Mecklenburg deputies walked by a teen’s cell without looking in before he hanged himself
Inside cell 4, Desmond W. sat alone with his thoughts and a letter.
Outside, deputies walked past, rarely looking in at the 17-year-old inside the one-person room, a lawsuit contends.
Video captures the moment Mecklenburg Deputy Dwight Weller did look through the small window — the moment he jolted back, grabbed his keys and said something into his radio.
Desmond was dangling from a metal grate on the ceiling, his neck tangled in a bed sheet.
A nurse stood nearby, according to state investigation records. She’d been waiting to talk to the teen, who was on suicide alert, about how he was adjusting to the new jail.
As more nurses, jailers and EMTs filled Desmond’s cell, video shows, Weller shuffled out and went to the edge of the frame with a book and a piece of paper.
He stayed there, talking to colleagues and sporadically writing, for about 40 minutes.
Deputies inside the jail needed to check on Desmond every 10 minutes to make sure he was OK — to make sure he stayed alive, according to North Carolina law. In tandem with deputies’ observations, an observation log needed to be filled in every 10 minutes, a requirement of state law.
In a civil lawsuit deposition this May, Weller explained what the video footage showed him doing.
Desmond’s observation logs had blank entries. Weller was back-filling them.
That violated state and jail policy, Weller admitted. But the order came from above, he told attorney Michael L. Littlejohn, who is representing Desmond’s mother in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina.
Weller is still employed by Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden. The sheriff’s office declined to comment on the video of deputies speeding through observations, Weller’s policy violation or his continued employment, citing the pending lawsuit.
Teen suicide inside Mecklenburg jail
Desmond had been at Mecklenburg County Jail North — then a juvenile jail, now a closed and abandoned facility — for less than 24 hours when he died on Nov. 21, 2020. At the time of his death, the state’s Department of Public Safety identified him as “Desmond W.”
He was arrested in Rockingham County, north of Greensboro, on Nov. 5, 2020, and jailed in Alexander County, near Hickory. There, he had already been on and off suicide alert for more than a week when he learned he had been charged with murder.
Sealed juvenile court documents keep details of his case unknown, but footage from his interrogation details his declining mental state, according to the lawsuit.
“If I commit suicide a real n— killed me,” Desmond said, according to a video referenced in the lawsuit. The line, Littlejohn wrote, is a lyric from a song called, “Point Guard,” by the rap artist NoCap.
Before he hanged himself — as the Mecklenburg County deputies outside his cell were oblivious to what he was doing — Desmond wrote the same rap lyric on a note. It was sandwiched between the words “tell my family I’m sorry” and a frowning face.
Blank suicide logs
After finding Desmond hanging in the cell, Weller started scribbling in the empty logs “per advice from my supervisors,” he said in the deposition.
“They asked me to make sure I had a record, so to the best of my ability, I started to put together a record,” he said.
Weller’s morning observations of Desmond were logged, but most others were left blank after Weller went on a 40-minute lunch break and Deputy Bruce Sherald took over.
Video filed in court and played during the deposition shows Sherald walk by cells without looking in the windows at the teens inside. It shows him press the staggered buttons around the room, which told supervisors that observations had been made. It does not show him go to the log book.
When Weller returned from lunch, he also neglected to fill the log for about 50 more minutes.
As a stretcher rolled in and out of Desmond’s cell, Weller tried to remember when he walked by the teen, he said in the deposition. He spaced the retroactive entries roughly 10 minutes apart from each other — often saying there were just nine minutes between observations. He also signed his initials next to observations that would have been made on Sherald’s watch. That was another policy violation, he admitted.
The timestamps in the upper corner of the footage never matched up with the times written on the observation log.
Weller wrote that his last observation happened 10 minutes before he found Desmond hanging.
During his deposition, Weller said Desmond was gray when he found him.
Deputies’ violations caught on camera
An observation, Weller defined, is “laying eyes on the resident, making sure they are alive and well, safe and secure, and that they are breathing” or moving.
Littlejohn played video of Weller and Sherald moving past the cells. He asked Weller — and later his supervisor, Maj. Celeste Youngblood — if it looked like the two deputies had truly observed the person inside.
Both said they couldn’t tell.
State law requires deputies to look into all cells — not just juvenile ones — at least twice an hour, with no more than 40 minutes between checks.
A few months before Desmond died, in July 2020, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services told the sheriff’s office it was not in compliance with that law when 51-year-old Michael Daniel Mangan died after officers missed those required rounds.
Since 2019, Mecklenburg County jails have failed 11 out of 15 death investigations conducted by the state. The DHHS said all failures were caused by missed supervision rounds, according to data and documents provided by Disability Rights North Carolina — a legal advocacy nonprofit that reviews all jail death reports, investigations and autopsies across the state.
McFadden earlier this year accused state jail inspectors of holding his jail to an unfair standard when reviewing the rounds guards make. At an April press conference, he derided DHHS, which oversees jail inspectors, and one inspector in particular.
But in October 2020 — one month before Desmond died — McFadden’s office promised the state it would change. Mangan’s death had exposed compliance issues, and the jail would implement a “random review of the video recording within each pod to ensure consistency with the shift log entries,” according to a letter McFadden’s office sent to the state.
McFadden also said he would require deputies to hit the buttons placed outside every three cells or so to indicate that an inmate observation has been made.
Littlejohn argues that the revised observation methods and oversight hasn’t helped.
Deputies tend to simply walk around the pod’s perimeter and press the buttons to mark a tour complete, Littlejohn said in an interview. They don’t actually observe the inmates, and video shows that, he says.
A fireable offense?
In neighboring Union County, sheriff’s deputies can’t fake rounds, said Lt. James Maye, who is the public information officer for Sheriff Eddie Cathey. The jails’ digitized system, which requires deputies to scan a code with their phone before they can move on to the next cell group, is designed to make misrepresenting near impossible. Detention officers don’t have the ability to edit anything, so they must log in real-time.
“It’s a detention center safety issue, it’s an integrity issue if records of any type are falsified,” Maye said.
In Union County, he said, deputies can be suspended or terminated for falsifying or attempting to falsify records.
Across the state, reprimands rarely happen, according to Disability Rights North Carolina’s research.
There’s “a troubling pattern,” according to its 2022 report on jail deaths, in which jail staff cause dangerous safety violations, the state uncovers those violations and their cause, and then nothing happens.
“If you have a jail that is constantly being cited for the exact same safety issue,” said Luke Woollard, an attorney for the nonprofit, “that speaks to issues with the regulatory system.”
While sheriffs are responsible for making sure their jails are safe and in compliance, DHHS jail inspectors must hold them accountable. Right now, if a jail’s failures endanger inmates and staff, the state’s only real option is “the nuclear option,” Woollard said.
It can shut the jail down, or give it a “slap on the wrist,” he said.
McFadden never talked to Weller about Desmond’s 2020 death, according to Weller’s deposition. The deputy’s record has just three strikes: two for falling asleep on his breaks and one for not shaving his beard before his shift.
Weller has interacted with the sheriff only in passing, he said, when McFadden enters Jail Central — the jail in uptown Charlotte.
Weller, who started as a sheriff’s employee making $35,000 a year ten years ago, according to his May deposition, now works at that jail’s front desk and makes $75,000.
Families take McFadden to court
Desmond’s case is one of at least nine civil lawsuits filed against McFadden, the jail and Wellpath (the jail’s former healthcare provider) in the last five years.
A lawsuit filed in July by the mother of Russell Fincham claims the 25-year-old died after officers missed rounds and nurses ignored his pleas for help. He’d “consumed five Xanax bars and one-half gram of fentanyl” the day of his arrest.
That lawsuit also alleged McFadden “covers it up” when staff problems arise in his jail.
McFadden “vented his frustrations” about his staff’s failure to update him, according to the Fincham lawsuit, in which Littlejohn also represents the plaintiff.
“You don’t find out the same day it happened . . you find out two weeks when it happened, and then I have to cover it up . . . I have to deal with and then I got to say this is what happened y’all,” McFadden allegedly said, according to the lawsuit.
More people have died at the Charlotte jail because deputies don’t properly observe people inside their cells, that complaint alleges: Michael Trent in 2019; Michael Mangan in 2020; Karon Golightly and John Devin Haley in 2021; Francine Laney, William Rhinesmith and Derrick Geter in 2022.
This story was originally published October 24, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
