by Anthony W. Accurso

In January 2025, protests erupted outside the Tarrant County Jail (TCJ) in Fort Worth, Texas, with demonstrators holding signs that read “Sheriff of Shame” and “69 + Deaths = Mass Murder.” So many people showed up to Commissioners Court meetings that new rules were put in place limiting speakers to as little as one minute at the podium, while three members of the public were detained for “disrupting” proceedings. Groups were organized on social media to plan the protests and share stories of loved ones who died in custody. The protest’s underlying message called for the resignation of Sheriff Bill Waybourn.

Since the start of Waybourn’s tenure as sheriff in 2017, more than 70 people have died while in custody, averaging just under 10 per year. In April 2024, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram provided the following summary: “11 of [the deaths] were due to COVID and 32 from other natural causes. Four were attributed to Fentanyl-related overdoses, three were accidental, six were suicides and one was a homicide. One death was caused by gunshot wounds from a shootout with U.S. marshals.” Several more deaths have occurred since then, such as a 63-year-old detainee who suffered a medical emergency in his cell.

Compared to the years before Waybourn’s tenure, the number of annual deaths at TCJ has been significantly higher, which had previously averaged around one per year in 2016-2018.

Waybourn claims he has done everything in his power to keep prisoners safe. But instead of taking responsibility, he has blamed many of the deaths on the detainees themselves for being in poor health at admission. In May of 2024, he invited the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Institute of Corrections (NIC) to inspect the jail, and then promoted the ensuing report, which stated that TCJ “[does] a solid job meeting the needs of incarcerated individuals.” Following the report, Waybourn played up the positive aspects of the report, telling KERA News: “My hope is the majority of good people that read this will see the good things that we’re doing, see the suggestions that have been made, and know that we’re doing what we should be doing.”

But are they?

Jail Operations

Most of the following information comes from the NIC report, which followed the agency’s visit to the facility.

Serving the approximately one million inhabitants of Fort Worth, the Tarrant County Jail is no small operation. The jail has “a capacity of approximately 5,000 incarcerated individuals and processes approximately 50,000 admissions and discharges every year,” with the “average length of stay … reported as 144 days.” This amounts to about “123 bookings per day.”

TCJ is composed of four unique facilities: “Green Bay Jail, Lon Evans Correctional Center, Tarrant County Corrections (Detention) Center (TCC/Lamar), and the Belknap Facility,” with “[a]ll of these … shar[ing] a common campus in downtown Fort Worth,” except the “Green Bay Jail [which] is in north Fort Worth.” At the time the NIC conducted its review, “an additional 453 [prisoners were] housed at the Dably Correctional Center in Garza County due to HVAC improvements at the TCC/Lamar.” The budget for the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) Detention Bureau is $113 million, including $8 million for behavioral health care, but not including the provision of medical health care services.

The Detention Bureau lists custody staff numbers of 701; although like many jails and prisons, they are understaffed, with 196 positions unfilled at the time of the report. My Health My Resources (MHMR) is the jail’s contracted provider for behavioral health services, which accounts for an additional 60 staff members, including management.

Medical services are provided by JPS Health Network, which also runs John Peter Smith Hospital in Forth Worth. Its staff provides “primary care services, nonacute infirmary-level care, detox care, dental services, dialysis, radiology, and weekly onsite specialty care, including obstetrics, orthopedics, and infectious disease.” JPS Hospital has “eight inpatient acute care beds on a locked unit,” and the jail has “48 male infirmary beds and 48 female infirmary beds for subacute and long-term care,” with an additional “26 COVID/DETOX/infirmary beds in the 55CD Lamar Unit.”

The report noted, however, that “as is common in all healthcare settings, nurse and provider vacancies exist,” that “[b]ed availability in the two infirmaries is a frequent challenge,” and “security staffing shortages have led to a limit of daily medical transports for routine off site specialty visits.” Investigators also highlighted that “71% of the TCJ population [is] on medications” that are “offered at the two main medication passes, which are at 3am and 3pm.”

The contract between TCSO and MHMR requires TCSO to provide fifteen interview rooms for MHMR staff for use in assessing patients detained at the main complex, and an additional room at the Green Bay facility. Despite this, the NIC found that “MHMR forensic case managers, therapists, and psychiatric providers deliver the majority of their one-to-one services at an incarcerated individual’s cell side as opposed to in a private setting outside of the cell.”

The two areas that received the most criticism from the NIC had to do with suicide prevention and detox protocols. The NIC found that policies exist that require evaluation during admission for both suicide and substance abuse disorder, as well as for routine and chronic medical conditions which require treatment.

While most prisoners are housed in general population, “those with more severe withdrawal symptoms as noted by [Clinical Institute Withdrawal Assessment for Alcohol] or [Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale] score (8 and above) are housed in gender-appropriate detox housing,” in which “the individuals … are confined to their cells for 23 hours daily.”

This use of solitary for detoxing is controversial, and the NIC team wrote that “[g]iven that the mental and physical stress of alcohol and illicit drug withdrawal is overwhelming even when medications are used to reduce the symptoms, the physical environment in which one withdraws, including the amount of time one spends in seclusion, can aggravate symptoms and increase suicidality.” It was the NIC team’s opinion that “this level of confinement for any individual is detrimental to their mental and physical health.”

As for suicide prevention, the team wrote that “[w]hile there are policies and practices in place at the jail across mental health, medical, and custody, there are several notable shortcomings marked by inadequate observation levels and the conditions of reassessment.”

It also noted that “the use of 1:1 or consistent observation is rare,” meaning that staff are required to “observe” a prisoner on suicide watch once every 10 or 30 minutes, depending on care level, giving an acutely suicidal person plenty of opportunities for self-harm.

MHMR also operates a program called Monitoring Individuals with Cognitive Need, which the NIC team determined was “Strong on verification of status, monitoring, and facilitation of competency evaluations.” Individuals with cognitive impairments are most often diverted to other state facilities instead of being prosecuted, but they are placed in single-cell housing and on 23-hour lockdown in the meantime. The NIC team wrote that “[a]t the time of the site visit, there were approximately 125 individuals waiting for transfer to the state hospital,” with “[m]ost of those waiting for close to a year … and those in maximum-security housing waiting an average of over 15 months.”

These waiting periods can cause deep harm. Take the case of Kai’Yere Campbell, a 21-year-old man who was arrested in December 2023 “on charges of assault of an elderly person, which occurred at a group home.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that “group home staff asked officers to take Campbell to the JPS Health Network for treatment, but he was taken to TCJ instead.”

“He is a child who cannot comprehend the adult word,” said Shantel Taylor, who says her son has the cognitive ability of an eight-year-old. “But now he is being punished by the justice system for behaviors that are a symptom of his developmental disability.”

United Fort Worth Organizer Pamela Young told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the 72-year-old nurse who was assaulted “never wanted charges filed against Campbell.” Taylor and Young, with assistance from the Texas Jail Project, were able to draw enough attention to Kai’Yere’s situation, and he was transferred to a state-supported living center in June 2024 after nearly seven months in confinement.

“I am grateful to United Fort Worth and the Texas Jail Project for bringing Kai’Yere’s case to my attention so that I could assist in expediting his transfer out of Tarrant County Jail to a facility equipped to provide the appropriate care for his disability,” said Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons. “While I am pleased to see he will be getting the support he needs, I am repeating my call for Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells to use the power he has, known as prosecutorial discretion, to dismiss the charges against Kai’Yere,” so that “[he] and his family find peace while he receives the care that he needs.”

The NIC noted that MHMR does a better job at diverting individuals with severe mental health issues, and returning to competency individuals who simply need to get on appropriate medication. It wrote that “for the period of September 2023 through February 2024, 123 patients entered the program with 37 being restored to competency and others having their case dismissed or a reduction of their time spent in single cell or in detention.”

Separate from the competency restoration program, which occurs in the jail setting, there is a diversion program operated by MHMR, run out of a separate facility called the Mental Health Diversion Center. While not part of the jail, it admits individuals who would have otherwise gone to jail for non-violent misdemeanors. Just under half of those admitted skip jail admission entirely; they are, instead, given treatment and wrap-around services in the community in lieu of jail. “From January 21, 2024, to the time of the visit, approximately 278 individuals have been admitted” to the diversion center, the NIC reported.

While Sheriff Waybourn was quick to seize on the portions of the report which painted his facility in a positive light, two things stand out from the perspective of the author’s experience in reviewing such reports.

First, the NIC is not a body which conducts a full review of a prison or jail’s operations to assess for constitutional violations. NIC staff spent a meager three days reviewing policies and interviewing staff, and were given a guided tour of the facilities. This is a far cry from the kind of in-depth analysis of incident-related evidence, in concert with detainee interviews, that has typically characterized a review from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. The aforementioned Commissioner Alisa Simmons underscored this point after the NIC report was released: “Calling this, ‘We’ve been cleared by the Department of Justice,’ is not accurate.”

Second, the criticisms and suggestions made by the NIC often use a kind of coded language that bureaucrats frequently employ to take the sting out of what would otherwise be harsh truths. For instance, the NIC wrote that “one area worth noting is that while clearly interested in providing care to their patients, the medical and mental health staff appear to be accepting of traditional correctional practices and barriers to ideal care environments, resulting in limitations to access,” and “may not feel able to continually advocate for accommodations to meet policy and/or standards.”

Courts have interpreted the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to require prisons and jails to provide timely health care to individuals who are detained or incarcerated by the state. A lack of staffing resources, such as a shortage of custody staff to transport prisoners for offsite medical procedures, does not excuse facilities like TCJ from providing timely care. This criticism from the NIC puts a clean-language spin on what is likely a culture in TCJ where constitutional rights, like access to medical care, are deprioritized in favor of Waybourn’s vision of “security.”

They Killed a Political Activist

Police in the nearby suburb of Grapevine arrested 31-year-old Mason Andrew Yancy just before Christmas 2024 after receiving reports “he was stumbling in the parking lot near a smoke shop and was later seen slumped in a car.” He “seemed disoriented” and “was in possession of ketamine,” according to the sheriff’s office. Though he was originally taken to a hospital after mentioning his medical issues, he was transported to the Grapevine jail and then transferred to TCJ on December 24.

On the evening of December 26, Yancy called a friend, Stephen Vasquez. “During that communication from the jail, he was begging me to get him out of jail, saying that he would need to get to the hospital,” Vasquez told a local NBC station. “I had been hoping he had been getting treatment in the jail, Mason did have addiction issues.”

Yancy collapsed while “seeing two nurses” the following day. “Staff from JPS, the fire department, and MedStar worked on Yancy for 40 minutes before a doctor declared him dead,” according to the sheriff’s office.

Commissioner Simmons questioned Sheriff Waybourn about Yancy’s death, citing emails she received about allegations that he was denied necessary medication. “I have absolutely seen no evidence, and I have poured over everything in these things, of what you just said, what my evidence is that he received medical [care] on a regular basis and that he was seen 9 times in four days,” responded Waybourn.

Yancy’s death significantly ratcheted up the public pressure calling for Waybourn’s resignation. Yancy was a political activist and a supporter of open carry laws, and his network of fellow activists has painted a figurative target on the sheriff’s back. Daniel Wood, a friend of Yancy’s and a Second Amendment advocate himself, began doing research into the many deaths under Waybourn’s watch after he learned about Yancy’s death. “They’re literally dependent on the people who are in charge, and they’re dying over senseless, needless things,” Wood told KERA. “And it needs to stop.”

“Wood and others created a Facebook event to organize the community to attend a Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting and demand answers about Yancy’s death,” an event that was promoted on social media by the Libertarian Party of Texas, according to reporting by KERA. “We want to show up in numbers and let them know we are serious about why another person is dead in their care,” read the event description. “Mason was always good at bringing people together, now we unite FOR him!”

During the January 14, 2025 meeting of the Commissioners Court, WFAA reported that three people were detained, two of whom were arrested and taken to jail. Dozens of people showed up that morning and signed up to speak about the deaths of Yancy and Vernon Ramsey, a 51-year-old man with diabetes whose cause of death was listed as “hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.”

“My brother was number nine [in 2024]; that’s nine too many,” said Darren Yancy, Mason’s brother. “This cannot continue, how many bodies have to stack up before the stench makes you cry?”

“You’ve got the number of deaths under various employees that keep occurring and there’s one man at the top, and that’s Bill Waybourn,” continued Darren Yancy.

Following the January 14 meeting, the Republican commissioners—Waybourn is also a member of the Republican Party—proposed a new code of conduct which “establish[es] a list of prohibited behaviors including personal attacks, disruptive behavior and signs of approval or disapproval from the audience.” It also bans the wearing or displaying of “signs, flags, banners, props, placards, or similar items larger than 8 1/2 by 11 inches … including items that can be illuminated or be attached to any pole, stick, or other device.”

The new rules were passed along party lines, with the three Republicans for, and the two Democrats against the measure. Violations can result in “being removed from the court, a temporary ban, cancellation of a speaker’s remaining time, [or] finding a speaker in contempt of Commissioner’s Court, which is punishable by up to a $25 fine and other criminal charges.”

Charlie Hermes was arrested for shouting at commissioners from his seat at the January 14 meeting, and detained again on January 28 for clapping after being warned not to.

Attorney C.J. Grisham was briefly detained before being released after agreeing not to bring his firearm into the meeting.

Carolyn Rodriguez, a local YouTuber who goes by Carolina and films interactions with police, not only defended Grisham but also challenged the decorum rules by listing various expletives that she asserts cannot be limited per the First Amendment. After County Judge Tim O’ Hare expelled Carolina from the meeting, she yelled “fuck you!” and “It’s not against the law” as she was being arrested. Around six months later, Carolina was found guilty by a six-member jury of hindering proceedings and sentenced to 18 months probation.

Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Democrat, asked the county’s attorney whether Rodriguez’s comments were protected speech, to which the attorney refused to answer during the meeting, saying he could give legal advice behind closed doors. “That’s fine,” said Simmons. “That’s fucking fine, but I need to know if it is protected speech.”

O’Hare then commented that Simmons is “simply the most classless person we’ve ever had sitting on this dais.”

Simmons has criticized the decorum policy, remarking that it places “way too much discretion to one person, and that’s Judge Tim O’ Hare.” Simmons also argued that the new policy requiring speakers to sign up to speak before 5 p.m. the day before the meeting was a “huge barrier” to access the court. The previous policy allowed for signups before 10 a.m. on the day of the meeting.

Commissioner Simmons encouraged protesters and attendees to continue showing up in force. “We can’t ignore almost 70 deaths, and we owe it to the taxpayers to bring transparency, these deaths cost us, they cost you taxpayer dollars,” she said. “Put pressure on us to stop these deaths, I’m going to be optimistic that we will see some progress and changes.”

Between 2022 and the end of 2024, KERA reported, the county has paid out more than $4.3 million in lawsuits alleging abuse of prisoners and medical neglect.

An Agency in Crisis

Anthony Johnson Jr., a 31-year-old Marine Corp veteran with a schizophrenia diagnosis, was arrested soon after a mental health facility turned him away. On April 21, 2024, Johnson had “an altercation during a contraband check,” during which officers handcuffed and pepper-sprayed him. “A partial video released by the Sheriff’s Office shows a jailer placing a knee on Johnson’s back for a minute and a half and multiple officers ignoring Johnson saying he could not breathe,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Waybourn’s response: “Detention Officer Rafael Moreno violated department policy by placing his knee on Johnson’s back after he was already in handcuffs.” Also, “Lt. Joel Garcia was fired” because “he made decisions that resulted in a delayed response by medical staff.”

While both guards were fired immediately following review of the incident, they were rehired because the sheriff’s office must follow certain protocols before letting an employee go. By July 2024, however, their terminations were finalized.

The cause of death for Johnson was listed as “ASPHYXIA (MECHANICAL AND CHEMICAL)” and his death was ruled a homicide. Two jailers are facing murder charges for his death, although criminal charges seem to be the exception rather than the rule for death at TCJ.

“The biggest settlement in county history—$1.2 million—went to Chastity Congious, who gave birth unattended in a [TCJ] cell in 2020,” KERA reported. “Her baby, Zenorah, died days after birth.” Also, according to Inforney News, Congious was “in custody awaiting a court date” and “the baby later died after jail employees waited outside the cell door.”

Waybourn, in response, announced that “a plan is in place to equip jailers with body cameras to increase transparency and accountability.” However, state laws often leave public access to body camera footage in such instances at the discretion of law enforcement, resulting in no more transparency or accountability than existed before.

In 2022, Kelly Masten, 38, was sent to TCJ for biting her grandmother and legal guardian. According to the lawsuit, Masten has a severe form of epilepsy that limited her brain’s development to “roughly that of a four-year-old or a five-year-old.” As a result of being frightened and confused, she refused her medication and “by policy jail staff could not force her to take it.”

Her father noticed bruises during a visit, and later remarked that jailers who failed to accurately record her name and birth date contributed to further neglect. The charges against Masten were eventually dropped and she was returned to her home. However, because her seizures went untreated, she required rehabilitation to “recover[] her limited ability to breathe and eat on her own.”

“We’re going to have isolated incidents where things go bad, where officers do wrong, because we still have human beings behind that badge,” said Waybourn. “We’ll never, ever get away from that. But all we can do is train better. To try to raise our standards, to try and see where our weaknesses are and improve on them and hold people accountable to those standards which we set.”

Publicly, the sheriff insisted that “all we can do is train better.” But it seems he also recognizes that a culture of callousness and unaccountability has taken root, and appears to be taking some, albeit inadequate, steps to address it.

Shortly after the asphyxiation death of Anthony Johnson Jr., TCJ Chief Charles Eckert retired. (Although, according to KERA, Eckert denied his retirement was related to recent jail deaths). After a nearly six-month search, Waybourn found someone willing to take over operations at the troubled facility.

Shannon Herklotz, Eckert’s replacement, spent more than 20 years at the Texas Commission on Jail Standards (TCJS), the state agency that inspects jails. He then ran the Harris County jail in Houston, but resigned in January 2023, after the previous year saw a record number of deaths at the jail. Herklotz wrote a resignation letter which, KERA reported, blamed the deaths on “the COVID pandemic, staffing shortages, and a large felony case backlog.”

Herklotz added, “While I pushed myself to new limits, the results were not always what I/we expected. I have no regrets and there is very little that I would change. However I feel that [Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez] and [Chief Deputy Mike Lee] want to move in a new direction and I do not feel as I have a place in that vision.”

Despite Herklotz’s less than stellar record, Waybourn must have been impressed by his work in Dallas County. Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price confirmed Herklotz’s transfer, and remarked that “Dallas County couldn’t match the compensation package Tarrant County was offering.”

“They understand that they’re in trouble,” said Price. “He understands all of the intricacies of the rules of the [TCJS], and he got a chance to come in pretty much with a blank sheet of paper and get us correct.”

Just before the deaths of Mason Yancy and Vernon Ramsey kicked off an intense wave of protests outside the jail and during Commissioners Court meetings, “news broke [in October 2024] that the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office did not get outside investigations of more than 20 deaths in custody—an apparent violation of state law.”

According to KERA, TCSO “allowed the Fort Worth Police Department to review the investigations the sheriff’s office performed itself.”

While this looks like an attempt to avoid liability for in-custody deaths at TCJ, these sorts of shenanigans were necessary to accomplish that goal. Most in-custody deaths are investigated by the Texas Rangers, who are notoriously bad at it.

Reporting from the Texas Observer, which examined over 400 Rangers investigations into jail deaths over the past decade, found frequent instances of jail conditions that led to preventable deaths, “such as jail staff ignoring people with deteriorating mental health, taking hours to respond to emergencies, violently restraining detainees in the middle of mental health crises, denying treatment for chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease, providing Tylenol for liver failure, and mocking people who are in pain.”

Yet while the “Rangers documented their findings going to a grand jury in about a fourth of the more than 400 cases reviewed by the Observer,” this resulted in “[c]harges [being] filed against jail staff in eight.”

The requirement to investigate in-custody deaths comes from the Sandra Bland Act, which went into effect on January 1, 2018. Yet, according to the Rangers, they were not given additional money for staff to handle the increased workload. Their investigations result in reports ranging from two to 100 pages, reflecting the amount of effort, or lack thereof, put into these reviews.

According to the Observer, “[r]eports about [the 11] deaths in the Tarrant County Jail [between June 2020 and February 2021] averaged about four pages [each], even as they document cases where people died after being pepper-sprayed, tackled, and strapped into restraint chairs by guards.”

Given how the Rangers clearly were willing to give a pass to Waybourn’s staff over and over again, it’s a mystery why TCSO failed to allow outside “investigations” into the more recent deaths. Either this minimal amount of scrutiny was simply too much, or—recognizing that the investigations were largely a sham—TCSO simply decided to conduct their own sham investigations.

Going Forward

U.S. Representative Marc Veasey, a Fort Worth Democrat, sent a letter in June 2024 to the DOJ, drawing attention to the “distressing pattern of inmate deaths and jail incidents” at TCJ, and requesting the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division look into the jail.

“From physical altercations to drug overdoses and even an unattended birth, the loss of any life within correctional facilities is intolerable and warrants immediate investigation and action,” wrote Veasey. “Unfortunately, as noted here, these deaths appear to be part of a pattern of negligence and mismanagement from the leadership of Tarrant County Jail.”

This letter was sent shortly after the NIC conducted its review, which mostly focused on jail policies rather than a records review into conditions surrounding in-custody deaths and jail conditions, issues that would likely be the focus of a Civil Rights Division investigation.

“Until these deaths subside, and they stop occurring, those recommendations or those findings by this NIC do not go far enough,” said Commissioner Simmons, who continues to push for a full investigation of the jail by the Civil Rights Division.

It is not clear that such an investigation will occur any time soon, since the DOJ, and especially its Civil Rights Division, have been affected by the mass firings under the newly elected Trump administration. Even if such an in-depth review were to be undertaken, it’s unclear whether the Tarrant County Jail would be able to change the culture of abuse and neglect present there, given that it seems to be a pervasive problem in many Texas jails.

What is clear is that Sheriff Bill Waybourn is unable to make the changes necessary to prevent more deaths.

“Y’all might as well plan the next rally,” said Commissioner Simmons during the protest over Mason Yancy’s death. “Because it’s going to happen again.”  

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