She said it into the intercom at 8:34 p.m. The floor was concrete. The overhead light did not go off. She said it again at 2:55 a.m. By then the cell smelled the way a cell smells when a person has been vomiting into a metal toilet for six hours. She said it, by the count of Indiana State Police records her attorneys later obtained, between sixteen and twenty times across the twenty hours before she died. I need to go to the hospital. I’m throwing up blood.
Ta’Neasha Chappell was 23. A mother. Black. She was locked in the Jackson County Jail in Brownstown, Indiana, on charges that had not been tried. And she was being poisoned. That is not a stray claim. That is what emergency-room doctors at Schneck Medical Center in Seymour wrote down when EMS finally reached her at 3:15 the next afternoon. They suspected ethylene glycol. Antifreeze. Or methanol. The cleaner. Multiple inmates later told police that other prisoners had been slipping something they called “the green cleaner” into her food and drink for days.
She was pronounced dead at 5:45 p.m., less than two hours after leaving the cell.
In October 2025, Jackson County finalized a $5.6 million settlement for her daughter. No jail worker faced a charge. The county prosecutor cleared everyone in that building. He cleared the inmates who allegedly poisoned her. He cleared the officers who, on the surveillance video her family’s attorneys later released, watched her writhe naked on a concrete floor, vomiting and moaning, and told investigators they thought she was faking.
That is the story. The rest is why it keeps happening.
What the video shows
Watch it if you can stand it. The audio came out first, in January 2022: sixteen intercom clips stitched into one long confession by the jail itself. Then the surveillance: a young woman on a concrete floor, ill and undressed, dying while people in uniform walked past.
Attorney Sam Aguiar, who also represents Breonna Taylor’s family, filed the federal complaint alongside Ben Crump and Lonita Baker. In a March 2022 deposition, Sheriff Rick Meyer admitted proper medical procedure was not followed. If she was vomiting blood, he said, she should have been sent to a hospital or seen by a physician. She was not.
The autopsy came back “probable toxicity from an unknown substance.” Manner of death: undetermined. Detectives could not find a lab willing to test her body fluids for the specific cleaner other inmates named.
So the paperwork stayed clean. The people in charge stayed in charge. And a little girl grew up without her mother.
The same script, different jail
Two years before Chappell died, Kevil Wingo, 36, spent more than seven hours in the Cobb County, Georgia, jail infirmary vomiting and fainting from what turned out to be a perforated ulcer. Surveillance video showed him banging on the door, collapsing five times, crying I can’t breathe. A nurse told him he was “playing around.” Officers moved him to a padded cell used for people in mental-health crisis, stripped him, left him face down on a toilet grate. He lay dead for an hour before anyone noticed. No one was fired. No one was charged. He left two teenage daughters and an 11-year-old son.
In 2018, Harvey Hill, 36, was jailed in Madison County, Mississippi, on misdemeanor trespassing after a former employer called police to say he needed a mental hospital. Within a day, guards had tackled him, pepper-sprayed him, kicked him in the head, and slammed him handcuffed into a concrete wall. A licensed practical nurse in the infirmary, not legally authorized to make medical decisions in Mississippi, gave him nothing. A guard pinned him to the floor of an isolation cell and left. Nobody checked on him for 46 minutes. When they did, he had no pulse. Autopsy: homicide. Liver laceration. Neck hematoma. Severe internal bleeding. Sheriff Randy Tucker’s office publicly attributed the death to “possible cardiac arrest” the next day. The autopsy was not released to the family for 25 months. By then, Mississippi’s one-year statute of limitations for a civil assault claim had long since passed.
In September 2022, Lashawn Thompson, 35, died in the psychiatric wing of the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta after three months in a cell so infested with bedbugs the family attorney counted more than a thousand bites on his body. His antipsychotic medication was in his file. It was not in his bloodstream. Fulton County paid $4 million. The independent autopsy called it homicide by neglect.
In June 2019, Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, a 27-year-old Afro-Latina trans woman on Rikers Island because she couldn’t pay $500 bail, had a seizure in a solitary cell. Video showed staff failed to check on her for 47 minutes. She was dead before the 48th. New York paid her family $5.9 million.
In July 2015, Sandra Bland was arrested in Waller County, Texas, for an alleged improper lane change and found hanged in her cell three days later.
Same script. Different jail.
Even the building where Chappell died has a second name on the docket. Joshua McLemore, 29, was locked into a windowless cell in the Jackson County Jail without a bathroom or a sink for 20 straight days in 2021, in the middle of a psychotic break, and died of dehydration and malnutrition. The same sheriff. The same courthouse. And, the same shrug.
Here is the wiring. The sheriff investigates the sheriff’s jail. The prosecutor decides whether to charge the prosecutor’s officers. The vendor keeps the contract because the vendor already has the contract. The county pays out of an insurance pool that does not answer to voters. Nobody in the chain has an incentive to end the chain.
The devil’s work
Incarceration should not abandon human dignity in any prisoner. But the racism outside the prison walls attaches itself to Black prisoners like a terrible weed that keeps cropping up in a garden despite every attempt to stop its growth. Unlike weeds strangling plants, racism places a real noose around Black prisoners’ necks. It is written into shift schedules. It is written into unwritten decisions about which body on which floor gets treated like a human being.
Despite training and oaths, prison officials up and down the chain of command carry their incessant racial biases into every duty. The Chappell video makes it plain. Officers delayed and made a weak attempt at even basic aid to a young Black woman, the only Black person in a jail pod of all white women who watched their fellow prisoner call out for help. If the white inmates and the white guards cannot offer aid, then a country that fills its Christian pews on Sunday is doing the devil’s work the other six days.
These unexplained deaths are the same reminder every time. A second-term Trump Justice Department is not going to reach into a county jail in Indiana or Mississippi to demand better care for a Black prisoner. Slavery is on the books as abolished. What grew out of it, and what nobody in this administration is going to touch, is not. And it does not happen in a vacuum. It happens where the top brass has decided, in writing or without it, that this floor is not worth calling a nurse to.
The numbers underneath the names
Reuters had to sue and beg to build the count Congress refuses to. Its investigators documented 7,571 deaths in more than 500 U.S. jails between 2008 and 2019. At least two-thirds, roughly 4,998 people, had never been convicted of the charges holding them. Black Americans made up at least 28 percent of the dead, more than double their share of the U.S. population.
Research published in Health Affairs has found that jail mortality among Black incarcerated people is disproportionately driven by illness rather than by suicide or violence. The kind of dying you do slowly while someone in a uniform decides whether to believe you.
The federal government is supposed to know all of this. In 2013, Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act, which required every state and federal agency to report in-custody deaths to the U.S. Attorney General. States that refused could lose up to 10 percent of their federal Byrne Justice Assistance Grant money. Twelve years later, the Justice Department has never once withheld a dollar. It has never fully collected the state and local data. The GAO has said so. The DOJ inspector general has said so.
A law with teeth is a law that bites. This one has not bitten.
If you cannot count the dead, you cannot fix what killed them.
What actual reform looks like
Not slogans. Not committees that report to the sheriff being investigated. Real fixes are moving right now, in statehouses and county boards, and they can be copied:
Take the sheriff off his own case. In October 2025, California signed the Forensic Accountability, Custodial Transparency and Safety Act (AB 1108), which bars sheriffs from overseeing medical death investigations at their own jails. Starting January 2027, every county with a combined sheriff-coroner office must contract with an outside civilian medical examiner or independent physician who controls the scope of the investigation and signs the death certificate. Every state should copy it, word for word.
Put civilians in the building. In Riverside County, California, a grand jury this summer recommended replacing the sheriff’s advisory committee with an independent civilian body empowered to audit jail health care and inspect facilities without warning. Washington State’s jail-standards proposal would create an independent agency with power to set minimum staffing, conduct unannounced inspections, and force the closure of jails that put lives at risk. Body cameras on jailers, under study in Tarrant County, Texas, are a floor, not a ceiling.
Enforce the law we already have. The U.S. Attorney General can withhold up to 10 percent of a state’s Byrne Justice Assistance Grant money when that state refuses to report jail deaths. The statute has said so since 2013. Twelve years, and not one dollar withheld. If your state is on the noncompliance list, ask your senator why. Fund the reporting portal. Publish the study Congress ordered years ago on what policies feed these deaths.
Tell the family. Ta’Neasha Chappell’s family got a phone call. Lashawn Thompson’s mother saw the bedbugs on the internet. There is no federal baseline that says a facility has to do better than that. The Family Notification of Death, Injury, or Illness in Custody Act (S.1322), reintroduced by Sens. Jon Ossoff and John Kennedy in 2025, would set family-notification standards inside federal detention and give states a template to copy. Pass it.
Medical care to the standard of care. Minnesota’s Larry R. Hill Medical Reform Act, signed this year, sets new standards for county-jail health care. New York City’s Local Law 2025/105, passed by the Council on July 14, 2025, requires the Department of Correction to notify the medical examiner and the Board of Correction within three hours of a person’s death in custody, and requires the Board of Correction to complete an independent investigation within 180 days. Every state needs a version.
End the private-vendor shell game. Wellpath. Quality Correctional Care. Advanced Correctional Healthcare, named in the McLemore complaint in Jackson County, show up over and over in these lawsuits. Publish the contracts. Publish the complaint data. Terminate vendors with patterns of preventable death. No more revolving-door bidding on human lives.
The sentence
$5.6 million cannot bring Ta’Neasha Chappell back. It cannot un-record the intercom. It cannot un-see the video. But, it will, if we let it, get filed next to the other settlements. Another line item in a system that already knows it treats Black pain as performance.
The jail heard her twenty times. The prosecutor heard the tapes and shrugged. The medical examiner heard about the green cleaner and could not find a lab. The county’s insurer wrote a check.
The rest of us don’t get to shrug. Not while this same script is running in a county building tonight, with someone else on the floor, someone else on the intercom, someone else whose name we haven’t heard yet.
Count the dead. Take the sheriff off his own case. Put civilians in the building. Fund the standards. Pay the medical workers who tell the truth. Fire the ones who don’t.
Ta’Neasha Chappell said I need help twenty times.
The country has said not yet for twenty years.
She is done waiting.
We should be, too. Midterm Elections. Vote.
Sources
Ta’Neasha Chappell case
- WFYI: Jail audio depicts Chappell pleading for help for hours before her death
- WFYI: A year after her death, Ta’Neasha Chappell’s family is still looking for answers
- Reason: She told jail employees she was throwing up blood. They ignored her.
- Rolling Stone: A Young Mom Was Arrested for Theft, and Died Mysteriously in Jail
- WDRB: Jackson County to pay more than $5M to family of Louisville mother
- WDRB Investigates: Indiana jail workers believed Louisville woman was ‘faking it’
Other jail deaths
- Equal Justice Initiative: ‘I Can’t Breathe’ (Kevil Wingo, Cobb County)
- Mississippi Today: Family says Madison County jailers tortured man (Harvey Hill)
- Reuters: Dying Inside investigation (Harvey Hill and national jail-mortality)
- Jackson Free Press: Harvey Hill’s jail killing egregious
- 13WMAZ: Fulton County $4M Lashawn Thompson settlement
- BBC: Lashawn Thompson autopsy ruling
- THE CITY: Layleen Polanco $5.9M Rikers settlement
- BBC: Sandra Bland, how did she die?
- Guardian: Joshua McLemore, 29, died in Indiana solitary cell
- World Socialist Web Site: McLemore complaint coverage (private-vendor defendants)
Data, law, and reform
- Congress.gov: Death in Custody Reporting Act, H.R. 1447 (113th Congress)
- Health Affairs / PMC: Increased Mortality of Black Incarcerated and Hospitalized People
- DOJ Office of the Inspector General: DCRA implementation review
- POGO: A Matter of Life and Death (DCRA)
- Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: DCRA implementation report
- CalMatters: California AB 1108 (FACTS Act)
- Press-Enterprise: Riverside County civilian oversight recommendation
- Washington State Standard: Proposal for new jail oversight agency
- NBC DFW: Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office body-camera review
- Congress.gov: Family Notification of Death, Injury, or Illness in Custody Act (S.1322)
- Spokesman-Recorder: Minnesota’s Larry R. Hill Medical Reform Act
- NYC Council Legistar: Int 0423-2024 (Local Law 2025/105)
Leave a Reply