Eye, WITI
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