Last updated November 8, 2026.(DS)

Phillips State Prison: Bed Math, Gang Violence, and the Record of the Dead

Phillips State Prison sits on W Rock Quarry Road in Buford, in Gwinnett County — a close-security facility for adult men that GDC's own records still describe as medium security in places, and that many sources still call medium security outright. It opened in 1991, was designed to hold 600 people, and is now rated for 918. GPS's facility record shows a population of 660 as of the most recent snapshot, roughly 72 percent of rated capacity. The plant is ten housing units mixing two-man and single-man cells, about 100 isolation and segregation cells, and a linked transitional center. Phillips has hosted a campus of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and offers education and faith-based programming. It has also been the site of federal corruption prosecutions over officers trafficking contraband and drugs, and — in the record assembled below — of a sustained pattern of homicides, contested death investigations, and a federal finding that the state's prison system violates the Eighth Amendment.

The Dead: 69 Names Since 2020, Fourteen of Them Homicides

GPS's mortality registry records 69 deaths at Phillips State Prison since January 1, 2020. That figure is a floor, not a ceiling: GDC reports deaths roughly two months late, so the count trails reality. By cause, GPS records 36 natural or medical deaths, 14 homicides, 8 suicides, 5 overdoses, 4 unknown or pending, 1 medical neglect, and 1 accident. The full list is maintained at gps.press/georgia-prison-deaths/facility/phillips-state-prison.

The most recent 25, as the registry reads at build time:

• Jacob Ray Nicholson died July 13, 2026, at Phillips State Prison; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending. He was 29.
• Richard L Thatcher died May 3, 2026, at Phillips State Prison; the cause is Unknown/Pending. He was 58.
• Rickie Lynn Rutherford died April 18, 2026, at Phillips State Prison; the cause is Unknown/Pending. He was 41.
• Cornelius Burge died February 11, 2026, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 42.
• Rodger Scales died February 9, 2026, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 40.
• Willie Roseborough died January 13, 2026, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 54.
• Justin Curtis Kinsey died November 8, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Accident. He was 37.
• Terry Nichols died October 14, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Suicide. He was 42.
• Alonzo Jr Carter died September 20, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Homicide. He was 78.
• Kendrick Keon Scales died August 27, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Overdose. He was 35.
• Joseph Ulrich died June 1, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 30.
• John Dean Tolbert died May 4, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 69.
• Taron Edmonds died March 31, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 32.
• Christopher Blake Hines died March 24, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Suicide. He was 37.
• Jerry Wayne Spencer died March 10, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 58.
• Harry Ray Taldon died February 22, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 57.
• Tommye Mobley died February 14, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 45.
• Ricky Ray Breedlove died February 7, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 71.
• Thomas Nicely died January 23, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical.
• Shun Pinkston died January 18, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical.
• William Pate died January 14, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical.
• Jody Stokes died January 13, 2025, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Homicide.
• Eddie Ray Scott died December 19, 2024, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Natural/Medical. He was 60.
• Corey Madison Cochran died December 18, 2024, at Phillips State Prison; the registry lists Homicide. He was 29.
• Leroy Brooks died December 9, 2024, at Phillips State Prison; the cause is Unknown/Pending. He was 64.

The yearly shape is not a steady line. GPS records 3 deaths at Phillips in 2020, 11 in 2021, 10 in 2022, 5 in 2023, then 18 in 2024 and 16 in 2025 — a doubling that tracks the system-wide mortality rise GPS has documented across GDC. For context, GPS has independently tracked 1,928 deaths in GDC custody system-wide since 2020.

A Cluster of Killings, 2021 Through 2024

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's homicide tracking documented a run of killings at Phillips that reads, in sequence, like a facility losing control of its housing units. Dave Stone, 61, died November 20, 2021, from closed head trauma with delayed effects; his sister told the AJC he was in a mental health ward when he was assaulted, apparently with two pipes wrapped in a cloth, after which his brain was no longer functioning and he was taken off life support.

Jamal Cymonne Johnson, 32, died June 11, 2022, from stab wounds to the head injuring the brain, with delayed effects. Sidney Sanchez Nealey, 22, died July 18, 2022, from stab wounds to the torso. Jacob Kendall Daniels, 19, died August 13, 2022, from a stab wound to the neck, shoulder, and arm. Quafabian Melik McBride, 19, died September 30, 2022, from stab wounds to the chest injuring the heart during a gang-related fight in the lockdown unit — and the AJC reported that officers had arranged for McBride to be brought to that lockdown unit on the day he was killed. Alim Rasheed Lovett, 33, died December 8, 2022, from stab wounds to the back injuring the right lung, with four other prisoners involved according to the incident report.

The McBride killing did not stay at Phillips. The AJC, drawing on the DOJ's findings, reported that the killing triggered a gang war at multiple GDC prisons, with Bloods attacking Crips over several days and 20 prisoners hospitalized. That is the mechanism GPS treats as central: a single death inside one facility's lockdown unit propagating outward across the system.

The killings continued. Arthur James Wimbush Jr., 46, died April 2, 2023, from blunt force trauma with fracture of the thyroid cartilage. David Fambro, 69, died July 24, 2024, from complications of facial fractures after an interval of 26 days; incident report data shows a homicide. Timothy Hurley, 19, died September 8, 2024. Brandon Lashaun Mincey, 37, died October 11, 2024. Corey Madison Cochran, 29, died December 17, 2024, per the Gwinnett Medical Examiner's full autopsy report. Jody Stokes died January 13, 2025; GDC's January 2025 mortality data — the one month in which GDC's published report carried populated causes — records the cause as "Homicide due to Strangulation." Alonzo Carter, 77 at the time of the fight that killed him, died September 20, 2025.

The Wimbush Prosecution: A Bed Shortage Becomes a Life Sentence

The Wimbush case is the one where the criminal record and the medical record close on each other. The Gwinnett County Medical Examiner's report, case 23G-0533, classified the manner of death as homicide and listed the cause as blunt-force trauma with fracture of the right side of the thyroid cartilage; an autopsy was performed April 3, 2023, and Carol A. Terry, M.D., certified the report.

Edward Lominac was indicted May 14, 2025, in Gwinnett Superior Court, case 25-B-02421-1, on Count 1 felony murder and Count 2 aggravated assault. The indictment charged that Lominac caused Wimbush's death on April 2, 2023, by repeatedly kicking and stomping him. It was a special presentment, and Karen Wilbanks of the GDC Office of Investigations and Compliance was a grand-jury witness. Lominac pleaded guilty to Count 1 on October 7, 2025, before Judge George F. Hutchinson III, and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, with Count 2 merged.

What makes the case analytically load-bearing is the bed math around it. GPS's reporting describes accounts that, two days before the killing, the officer in charge of security at Phillips tried to move Wimbush to a safe placement and found there was nowhere to put him — that every segregation bed was full. GPS has received accounts from inside Phillips describing segregation beds full to the point that people without disciplinary infractions were held in lockdown beds for months for lack of space. Those accounts are consistent with the pattern GPS has documented system-wide: classification drift, where facilities hold populations their design and staffing were never built for.

Contested Deaths: What the Medical Examiner Found, and What It Did Not

The Gwinnett County Medical Examiner's production R281208-061826, received and OCR'd by GPS on June 26, 2026, is the single richest documentary source on Phillips deaths — and reading it end to end produces a picture less of clear answers than of gaps.

Several Phillips deaths were ruled homicides on autopsy: David Arthur Stone (21G-2035), Jamal Cymonne Johnson (22G-0988), Sidney Neally (22G-1169), Jacob Daniels (22G-1307), Quafabian Melik McBride (22G-1571), Arthur Wimbush (23G-0533), David E Fambro (24G-1319), Timothy Hurley (24G-1600), Mincey (24G-1781), Corey Madison Cochran (24G-2249), and Jody Stokes (25G-0099). Others were ruled suicide: Andrew Blayne Chandler's case 22G-1309, case 22G-1459, case 24G-0254, case 24G-0519, Nile Baptiste Young (24G-1750), Christopher Blake Hines (25G-0645), and case 25G-2007.

But a large share of the Phillips record consists of investigator reports only, because the Gwinnett Medical Examiner declined jurisdiction — and in those cases the production does not exclude that a GBI or other-agency autopsy was performed. That is the situation for Eugene Michael Henry (22G-0999), Larry W Mincey (23G-2277), Dwight Hamrick Timms (24G-0128), Ryan Matthew Willis (24G-1195), William Pate (25G-0106), Shun Pinkston (25G-0138), Thomas Nicely (25G-0186), Ricky Ray Breedlove (25G-0325), Harry Ray Taldon (25G-0430), Taron Edmonds (25G-0700), John Dean Tolbert (25G-0947), Willie Roseborough (26G-0094), and John Carlysle Neale (24G-0423), among others. In several of these the record shows a natural manner of death with no autopsy by the county.

The Sheffield case shows how much can sit inside a "natural" finding. David Gregory Sheffield, 64, was found lifeless in his cell at Phillips on July 20, 2024. GDC Special Agent Karen Wilbanks was the lead agent; she told the ME investigator that Sheffield possibly choked while eating a sandwich, that he had been assaulted approximately one month before his death, that he had refused his prescribed hypertension medication for about two months, and that he had mental-health issues. By the time the investigator arrived, Sheffield had been moved to a prison medical cell and lay on a stretcher in a dirt-soiled tan uniform with a piece of bologna on his lower abdomen. The cause was certified as hypertensive cardiovascular disease, manner natural, by Carol A. Terry, M.D., case 24G-1293 — a limited dissection performed July 23, 2024, not a full autopsy. GDC Special Agent Robert Raymond had reported the death to the medical examiner.

The Carter case shows the opposite: a death initially recorded as Unknown/Pending, amended on August 26, 2026, to homicide. Carter, then 77, was involved in a fist fight with another incarcerated man at Phillips on May 12, 2025; no weapons were involved, and the other man reportedly said he was defending himself. Carter had blood coming from his ear and face, was taken by Gwinnett County Fire and Emergency Services to Northeast Medical Center Gainesville for a traumatic brain injury, and was transferred May 29 to Select Specialty Hospital-Midtown Atlanta, where he remained in a vegetative state, bedridden, tracheostomised, and tube-fed until he died. The ME recorded the injury-to-death interval as 4 months 10 days and certified complications of blunt-force head trauma, including pneumonia of the upper right lung lobe, as the cause, manner homicide, case 25G-1850. The report records both "Scene investigated by Law Enforcement: No" and "Scene investigated by ME/C: No."

The Burge case is the one where the record's own narrative is thinnest. Cornelius Burge, 42, was housed in the Mental Health Unit at Phillips. He was observed lying in his bed during a 3 a.m. bed check and found unresponsive in bed at 5 a.m.; he had a cellmate and was taken to the medical infirmary and pronounced dead there. The ME narrative reports no other medical conditions for him. The cause was certified as probable cardiac dysrhythmia due to concentric left ventricular hypertrophy, manner natural, with schizoaffective disorder listed as another significant condition, case 26G-0270, certified by Carol A. Terry, M.D. The ME records the date of death as February 11, 2026 (Found) — the date he was discovered, not necessarily the date he died.

The Documentary Gap: Toxicology Without a Determination

A recurring feature of the Phillips record is that the state's own investigative production does not contain the finding. GBI Division of Forensic Sciences responses to open-records requests were closed on July 26, 2026, with status "testing incomplete," with refiling advised after approximately November 24 — the agency stating that reports and/or scientific testing were incomplete and expected within 120 days. In multiple Phillips cases the GBI production contained only a postmortem toxicology report: no medical examiner cause or manner of death, no autopsy report, no investigator narrative.

The toxicology itself is often striking. DOFS report 2022-1023327, dated October 17, 2022, was positive for methamphetamine at 4.2 mg/L, amphetamine at approximately 0.36 mg/L, diphenhydramine at 0.32 mg/L, and haloperidol below the lowest calibrator, and negative for barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cannabinoids, cocaine and metabolites, and common opioids. DOFS report 2022-1025952, dated October 27, 2022, was positive for methamphetamine at 0.65 mg/L with amphetamine below the lowest calibrator. DOFS report 2024-1004657, dated March 26, 2024, was positive for methamphetamine at 0.26 mg/L and amphetamine at 44 ug/L. DOFS report 2024-1008003, dated May 22, 2024, was positive for mirtazapine below the lowest calibrator and negative for the rest. DOFS report 2025-1035924, dated January 7, 2026, was positive for warfarin and negative for cannabinoids, amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, opioids, and cocaine.

The pattern matters because it is the mechanism by which a death can be recorded as natural in one document and as something else in another. GPS's own analysis of its registry against the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project's custodial mortality dataset — GDC's own cause coding obtained by open records request, covering 2015-2021 — found agreement on cause of death about 84.5 percent of the time across roughly 200 records, with most disagreements arising where GPS coding was more specific than GDC's "Undetermined" classification. GPS's position is that a medical examiner, coroner, or autopsy determination, where obtained, supersedes GDC's coding.

The Federal Findings and the PREA Paradox

A DOJ investigation in October 2024 cited Eighth Amendment violations at Phillips State Prison. That finding sits inside the broader CRIPA conclusion GPS has documented system-wide: that GDC leadership "has lost control of its facilities," that sexual assault is "rampant," and that the Department placed "too much blame on gangs and insufficient emphasis on understaffing." GPS treats infrastructure collapse and staffing collapse as force multipliers for the violence pattern — and Phillips, with a design capacity of 600 now rated for 918, is a facility where that arithmetic is visible in the plant itself.

Against that backdrop, the paper record at Phillips reads strangely clean. Phillips passed a federal sexual-abuse audit with zero standards failed in February 2018. The audit was conducted by Robert Lanier of Diversified Correctional Services, LLC; the site visit was February 5, 2018, and the report is dated April 5, 2018, running 145 pages. Of 45 PREA standards assessed, 40 met the standard and 5 exceeded it. The audit certified compliance with §115.41 (screening for risk of sexual victimization), §115.42 (using screening information for housing and program assignments), §115.62 (the duty to protect prisoners at substantial risk of imminent sexual abuse), and §115.67 (monitoring for retaliation after a sexual abuse report). Cedric Taylor was warden at the time; Rhonda Billings, Deputy Warden of Care & Treatment, was the Facility PREA Compliance Manager; Grace Atchison was the statewide PREA Coordinator; Timothy C. Ward was GDC Chief of Staff. The audit report records GDC's policy that offenders with nonconsensual sexual contact will be strongly disciplined and referred for criminal prosecution, and that employees who engage in sexual misconduct will be terminated and referred for criminal prosecution.

GPS has received accounts from inside Phillips alleging that the screening system certified under §115.42 was, in practice, for sale — that people were moved from mental-health classification to general population after payment — and accounts alleging retaliation against a person who tried to protect another. Those are allegations, not findings, and they sit against a clean audit. The contradiction is the analytical point: a zero-failure audit and a DOJ finding of rampant sexual assault cannot both describe the same facility at the same time without one of them measuring the wrong thing.

Staffing, Contraband, and the Corruption Record

Phillips has a documented corruption history. The AJC has associated the facility with Operation Ghost Guard, and the facility record notes federal prosecutions over officers trafficking contraband and drugs. GDC's own published contraband reports — arrests as reported, not convictions — record a staff-class arrest at Phillips in 2019 and another in 2026, one involving an actor printed as "Officer" and one as "Correctional Officer." GDC publishes no dispositions.

The staffing picture is thinner in the public record than the violence record warrants. Centurion's proposed staffing matrix for Phillips totals 1,244 weekly hours (31.10 FTE) across day, evening, and night shifts, including a Medical Director at 24 weekly hours (0.60 FTE), a Director of Nursing at 40 (1.00), a Health Services Administrator at 40 (1.00), NP/PA at 80 (2.00), a Medical Records Clerk at 40 (1.00), CNA at 168 (4.20), LPN at 208 (5.20), and RN at 112 (2.80). Separately, MHM Amendment 5's staffing matrix assigns 26.25 total FTE to Phillips, and MHM Amendment 7 lists a total dental staffing allocation of 26.25 FTE. GDC's own report lists Phillips with an institution capacity of 928 — a figure that differs from the 918 rated capacity in GPS's facility record.

On the security side, the public record is largely silent. GPS staff have acknowledged a current gap in firsthand source intelligence coverage at Phillips — a gap that matters given how much of what is known about the facility comes from medical-examiner productions and court filings rather than from inside.

Infrastructure, Technology, and the Cost of Both

Purchase order 607029, dated June 30, 2023, totals $401,871.00 and is associated with Phillips State Prison; the item purchased is described as "Phillips SP Drone Detection Deployment and Software Subscription," quantity 1.0000 EA. That is a facility spending roughly $400,000 on aerial contraband detection while its medical examiner production shows deaths ruled natural without autopsy and homicides certified months after the fact.

The infrastructure pattern GPS has documented system-wide — facilities 30 to 40-plus years old, deferred maintenance producing broken locks, inoperative surveillance, mold and water failures, broken kitchen equipment, and pest infestations — is the frame in which Phillips's own plant should be read. The facility opened in 1991 and has been rated well above its design capacity for years. GPS has received accounts from inside Phillips describing plumbing and fixture contracts that failed within days of installation, and describing a cellphone-containment system that created hotspots people fought over. Those accounts are consistent with the broader finding that infrastructure spending at GDC facilities frequently buys hardware that does not survive contact with the population it is meant to manage.

Accountability and the Current Command

The warden of Phillips State Prison is Aaron Thomas Pineiro, in the post since June 16, 2024. The deputies are Remona Annette Holloway (Deputy Warden of Administration, since November 1, 2025), Dorothy Andre (Deputy Warden of Security, since January 16, 2026), and Joshua Craig Fulbright (Deputy Warden of Security, since October 1, 2024). Cedric Taylor was warden at the time of the 2018 PREA audit; Ahmed Holt has also been identified in court records as a warden of the facility.

The state's liability record at Phillips includes settlements from the GA DOAS Risk Management ledger: $5,000 to Steven A. Whitt (2019 incident), $2,500 to Terry Allen (2018 incident), and $700,000 to Demitri Carter (2017 incident).

GPS records show four external complaints filed to the Georgia prison ombudsman in the twelve months through September 2026, with three of them concentrated in September. One family member wrote publicly on Facebook on September 23, 2026, that her son "was killed in Phillips State prison in 2017" and that "Nobody ever called me back or your wrote me" — her account of what happened after her son's death, not a GPS finding. Another man wrote on September 3, 2026, that during his own time at Phillips in 2024, a man set his cell on fire two days before his release date and it took officers 30 to 45 minutes to arrive and begin letting people out.

Sources

This analysis draws on GDC mortality data and published institutional records; Gwinnett County Coroner and GBI Medical Examiner reports produced under open records request R281208-061826 and received by GPS on June 26, 2026; GBI Division of Forensic Sciences postmortem toxicology reports; Gwinnett Superior Court filings in the Wimbush prosecution (case 25-B-02421-1); the GA DOAS Risk Management settlement ledger; the 2018 PREA audit report published by GDC; Centurion and MHM staffing matrices and GDC purchase-order records; homicide-tracking coverage by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; the DOJ's October 2024 CRIPA findings; GPS's own mortality registry and facility records; and accounts collected by GPS from people held at Phillips and their families.