Deaths, ill treatment at Riverside spark call for regional jail reform (2024)

Denise Gunn asked Chesterfield County prosecutors to go to court to revoke her son Kevin Wyatt’s probation last year, thinking he’d be safer in jail than on the street.

He died in Riverside Regional Jail eight months later of an overdose of cocaine and fentanyl, she said. He was due to be released from the Prince George County facility in three weeks.

When jail officials called Gunn, some 10 hours after her son’s death, they asked her if her son brought drugs into jail, she said.

But he’d been there for months, she replied. How could he have?

The jail’s interim superintendent, Tojuanna Mack, and jail board chair John Altman did not respond to questions about Wyatt’s death.

Wyatt’s death — like the four deaths in 2022 reported in the Board of Local and Regional Jails’ latest review of jail deaths, the seven in 2021 and the seven in 2020 — is just one more sign of a broken system, according to legislators from the seven localities that run the regional jail. Those localities are the cities of Colonial Heights, Hopewell and Petersburg and the counties of Charles City, Chesterfield, Prince George and Surry.

“Kevin told me you could get better drugs in jail than on the street,” Gunn said Monday during a news conference at the General Assembly Building.

On the other hand, when Libbie Roberts needed medication for liquid in her lungs, she said jail staff gave her so much blood thinner, but without doing the necessary blood tests to monitor her reaction, that she started bleeding through the pores of her skin.

“I kept telling them I was feeling dizzy,” she said. Roberts said it was not until she was released that she got the medication and monitoring she needed to treat her edema.

Roberts said the jail placed a friend who was going through drug withdrawal in a pod with eight other women. Her friend’s withdrawal brought constant vomiting and diarrhea that left her too weak to get up from the plastic “turtle shell” type bed where she was left to lie for seven days in her own waste, Roberts said.

Mack and Altman did not respond to questions about Roberts’ allegations.

‘Our neighbors’

“The people in Riverside are our neighbors,” said Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield.

Coyner, with nine other Richmond-area lawmakers in both parties, said the first step is to find a professional jail administrator to take over as superintendent.

(The other lawmakers are state Sens. Lashrecse Aird, D-Petersburg; Glen Sturtevant, R-Chesterfield; and Ghazala Hashmi, D-Chesterfield; as well as Dels. Mike Cherry, R-Colonial Heights; Kim Taylor, R-Dinwiddie; Mark Earley Jr., R-Chesterfield; Delores McQuinn, D-Henrico; Debra Gardner, D-Chesterfield; and Michael Jones, D-Richmond.)

But the legislators are not encouraged by the regional jail board’s approach. Coyner contrasted it with a high-profile Chesterfield job search.

“Chesterfield County today is searching for a new school superintendent ... they hired a professional search firm, they put out information to the community asking what you’re looking for in the next person to lead our schools,” Coyner said.

“They’re hosting community forums … the only thing our regional jail board has put out is a job posting,” said Coyner, referring to a notice on the jail website.

“My bet is if you asked how many qualified people who have experience running a jail applied, the answer would likely be zero.”

Coyner sees a ‘broken’ model

But like the deaths and the poor care ailing inmates face, the jail board’s approach points to deeper issues, she said.

“I think the whole regional jail model is broken,” she said.

Hampton Roads Regional Jail finally closed this year after years of inmate deaths — more than 25 since 2015, including Jamycheal Mitchell, an inmate who had stopped taking his schizophrenia medication when he was arrested for stealing $5 worth of snacks from a convenience store. Mitchell starved to death in the jail.

Regional jails in Virginia are overseen by boards, usually made up of county administrators and city managers, as well as elected local officials.

They are regulated by the Board of Local and Regional Jails — but there’s little transparency about jail operations, Aird said.

Sometimes, as in the case of Riverside, fiscally stressed localities — Riverside’s members include two, Hopewell and Petersburg — struggle to find the money to do everything a local government needs to do, Coyner said.

“How can you manage if your own house is in disorder?” she asked.

Coyner added: “This has been a crisis in plain sight for years.”