AUGUSTA STATE MEDICAL PRISON

Analysis written on June 21, 2026.

Augusta State Medical Prison’s Toll: Homicides, Neglect, and a System in Open Defiance

Augusta State Medical Prison (ASMP) in Grovetown is the Georgia Department of Corrections’ flagship close-security medical facility—a 1,326-bed prison built in 1983 that now holds approximately 1,159 people, including high-acuity patients requiring level-V specialty care. Designed as a 535-bed facility, it operates well above its original design capacity, a physical strain compounded by the facility’s role as the primary receiver of the system’s serously ill and dying. Warden Deshawn Jones oversees a staff that includes Deputy Wardens for security, administration, and care and treatment, but the institution’s public record tells a story of cascading violence, systemic medical neglect, and a leadership that has repeatedly defied federal court orders. GPS-tracked mortality records show 376 deaths at ASMP since tracking began; the pace remains relentless, with more than two dozen recent fatalities documented in the last year alone. The Georgia Department of Public Health has issued mostly high scores for the facility’s food service, yet GPS’s own investigation has revealed systemic sanitation failures and a nutritional crisis that those scores systematically obscure. Inmate accounts collected by GPS, along with reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, federal court findings, and the U.S. Department of Justice, paint a picture of a facility where gang violence, staff complicity, and deliberate indifference to medical suffering have produced some of the highest-profile custodial deaths in the state.

The Dead and the Dying: Homicides Inside a Medical Prison

At a prison whose mission is to provide acute medical and mental-health care, a striking number of the deaths documented by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and GPS’s own mortality database are homicides. On October 28, 2020, Thomas Henry Giles, 31, died of smoke inhalation after officers evacuated nearby cells but left him locked inside his smoke-filled room for hours; the GBI medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, and the state later agreed to pay his family $5 million to settle a lawsuit. In June 2016, Jimmy Lucero, 19, was transferred to ASMP in the throes of a mental-health crisis, placed in solitary confinement without required medical checks, and fell into a catatonic state; he starved to death. The AJC investigation detailed these and other killings: Eddie Gosier, 39, was strangled hours after guards deliberately moved a prisoner with a known strangulation history into his cell; Amos Bennett Huff Jr., 60, was strangled by his cellmate; Jerry Merritt, 59, was stabbed by a younger gang member over a $15 commissary debt; and Lamar Wesson Phillips, 39, Thomas Preston Johnson, 56, and others were killed in inmate-on-inmate assaults. In at least one case, a correctional officer was charged with aiding the attack that led to the stabbing death of Rodarick Lee Hayes, 29, whom the DOJ investigation found had been attacked on multiple occasions before he was killed. GPS’s internal records indicate that the facility’s death toll has continued into 2026: Jacobi Chomicki, 23, died on May 22 with an undetermined cause of death, and multiple gang-related stabbings have been reported, including a mass stabbing that left one incarcerated person hospitalized with upper-body wounds. The pattern is not limited to violence; GPS’s mortality data show dozens of additional deaths categorized as natural, often among men in their 60s and 70s, yet the rate at which men are dying in a facility that is supposed to provide treatment raises fundamental questions about the quality of that care.

Staff-on-Inmate Violence and the Retaliation Machine

The abuse at ASMP is not confined to prisoner-on-prisoner conflict. GPS documented a pattern of staff-on-inmate violence and administrative cover-up that came to a head in February 2026 when Janette Shields, a 67-year-old certified nursing assistant, was arrested for allegedly striking Bruce Charles Smith, a disabled inmate weighing just 103 pounds, in the prison’s medical wing. Shields’ arrest followed a February 14 incident during which she allegedly struck Smith with an open hand. The very next day, according to news reports and GPS’s own investigation, another CNA identified as Williams allegedly cursed at Anthony P. Shedd, a quadriplegic patient, refused to empty his catheter bag, refused to assist him with eating, and locked the door to his room. Shedd, who is entirely dependent on staff for basic bodily functions, had already suffered permanent nerve damage and progressive paralysis that turned him into a quadriplegic while in GDC custody—a decline that his family and multiple inmate witnesses attribute to years of ignored medical pleas and delayed specialist referrals. GPS’s reporting on the Shields arrest and the Williams incident characterized the two consecutive episodes as establishing a systemic failure in the treatment of disabled men in the medical wing. But the retaliation was immediate: within days, the warden allegedly called Shedd’s contact, Cindy Robertson, and threatened that any further complaints—including any grievance that mentioned staff—would result in disciplinary reports against Shedd himself. GPS staff observed that this linkage of complaint-filing to punishment constitutes unambiguous retaliation under GDC policy and may implicate the First Amendment and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Family members and inmate witnesses have consistently reported that incarcerated individuals at ASMP are reluctant to identify abusive staff because of well-founded fear of retaliation, including transfers away from support networks and prolonged solitary confinement. The grievance system, multiple accounts tell GPS, is effectively non-functional, and personal property destroyed during shakedowns is rarely replaced. In this environment, the people most in need of assistance—the quadriplegic, the medically dependent—are the most vulnerable to both neglect and punitive institutional response.

Above the Law: GDC’s Defiance of Federal Courts

The failure to protect and the retaliation against complainants unfold against a backdrop of broader institutional contempt. Ralph Harrison Benning, an inmate at ASMP, filed suit in 2018 challenging GDC’s policy limiting incarcerated people to 12 email contacts drawn from the in-person visitation log. In 2024, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the restriction violated the First Amendment, and in November 2024, U.S. District Judge Tilman E. “Tripp” Self III issued a summary judgment order enjoining GDC from enforcing the limit. Benning immediately filed a motion alleging that GDC was “willfully and intentionally” refusing to comply. By February 2026, Judge Self held a contempt hearing in Macon, summoned Commissioner Tyrone Oliver to the witness stand, and scolded the department for its defiance, calling it “shocking” and “unbelievable” that GDC acted as if it were “above the law.” Only after the hearing—and the threat of contempt—did GDC send a directive to all wardens to stop enforcing the email limit, but GPS’s reporting documented that the restriction continued in practice for months after the court order. This pattern of institutional stonewalling extends beyond the Benning case: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s two-year investigation revealed rampant corruption, massive understaffing, and record homicides, with officials actively suppressing information about prison deaths. A prior federal contempt finding involved GDC’s willful disregard of mandates to improve conditions in a high-security wing near Jackson. The U.S. Department of Justice’s 2024 report described horrific violence, sexual assaults, and gang-run prisons enabled by a culture of indifference, and GPS’s own investigative series, “Above the Law: GDC Defies Courts, DOJ, and Legislators,” traces how the department has stonewalled every institution of accountability—from federal judges to the state legislature—without consequence. At ASMP, this defiance translates into a facility where the warden allegedly threatens discipline for medical complaints, and the grievance machine serves as a shield rather than a remedy.

Gang Control, Staffing Collapse, and the Officer Who Aided a Murder

ASMP’s violence is inseparable from the systemic crisis GPS has documented across Georgia prisons: staffing vacancies that have run between 49 and 60 percent systemwide for years, against a national standard of no more than 10 percent. Commissioner Oliver himself acknowledged that the department has “lost control” of its facilities, and GPS’s systemic finding—bolstered by the DOJ and the Guidehouse 2024 consultant assessment—is that gangs have filled the vacuum, controlling access to phones, showers, food, and bed assignments. Approximately 31 percent of the system’s population is validated as members of 315 different security threat groups. At ASMP, gang violence has been both chronic and lethal. Jerry Merritt, a Gangster Disciple, was stabbed to death by a young Crip over a commissary debt. GPS’s intelligence system has recorded at least 13 distinct assault-by-inmate signals from multiple sources in recent months, including critical-severity incidents reported by the AJC and the DOJ Civil Rights Division. In May 2024, Rodarick Lee Hayes was fatally stabbed—and a correctional officer was charged with aiding the attack, a finding the DOJ highlighted as evidence that the state fails to protect its prisoners. Multiple family accounts describe an environment in which gang leaders function as de facto authorities, coordinating violence across facilities, and in which men have been deliberately housed with known sexual predators—a form of unofficial sentence handed down in the absence of real supervision. The line between staff and inmate violence has blurred: GPS has received reports of a staff member being stabbed during a medication distribution altercation, and aggregate signals show four PREA violations and three PREA retaliation allegations surfacing across multiple sources in just the last few months. Sexual violence, the DOJ concluded, is “rampant,” and GDC has never submitted a PREA certification of full compliance in the law’s two-decade history.

Medical Neglect as Routine Practice

Layered atop the violence is a systematic medical neglect that GPS’s case records and inmate accounts show is not an aberration but a feature of the institution. GPS staff observed a documented pattern in which a man in his 40s or 50s experienced progressive neurological decline—weakness, numbness, falls, incontinence—over the course of more than seven months, while medical providers delayed reviewing MRIs, failed to order neurosurgical referrals even after cord compression was found, and instead deployed surveillance-camera reviews to construct a malingering narrative. In one striking account published by GPS’s Tell My Story project, a family member described watching a loved one become quadriplegic inside the system after his cries for help were ignored for seven months; staff moved him as far from the nurses’ station as possible so they wouldn’t hear him calling. That narrative aligns with the Shedd case and with derived records showing that critical lab values at intake were never reviewed by a provider, that no renal workup followed abnormal results, and that medications for a severe condition were not adjusted despite documented declines. GPS’s analysis of ASMP medical records reveals a pattern in which prescribed narcotic pain medications are discontinued without explanation, regular prescriptions go unfilled for weeks, and mental-health drugs that lapse are restarted at full strength without titration—a practice multiple family members and inmate witnesses have described as causing acute suffering. The suspension of care extends to basic maintenance: GPS staff have observed allegations that wheelchair-bound and catheter-dependent patients are refused assistance with cleaning and feeding, that chux pads are used in lieu of wipes because wipes are unavailable, and that during extended lockdowns, men in the medical wing have been denied adequate meals, microwaves, air conditioning, and outdoor time—all while the facility’s own nursing protocols require immediate provider contact for vital-sign abnormalities that can result from such conditions.

The Scores Don’t Match the Kitchen Floor

Public-facing accountability for food safety at ASMP offers a revealing lesson in how Georgia’s prison system manages appearances. The Georgia Department of Public Health has conducted multiple routine food-safety inspections at the facility between 2023 and 2026, issuing scores of 100, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 91, and 90—all Grade A. These scores suggest clean, well-run kitchens. Yet GPS’s systemic investigation, “Dunked, Stacked, and Served,” found that DPH scores systemically fail to capture sustained equipment failures, roach and rodent infestation, and meals served on visibly contaminated trays. Because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load—and because GPS has documented professional overlap between inspectors and facility staff in small-county settings—high scores coexist with inmate and family accounts of trays crawling with roaches, broken sanitizing dishwashers, and food that is inedible. The nutritional crisis is equally acute: GDC spends approximately $1.69 per person per day on food, and has proposed slashing that to $1.60 in FY27, under 60 cents per meal, against the FDA Thrifty Food Plan estimate of roughly $10 for an adult man’s nutritionally adequate diet. A GPS Tell My Story narrative from a man who spent ten years in Georgia prisons described a steady deterioration in food quality after COVID, with bone shards in ground meat and portions so small that men are forced to rely on commissary just to survive. At ASMP, where men are already medically compromised, the nutritional deficit becomes a death sentence. GPS’s own investigative reports, including “The Classification Crisis” and “The Price of Love,” connect the food crisis to the violence and mortality patterns the DOJ documented, emphasizing that chronically underfeeding a locked, gang-dominated population is a force multiplier for conflict.

Signals of a Crisis Unchecked

GPS’s intelligence system, which aggregates anonymized accounts from case claims and intel reports across all visibility levels, shows that the crises at ASMP are not receding. In the past twelve months, the system recorded 13 signals of inmate-on-inmate assault at critical or high severity, 7 signals of death-in-custody reports, 7 signals of medical neglect allegations, and 6 external complaints filed with bodies including the 11th Circuit, the DOJ Civil Rights Division, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Five signals of due-process violations point to the email-contact case and the broader grievance obstruction, while four PREA-violation signals and three PREA-retaliation signals underscore the sexual-violence epidemic the DOJ identified. The monthly concentration of these signals—with spikes in February 2026 around the contempt hearing and the CNA arrests, and sustained assault and medical-neglect signals through May—indicates that the facility’s patterns are not historical artifacts but ongoing incidents being documented in real time. GPS’s reporting continues to receive accounts of retaliation, neglect, and violence from families and incarcerated people, many of whom fear that speaking out will only worsen their conditions. The warden’s alleged threat to link all complaints to disciplinary action is not an isolated threat but part of a systemic logic that GPS has documented across multiple facilities: complaints are treated as security threats, grievances are buried, and the people who survive inside are those who stop asking for help.

Sources

This analysis draws on reporting and data from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, including its two-year investigation of GDC corruption and its homicide-tracking coverage; the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2024 findings of systemic violence and rights violations; federal court records in Benning v. Oliver and related contempt proceedings; Georgia Department of Public Health food-safety inspection reports; GPS’s own investigative reports, mortality database, and Tell My Story narratives; and inmate and family accounts collected by GPS staff.