Inspections find problems at Cleveland County jails
Twelve hours after Carla Shull hung herself in the Cleveland County Detention Center, her mother, Michelle Shull, learned that her daughter was dead.
She didn't hear directly from the Cleveland County Sheriff's Office, however.
Instead, deputies went to the home of a man with whom Carla, 29, shared children. Shull later learned from others what had happened.
"I've got a lot of questions," Shull said. "Nobody has come to me and told me what happened to my daughter. She hung herself supposedly at 12 midnight, but I didn't find out until 12 o'clock the next day."
Carla was found at 12:30 a.m. May 25, around 15 minutes after a jailer last checked on her, according to a jail report.
In the day leading up to her death, Carla was supposed to have been on a special watch, in which jail deputies checked on her four times an hour, with no more than 20 minutes between rounds.
A state Department of Health and Human Services investigation found that on May 24, Carla was left alone longer than 20 minutes eight times between 11:09 a.m. and 6:50 p.m.
Rounds after 6:50 p.m. proceeded as required, but the state's findings left Michelle Shull with a lingering question: "If she was on suicide watch, how'd she hang herself?" she asked.
Other deaths
Shull's death was not the first time that a state investigation found that jail guards missed rounds in Cleveland County. State regulations require that guards check on prisoners at least twice an hour, with no more than 40 minutes between rounds.
Including Shull, there have been seven in-custody deaths between Cleveland County's two jails since 2017. In four of those instances, a state investigation conducted after the death found problems with the jail's supervision of inmates.
Of the deaths, four – 31-year-old Christopher Cody, who died in 2017, 35-year-old Clint Ford, who died in 2019, 33-year-old Brandon Curry, who died in 2022, and Shull – were all reported as suicides.
One death, 37-year-old Jeffery Todd Dunn, was a homicide. In 2019, Dunn was beaten and asphyxiated by another inmate in a jail holding cell that jailers couldn't see into. The other inmate, 43-year-old Kenneth Eric Darby, was convicted in October 2021 of second-degree murder and sentenced to 14-17 years in prison. Cleveland County paid $347,500 in a settlement with Dunn's family.
A state investigation found that jailers had checked on the two inmates only once in the two hours before Dunn was found dead.
Of the seven deaths, six took place at the Cleveland County Detention Center, while the other, 59-year-old Thomas Campbell, took place at the other jail, the Law Enforcement Detention Center. Campbell died of heart problems, according to his autopsy report.
The other inmate to die of natural causes was 63-year-old Billy Watson, who died in 2018 of an apparent heart attack.
Whitney Brooks
An eighth death was not listed as an in-custody death because the woman, 34-year-old Whitney Brooks, died at Atrium Health in Shelby rather than in the jail.
Brooks, who was incarcerated at the Cleveland County Detention Center until shortly before her death, told doctors that she had been sick for a couple of weeks before she received medical care, according to state records. She died of sepsis Jan. 3, just hours after she was released from jail and admitted into the hospital. Because Brooks was released from custody, there was no state investigation into her death.
"They did not release her from custody until they found out she was dying," said Brooks' mother, Diane Brooks.
Failed inspections
It was not just death investigations that found problems at the jail. The jail was also cited for supervision problems after biannual inspections.
In August of 2022, a state inspection at the Cleveland County Detention Center found that guards missed rounds at various times, with some gaps between rounds being as much as one hour and 22 minutes.
In February 2023, state inspections at both jails found gaps between rounds that were too long.
The response
Cleveland County Sheriff Alan Norman said in a written statement that at the time of Shull's death, rounds were properly made. In the statement, he also said that detention officers are receiving training in suicide prevention and crisis intervention to help identify inmates who need extra attention.
"We are providing continuous training on the importance of making proper rounds. Working within a detention environment in itself is challenging. With the number of officers working, they are tasked with not only making the routine two rounds an hour. Officers also have special population inmates that require four checks an hour," he said. "While making sure this is done, the officers are handling medical issues, supplying recreation time, (and) conducting visitation and feeding (which are all required standards.)
"One of the biggest challenges detention centers are facing is having to handle more individuals who have mental illnesses or severe substance abuse issues because of the lack of state facilities that are more equipped to properly handle these individuals," he added.
"The administration works hard at doing what can be done to make the best effort to prevent these heart-rending events from happening. The detention officers are receiving constant training, and we are utilizing our administrative assistant to run a daily compliance report that is reviewed by supervision to ensure proper rounds are being made, according to state rules."
Norman also said that it has been difficult for the jail to find staff.
Out of 69 detention positions, the jail is currently 12 positions short, but two new employees are expected to start soon and eight more are in the hiring process, Norman said.
As of Oct. 19, the jail's current population was 268 inmates.
"In order to address the staffing issues, we are participating in various job fairs and utilizing media to recruit," Norman said. "We have also conducted pay studies to make our pay compatible to surrounding agencies as well as industries within our area. This is a very demanding job, which makes it hard to find and keep quality employees."
"As stated, any jail death, regardless of the cause, is heartbreaking, which not only affects the families, it makes an unforgettable impact on the staff," Norman said. "The detention staff, detention administration and sheriff's office are committed to do whatever's within our power to prevent the number of deaths in the Cleveland County Detention Center from rising above zero."
Expert opinion
Luke Woollard, an attorney with Disability Rights North Carolina, an organization that tracks jail deaths, said that the fact that the jail has been repeatedly cited for the same sorts of problems points to a weakness in North Carolina's regulatory oversight process.
"You see it come up again and again in these inspections, with similar solutions proposed each time that then don't seem like they're fixing the problem," Woollard said. "And when there's no repercussions to the jails, they keep failing and they keep saying, 'we'll re-educate people. It's the tracking system. We're gonna put systems in place to fix it.'"
An example of that, Woollard said, is that in the bi-annual inspection that took place in August 2019, a little more than four months after Dunn was murdered in his cell. Five cell doors in the same cell block where Dunn was killed were found to have damaged glass, the same problem that the jail was cited for after Dunn's death.
"That is a regulatory issue that's not being addressed. It seems like it happens sort of across the state where we have the regulator or the inspectors going in, finding something wrong, citing them for it, then that thing doesn't get fixed and the same problem continues to show up in bi-annual inspections and death investigations," he said.
The state's recourse in a case in which a jail is unsafe is to close the jail, an extreme measure that is rarely even threatened.
"That is a nuclear option. I mean, that's the big red button on the desk. As a practical matter, it's incredibly difficult," Woollard said. "The regulatory system isn't really adequate to get these problems fixed."
Woollard said that one possible solution is a punishment that is more immediate than a shutdown and less severe.
"Like fines, like fixing things on site while the inspectors are there for certain conditions, things like that," he said.
Shull said that since her daughter's death, she has struggled. She wants to know the details of what happened to her daughter. Carla Shull left behind two young daughters.
"I'm talking to a psychiatrist now because I can't sleep," she said. "I can't eat. Me and Carla had our differences, but we was working on it… I just need some closure."
This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Inspections find problems at Cleveland County jails
