Last updated November 8, 2026.(DS)

Coffee Correctional Facility: A Private Prison at 106.8 Percent of Capacity

Coffee Correctional Facility opened in 1998 in Nicholls, in Coffee County, as a medium-security men's prison. It is not run by the Georgia Department of Corrections directly: it is a private prison operated by CoreCivic, a fact GDC's own reporting lists plainly. Its original design capacity was 1,000. Its current rated capacity is 2,628. Its population, per GPS's facility records, is 2,808 — 106.8 percent of rated capacity. Sidney Carter has served as warden since January 1, 2024.

That gap between what the building was designed to hold and who is actually inside it is the thread that runs through everything below: a homicide record that includes two men killed in their early thirties and forties, a December 2025 stabbing spree that produced sixteen indictments, a mortality registry in which nearly half the recorded causes remain unknown, and a food-safety inspection record that reads clean while GPS's systemwide reporting describes something else entirely.

Two Homicides and a Stabbing Spree

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's homicide tracking documented two deaths at Coffee that GDC's records classify as homicides. Kendall Ja'Mal Cromer, 31, died on November 30, 2020, from stab wounds to the neck and chest; an incident report cited by the AJC indicated four other incarcerated people were involved. Hendricks Riley Gunn, 42, died on January 1, 2022, from blunt force injuries to the head and neck.

Five years later, the facility produced the largest single violence event in its public record. On December 13, 2025, a series of stabbings at Coffee left multiple incarcerated people critically injured and requiring off-site, life-saving medical care, according to GDC's own account. A grand jury subsequently indicted sixteen incarcerated people on charges including aggravated assault, aggravated battery, violations of the Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act, and riot in a penal institution, after evidence was presented on June 18. FOX 5 Atlanta reported that the sixteen alleged members of the Bloods gang carried out the stabbings; Yahoo.com's account stated that all sixteen indicted were Bloods members. Those gang characterizations are the outlets' reporting, not a GPS finding.

GPS records show a further concentration of reported assaults by incarcerated people in June 2026 — three distinct sources at critical and high severity, with an external complaint filed to the Georgia Attorney General's office in that period. That is a separate window from the December 2025 stabbings and should not be read as describing them.

Twenty-Six Deaths, and a Cause Column Half Empty

GPS's mortality registry records 26 deaths at Coffee Correctional Facility since January 1, 2020 — a floor, not a ceiling, since GDC reports deaths roughly two months late. Twelve of the 26 carry a cause of Unknown/Pending. Five are coded Natural/Medical, four Other, two Homicide, two Suicide, and one Accident.

The most recent deaths in the registry are Fletcher Mccloud, who died July 27, 2026, at age 44; Paul Travis Williams, who died March 23, 2026, at 57; Richard Romeo Shelby, who died December 28, 2025, at 60; and David Lynn Waldrop, who died November 25, 2025, at 70. GPS does not yet know the cause in any of those four cases.

Earlier deaths in the registry include William Eric Green, who died May 24, 2024, at 61; Robert Adams, who died February 8, 2024, at 52; Jeffery B Russell, who died January 8, 2024, at 60; Traquan Latrez Clay, who died November 21, 2023, at 25; Raymond Turahn Peoples, who died November 18, 2023, at 53; Karl Eugene Pundt, who died November 25, 2022, at 78; Charles J Edwards, who died September 26, 2022, at 75; and Aydin M Rashidov, who died August 18, 2022, at 27 — all with cause Unknown/Pending.

The registry's coded deaths run back through 2020. Enrique Alejandro Lopez died March 30, 2022, at 37, coded Accident. Robbie Lee Collins died January 18, 2022, at 45, coded Suicide. Maurice Bernard White died January 17, 2022, at 48, coded Natural/Medical. Edward Tyrone Poole died December 29, 2021, at 34, coded Suicide. Robert Ennis Roebuck died November 2, 2021, at 56, coded Natural/Medical. Derrick Moody died June 10, 2021, at 58, and Lewis Nathaniel Wright died January 29, 2021, at 70, both coded Other. Leroy Henderson died January 20, 2021, at 67, coded Natural/Medical. Abdullah Khalid Bin Mikal died July 26, 2020, at 38, coded Other. Ernest Byrd Shuman died July 24, 2020, at 73, and James Lee Grace died June 22, 2020, at 67, both coded Natural/Medical. Michael Leonard Taylor died January 8, 2020, at 45, coded Undetermined. The full list is maintained at GPS's facility death page.

What "Natural" Actually Means in These Records

The cause-of-death column at Coffee deserves its own reading, because it is not what most readers assume it is. GDC's cause coding in the 2015–2021 custodial mortality dataset — obtained by open records request and compiled in the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project — reflects the Department's own classification, not autopsy findings. For Robert Ennis Roebuck, whose death GDC coded Natural, the record carries no pathologist's examination behind that determination. The same is true of the Undetermined coding attached to Lewis Nathaniel Wright and Michael Leonard Taylor, and of the Suicide coding attached to Edward Tyrone Poole: these are GDC's own classifications, not medical-examiner findings.

GPS's position is that a medical examiner's, coroner's, or autopsy determination supersedes GDC's coding wherever the two conflict. In an internal validation across 200 records where GPS already held a cause of death, GPS and the UCLA dataset agreed 84.5 percent of the time; most disagreements were cases where GPS recorded something more specific than GDC's Undetermined designation. None of this establishes that any individual death at Coffee was misclassified. It establishes that the label in the column is an administrative act, and that roughly half the deaths in GPS's post-2020 registry at this facility still have no label at all.

A Clean Inspection Record and a Systemwide Contradiction

The Georgia Department of Public Health has inspected Coffee's food service seven times since May 2023, and every one was a routine inspection scoring Grade A: 100 on May 19, 2023; 100 on December 13, 2023; 100 on May 6, 2024; 90 on November 8, 2024, with two violations for cold-holding temperatures and facility maintenance; 99 on May 2, 2025, for a nonfood-contact surface; 96 on September 29, 2025, for food-contact surfaces not cleaned and sanitized; and 100 on March 27, 2026.

That record sits uneasily beside GPS's systemwide finding. GPS has documented a pattern of food-service sanitation failure across GDC kitchens that DPH scores systematically fail to capture — tray-sanitizing dishwashers broken for sustained periods, roach and rodent infestation in kitchen and serving areas, meals served on contaminated trays. The pattern is hidden from the scores in part because inspections are scheduled walkthroughs that do not assess equipment under load. The Marshall Project's May 16, 2026 investigation independently reported rats in kitchens, insects in food, and moldy trays across Georgia facilities. GPS's finding is systemwide; it does not establish that any specific condition was present in Coffee's kitchen on any inspection date, and the Grade A scores above stand as recorded.

Drugs, Contraband, and a Guard Indicted

GDC's published contraband reports record nine incidents at Coffee between 2012 and 2018, including three involving staff-class actors in an Officer role. In the most recent, on January 28, 2018, security staff found a methamphetamine pipe on visitor Donna Winters during a routine search; she was arrested by the Nicholls Police Department. Earlier incidents involved footballs thrown over the fence — one January 2013 case yielded 16 cell phones, 10 chargers, and tobacco — and a December 2012 visitor arrest that produced 27 bags of marijuana.

The more serious case came later. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Dacia Gaskins, a former correctional officer at Coffee, was indicted for conspiring to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and marijuana as part of a drug-trafficking operation. An indictment is a charge, not a conviction.

Medical Delay and the Limits of the Grievance Process

GPS has received accounts of medical delay at Coffee Correctional Facility. A recurring account describes an incarcerated person who has sought surgery for a painful foot deformity since 2019, with repeated evaluations by multiple physicians reaching the same conclusion that surgery was required; a physical therapist reportedly questioned why he had been sent for therapy before the operation. In 2025 a physician again advised surgery and scheduled a follow-up to arrange it. A formal grievance filed in 2026 was denied on the stated basis that an outpatient surgery had already been performed — a procedure the account says never occurred, and for which, the account asserts, no departure, transport, treatment, or follow-up records exist. GPS has also received reports of a family not being notified after an incident involving an incarcerated relative, and of information reaching the family through another incarcerated person rather than through facility staff.

These are accounts GPS has received, not findings. They are consistent, however, with the structural picture GPS has documented systemwide: officer vacancies in Georgia's prisons have run between 49.3 and 60 percent for multiple years against a national standard of no more than 10 percent, and the October 2024 DOJ findings letter concluded that GDC leadership "has lost control of its facilities," faulting the Department for placing "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." GPS treats staffing collapse as the force multiplier behind the violence, classification, and mortality patterns documented at the facility level — a frame that does not depend on any single account being true.

Sources

This analysis draws on Georgia Department of Corrections records, including its facility listings, internal audit calendars, mortality coding, and published contraband arrest reports; Georgia Department of Public Health food-service inspection records; the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project's custodial mortality dataset, obtained from GDC by open records request; homicide and court reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; reporting by FOX 5 Atlanta and Yahoo.com on the December 2025 stabbings and subsequent indictments; The Marshall Project's May 2026 investigation of Georgia prison food; GPS's own mortality registry and systemic findings on staffing, infrastructure, food service, and sexual violence; and accounts shared with Georgia Prisoners' Speak through Tell My Story and family and witness reports.