Aspiring rapper killed inside North Carolina jail, autopsy says. Family wants answers.

The Scotland County jail was supposed to be a temporary hold for Ricardo Jones, a 31-year-old aspiring rapper from Florida. During a traffic stop, police in the county discovered a bench warrant on drug charges in his home state.

Jones, the father of four children with another on the way, never made it back to the Sunshine State. A week after he entered the jail, he was found dead on a mattress on the floor of a cell. An autopsy concluded that Jones was killed.

Jones’ family say they don’t understand why no one has been charged 10 months after his death. Jones was locked up in a relatively small jail that is supposed to limit inmates’ movements and has security cameras, including at least one that was trained on his cell.

They want authorities to charge any inmates involved in Jones’ death. They also want jail staff held accountable for failing to keep a watchful eye.

“I don’t want my son’s death to be in vain,” said his mother, Celestine Mitchell. “I want my son’s death to be helpful to other people, so they don’t leave this world the way my son left.”

A state Department of Health and Human Services investigation found shortcomings with how closely inmates were monitored at the Scotland County jail while Jones was confined there.

As a result, his death marks the fourth time in four years that state investigators found detention officers in a county jail didn’t regularly check on an inmate hours before a violent death.

Killed in custody?

How Jones died is not clear. But public records shed some light.

At noon on June 18, jail staff observed other inmates walking into Jones’ cell via a surveillance camera, according to a medical examiner’s report.

When jailers entered the cell, the report said, they found Jones lying on a mattress on the floor, wet from a shower. Jones said he didn’t need help, the report said.

After officers “observed numerous” inmates “continue” to enter Jones’ cell, they returned. This time Jones did not respond so officers summoned emergency medical technicians.

By the time EMTs arrived, Jones was not breathing and had no pulse. An autopsy concluded he had been struck in the head, a blow so powerful that he was seen struggling to stand, sweating excessively and gasping for air, says the report, without specifying who saw Jones in that state.

His death “is attributed to complications of his reported involvement in a physical altercation with another jail inmate,” the autopsy report said.

The medical examiner also found that Jones had sickle cell trait, carrying just one of the mutated gene that causes sickle cell disease, a disorder that hinders red blood cells’ ability to carry oxygen throughout the body.

People with the trait often don’t know they have it, but strenuous physical activity can trigger sickled blood cells. That’s what happened during “an altercation” in this case, the medical examiner found, calling it a contributing factor in Jones’ death.

Family left in the dark, they say

Jones’ family say they’ve heard little from Sheriff Ralph Kersey, who runs the jail, or a State Bureau of Investigations agent assigned to investigate Jones’ death. They were not aware, for instance, that state regulators found the detention center did not check on people confined within as frequently as is required while Jones was locked up here.

State jail regulations require jailers to check inmates in person at least twice an hour. It’s a standard meant to protect inmates and staff. If inmates becomes ill or infirm, jailers have a better chance at rescuing them. It also helps ensure control of a facility so that inmates looking to do harm to others are less likely to attack.

The 109-bed jail in Laurinburg has electronic check points that detention officers scan to document that they make their security rounds. But the day before Jones was struck and died, a detention officer had failed to do those scans four times at one checkpoint and two times at another that covered the unit he was housed in, the DHHS report said.

Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, said jailers need to regularly perform rounds to keep jails under control.

“You shouldn’t have a jail housing unit where people are just coming and going from one another’s cells and there’s no officers watching things,” said Kendrick, whose organization advocates for safer jail and prison conditions.

Jones’ mother said she has spent time behind bars, so she knows firsthand what happens when jailers aren’t regularly patrolling.

“When you know how officers operate in a facility you have control to do what you want to do,” Mitchell said. “By them not doing their duties, the inmates knew they had time to do what they wanted to do.

Three weeks before Jones died at the Scotland County jail, another inmate, Robert Stamper Jr., 46, died by suicide there shortly after being admitted. He and Jones are among a record number of jail inmates in North Carolina who died last year.

The DHHS investigator found evidence that officers did not perform required checks during the five hours prior to Stamper’s death.

The lack of checks is one of several concerns Jones’ family discussed in interviews.

Jones’ uncle, Derek Ned, doubts his nephew could have spoken to the detention officers when they first checked on him.

“If he had a contusion and there was brain damage, according to the medical examiner, he can’t tell someone he’s OK,” Ned said.

He and Jones’ mother say their calls to the authorities have largely gone unanswered. Sheriff Kersey, they said, didn’t call them until after a television station news reporter in Florence, S.C., broadcast an interview with them seeking answers three days after Jones’ death.

At that point, the sheriff had only made public that Jones had died and the SBI was investigating Jones’ death. His office has yet to announce the death was a homicide.

Kersey did not respond to The N&O’s request for interviews. The N&O also received no response to a request for an incident report or for any video capturing what occurred inside the jail the day Jones died. The SBI did not respond to requests for comment either.

People running the Scotland County jail idid confirm to the DHHS that officers did not conduct required checks the evening before and the day that Jones died. The officers carry devices that log checkpoints in the jail during their rounds.

Jail seeks to fix supervision issues

A shift supervisor at the jail was demoted as a result, DHHS records show. The sheriff’s office also said the jail would purchase more tracking devices so that all jailers have them when making rounds.

Reece Saunders, the district attorney for Scotland County, confirmed that the SBI was assigned to investigate Jones’ death and provided limited information on Jones’ arrest. He cited North Carolina State Bar rules limiting how much prosecutors can discuss on open cases to avoid prejudicial statements.

If the criminal investigation confirms the autopsy report, Jones would be the fourth inmate to die in North Carolina’s jails in the past four years after confrontations with other inmates.

In 2019, an inmate in the Cleveland County jail and another in the Craven County jail died after being struck by other inmates, authorities said. The following year an inmate died after being attacked in the Orange County jail, deputies said. In the other deaths, the state DHHS also cited the jails with failure to properly check on the inmates.

The family of the Cleveland County inmate, Jeffery Todd Dunn, sued the sheriff and several employees. They received a $347,500 out-of-court settlement in 2021.

Ricardo Jones grew up in the Fort Myers area. He was a running back in high school and attracted some college interest, his family said, but that opportunity faded when a girlfriend became pregnant shortly after he graduated.

Amid the odd jobs to pay child support, Jones sought to make it as a rapper with the stage name “Shotta Suppa.”

He learned he was a father a fifth time while in the Scotland jail, his family said.

Mitchell said the fifth child, a son named Ricki, was born in February.

“So now he has to grow up without a father,” she said.