COFFEE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

Coffee Correctional Facility, a privately operated state prison in Nicholls, Georgia, has been the subject of news reporting documenting two homicides of incarcerated people and the federal indictment of a former correctional officer on drug-trafficking conspiracy charges. The picture that emerges from the public record is one of lethal interpersonal violence inside the housing units paired with a staff-corruption case that placed contraband narcotics distribution at the center of the facility's operation. Family and outside accounts collected by GPS additionally point to recurring failures in next-of-kin notification when serious incidents occur.

Two Homicides Inside the Housing Units

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's reporting on in-custody deaths at Coffee Correctional Facility documents two homicides separated by just over a year. Kendall Ja'Mal Cromer, 31, died on November 30, 2020 from stab wounds to the neck and chest; according to the AJC's reporting, an incident report indicates four other incarcerated people were involved in the stabbing. The second homicide came roughly thirteen months later: Hendricks Riley Gunn, 42, died on January 1, 2022 from blunt force injuries to the head and neck.

The two deaths share a structural signature that goes beyond the act of violence itself. Both involved weapons or force capable of producing fatal injury inside a controlled housing environment — a stabbing implement in Cromer's case, an instrument or method capable of fatal blunt-force trauma in Gunn's. In Cromer's death, the involvement of multiple incarcerated assailants as reflected in the incident report points to a coordinated assault rather than a spontaneous one-on-one fight, raising questions — not answered by the public reporting — about supervision, sightlines, and response time in the unit where the killing occurred.

Neither death has been the subject of detailed public follow-up reporting on prosecution outcomes or facility-level corrective measures in the materials reviewed here.

Staff Corruption and Contraband Trafficking

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also reported on the federal indictment of Dacia Gaskins, a former correctional officer at Coffee Correctional Facility, charged with conspiring to distribute illegal drugs. The indictment specifies a multi-substance trafficking operation involving cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and marijuana.

The breadth of the substances named is analytically significant. A staff-involved drug conspiracy spanning stimulants, opioids, and cannabis is not consistent with opportunistic single-incident smuggling; it points instead to an established distribution channel running through the facility. Contraband flow at that scale typically depends on stable inside-the-walls demand, reliable handoff routines, and at minimum tacit gaps in search and supervision protocols. The Gaskins case, as reported, sits alongside the homicides as a second axis of operational concern: the same control failures that allow weapons capable of killing into housing units are functionally connected to the failures that allow narcotics in.

Notification of Families After Serious Incidents

GPS has received recurring reports concerning Coffee Correctional Facility's handling of next-of-kin notification following serious incidents involving incarcerated people, including accounts that information about such incidents has reached families through informal channels rather than through facility officials. These reports register as a pattern worth flagging in the context of the facility's documented in-custody death history; verification of individual instances is pending the surfacing of corroborating records.

Sources

This analysis draws on reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution covering in-custody deaths and the federal indictment of a former correctional officer at Coffee Correctional Facility, along with family and community accounts collected by GPS staff.