# Five Hours in a Shower Stall > Georgia's own death investigators recorded what happened to four men at Washington State Prison. A man locked alone in a shower stall to cool down. A cell unchecked for fourteen hours. A tray at 10:19 nobody rose for. In each case the response to a medical crisis was a placement, not treatment. **Published**: 2026-08-09 **Source**: https://gps.press/five-hours-in-a-shower-stall/ **Author**: Justice Reed --- At six o'clock on the morning of January 5, 2022, someone at Washington State Prison noticed that David Terry Melton was hot and did not seem right. He was twenty-five years old. He appeared to be under the influence of something. What happened next is recorded in the State of Georgia's own death investigation. Officers took him out of his housing unit and walked him to another building. They put him in a shower stall, under running water, so that he could cool down. Then they closed the door, locked it, and left. A guard came back at nine and found him awake and able to talk. The next documented check was at half past eleven. By then Melton had used his pants as a ligature, tied one leg around his neck and the other to the showerhead, and was hanging with his feet still touching the floor. That account does not come from a grieving family, an incarcerated witness, or Georgia Prisoners' Speak. It comes from a Record of Medical Examiner written by a Death Investigation Specialist for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, obtained by GPS through an open records request. The state investigated this death and wrote down what it found. This is what it wrote. ## The Stall The passage is worth reading in the investigator's own words, misspelling and all. > "On 1/5/2022 at approximately 0600 hours, while the decedent was in a general population someone noticed that he was hot and apparently under the influence of some type of drugs. The guards removed him from general papulation and transported him to another building where they placed him in a shower stall under the water so that he can cool down. They locked the door and left him alone in the shower stall." Read that as a clinical decision and it collapses immediately. A person showing signs of acute stimulant intoxication is a person at risk of hyperthermia, cardiac arrhythmia, seizure, and psychosis. The response the record describes — cold water, a locked door, an empty room — is not a treatment. It is a holding measure. Toxicology later confirmed methamphetamine in his blood at 0.54 mg/L, along with amphetamine, which means the observation that triggered the placement was correct. Staff identified a man in a drug emergency and responded by putting him somewhere. Two things the record does not say deserve stating plainly, because the temptation to fill them in is strong and the discipline of not doing so is what makes the rest of this credible. The report never says how long he was in the stall. He entered around six and was found around half past eleven; five and a half hours is arithmetic performed by GPS on the clock times in the document, not a figure the state asserted. The report also never says who decided. Across the entire narrative the actor is "the guards" — a collective noun with no rank, no name, and no supervisor attached. No medical staff member appears anywhere in the sequence. No shift commander signs off. The document names a warden, but only as the officer in charge of the subsequent investigation, which is a different thing entirely and must not be confused with it. Whoever made the call to lock a visibly intoxicated man in a shower alone, the State of Georgia's own investigation did not record their name. There is one more absence. The GBI investigator asked whether cameras covered the area, and was told the coroner would check with the warden. No answer to that question appears anywhere in the file. Melton's death was certified by Associate Medical Examiner Steven P. Atkinson as ligature hanging, manner suicide. The autopsy, performed three days later, noted something quietly odd: a layered dissection of the neck found no soft tissue hemorrhage, and the hyoid bone was intact. The ligature was never sent to the morgue with the body. ## More Than Fourteen Hours Eighteen months later, in June 2023, Jimmy Lee Rucker died in a single cell at the same prison, and the state's investigation records a longer version of the same silence. Rucker was fifty-three. Two days before his death he had already been through this once: > "On Sunday, 06/18/2023 the decedent also appeared to have gotten high from some kind of substance. His reaction resulted in him being detained and put in a cell." No medical evaluation is described. No policy basis is given. No one is named. The institution's answer to a man visibly intoxicated was custody, and the record contains no indication that anything else was considered. He was last seen alive by staff at 6:45 on the evening of June 19, during rounds. What the men in the neighboring cells heard that night reached the investigator secondhand, through the coroner, and should be weighed accordingly: > "The inmates next to the decedent heard the decedent being loud between 0000-0200 hours on 06/20/2023. To the inmates nearby, the decedent seemed to be hallucinating. It appeared to them like he was under the influence of something or intoxicated with some kind of substance." He was found the following morning at 9:25. Not by an officer on rounds — by a physician doing routine patient checks who noticed the man in the cell was not responding to anything said to him from outside the door. Between 6:45 in the evening and 9:25 the next morning, more than fourteen hours, the state's death investigation records no round, no check, no observation of any kind. That gap is not GPS's inference. It is the shape of the document. What the report says about the response is unambiguous, and unlike Melton's case it is not a matter of silence: > "EMS was not contacted, and no resuscitative measures were performed." > "The decedent was found lying supine in his cell. There were no injuries noted. Rigor-mortis and lividity were both present. Lividity was consistent with how the decedent was found. The decedent was cool to the touch." Rigor, fixed lividity, and a cool body mean he had been dead for hours before anyone opened the door. The cause was certified as the toxic effects of methamphetamine, manner accident. His family did not learn that officially for a very long time. The report was not signed out until April 30, 2024 — three hundred and fifteen days after he died. ## The Tray at 10:19 Garrett Lee Bailey died at Washington State Prison on June 12, 2023, eight days before Rucker. He was thirty-nine, and of the four men in this account he was the one the institution had the most documented reason to watch. He was in a single cell precisely because of that. The investigator's narrative is specific: > "He was confined to the single-cell due to his mental status and a suicide attempt from two weeks prior to his death where he held a makeshift blade to his neck and threatened to take his life. He had been evaluated, released back into general population, then stated he felt unstable and requested solitary confinement." That is a man who tried to kill himself, was assessed, was returned to a dormitory, went back to staff to say he did not feel safe with himself, and asked to be locked away. Then the record adds a second warning, attributed to the Department of Corrections' own investigator: > "According to the DOC Investigator, the decedent had to be revived with Naloxone a week ago." A suicide attempt two weeks out. An overdose reversed with naloxone one week out. A self-reported statement that he felt unstable. Whatever else can be said about the events of June 12, no one can say the institution lacked notice. Meal trays were delivered at 10:19 that morning. What follows is the single most damning sentence GPS has recovered from any of these files, and it is entirely matter-of-fact: > "He did not get up to get the tray, but was seen breathing and known to be alive at the time." Someone looked into the cell of a man on de facto suicide and overdose watch, saw that he did not rise for his food, observed that he was still breathing, and moved on. The next tray came at 4:02 in the afternoon. He was unresponsive. Medical staff found no pulse, and he was already in rigor with lividity beginning to set. Five hours and forty-three minutes passed between the two observations. The certified cause was methamphetamine toxicity at 6.6 mg/L — an extraordinarily high concentration — with the manner ruled accident. The investigator noted, almost in passing, that there were no signs of drug use in the cell. ## Four Days, Unrecorded Johntavis Kellom was thirty-six when he died on May 2, 2024. He is filed by the GBI under the spelling "Jontavious," though three of the four identification tags the prison itself attached to his body read "Johntavis." The state could not consistently spell the name of a man in its custody, and the discrepancy is documented in the autopsy report itself. The case brief summarizes his death in a single line: an inmate with limited medical history, in respiratory distress for four days before he died. The narrative expands it slightly: > "He had been complaining of respiratory illness since Monday, 4/29/2024, with complaints of cold and flu type symptoms (cough, shortness of breath, respiratory distress), and it progressively worsened over the days prior to his death. On the evening of 5/2/2024, at 1830 hours, EMS was contacted, and the decedent was transported to Washington CO. Regional Medical Center due to the worsening of his symptoms." He arrived at 6:36 and was pronounced at 7:24. Here GPS must be careful, and the care is the point. For the four days between April 29 and the ambulance call on May 2, the state's death investigation contains nothing. No clock times. No sick-call requests. No nursing encounters. No vital signs. No account of what any staff member saw or did. There is one sentence — that his symptoms progressively worsened — sourced to the deputy coroner rather than to any medical record. That is not proof that Kellom was ignored. Two details point the other way: he had been prescribed amoxicillin, and he was known to use an inhaler, which means some clinical contact occurred at some point. GPS cannot say from this record that the prison let him deteriorate untreated, and does not say it. What GPS can say is this. A man in a state prison told staff he could not breathe properly, got worse for four days, and died within an hour of finally reaching a hospital — and when the State of Georgia investigated that death, it did not write down a single thing about what the prison did during those four days. The medical examiner certified the cause as methamphetamine intoxication "in the setting of respiratory illness and cardiomegaly," making the illness contributing context rather than the cause. Testing for viral respiratory pathogens came back negative for any organism that would explain the pneumonia found at autopsy. The four days are a hole in the record. Holes in records are not neutral. They are decisions about what was worth asking. ## The Investigations That Were Not Conducted Read across all four files and a second pattern emerges, one that has nothing to do with medicine. For Melton, the medical examiner recorded that the findings were discussed with a named GDC agent, and that "their investigation considers this death a suicide with no suspicions of foul play." The question about camera coverage of the shower area was raised and never resolved in the file. For Rucker, the investigator wrote that "a law enforcement agency will be assigned to the case, but it was not provided at this time. A case number was not provided either." No assignment ever appears. The field for the investigating officer contains a clerical notation about evidence return rather than a person's name. Scene photographs and possible video were requested. Nothing further appears. For Kellom, the fields for investigating agency, incident number, and officer are all blank, and the narrative states the position outright: > "Law enforcement is not involved in this case. Foul play is not suspected." A thirty-six-year-old man died after four days of respiratory distress in state custody and no investigator was assigned to ask why. The certification timelines tell a related story. Melton's report was completed seventy-one days after his death. Kellom's, eighty-four. Rucker's took three hundred and fifteen. For most of a year, the official record of how a man died in the custody of the State of Georgia simply did not exist in finished form. ## What the Constitution Actually Requires The legal standard governing medical care in American prisons is not perfection, and it is not even competence. Since 1976 the Supreme Court has held that deliberate indifference to a prisoner's serious medical needs violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment ((Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97 (1976), [https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/429/97/](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/429/97/) )). The test has two halves: a serious medical need, and officials who knew of a substantial risk and disregarded it. Nothing in these four files establishes what any individual officer subjectively knew. That is a matter for litigation, and GPS is not a court. What the files do establish is the objective half with unusual clarity. In three of the four deaths, staff observed the crisis before the man died. Melton was identified as hot and intoxicated. Rucker had been detained for intoxication two days earlier and was audible in distress overnight. Bailey was seen failing to rise for his food after a suicide attempt and a naloxone reversal. In every one of those cases, the intervention the state's own investigators recorded was a placement. A stall. A cell. A wait. In October 2024 the Department of Justice concluded a three-year investigation and found reasonable cause to believe Georgia violates the Eighth Amendment, describing the state as deliberately indifferent to unsafe conditions it had known about for years ((U.S. Department of Justice, Investigation of Georgia Prisons findings report, October 2024, [https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf](https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/findings_report_-_investigation_of_georgia_prisons.pdf) )). Washington State Prison is among the facilities that drew federal attention. In November 2023, DOJ made a records request to GDC naming seven deaths at Washington State Prison. Garrett Bailey was one of the seven. ## What Cannot Be Known There is a reason GPS is reconstructing these deaths from forensic records obtained one open records request at a time rather than from any published state source. The Georgia Department of Corrections does not publish cause of death. Its monthly mortality reports confirm that a person died and nothing more. The GBI, meanwhile, declines to perform examinations in a substantial share of in-custody deaths, returning instead a records review concluding that "an examination by this office is not necessary." At Washington State Prison alone, GPS holds four such declinations — Brooks in 2022, Williamson and Kidd in 2023, Gresham in 2025 — where the county coroner has confirmed producing everything he holds and directed GPS to the GBI, and the GBI then declined to examine. Those deaths have no cause of death available from any official source in the State of Georgia. Four men at one prison were fortunate, in the narrowest possible sense, that someone looked at their bodies closely enough to write down what happened. The reason we can tell you about a shower stall, a tray at 10:19, and fourteen hours of silence is that these four deaths generated paper. Most do not. --- ## Call to Action: What You Can Do Awareness without action changes nothing. Here's how you can help push for accountability and real reform: **Join the GPS Advocacy Network** — Sign up at [https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/](https://gps.press/become-an-advocate/) and we'll advocate on your behalf every week. GPS identifies your state legislators, crafts personalized letters on the most pressing prison issues, and sends them directly to the representatives who represent you. You receive a copy of every letter. It takes two minutes to sign up — we handle the rest. **Send a 60-Second Message** — Pick an issue, get a ready-to-edit message with the verified facts already in it, and email your state House representative and senator directly from your own inbox at [https://gps.press/send-a-message/.](https://gps.press/send-a-message/.) No signup, nothing stored — it takes about a minute. **Tell My Story** — Are you or a loved one affected by Georgia's prison system? GPS publishes first-person accounts from incarcerated people and their families. Submit your story at [https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/](https://gps.press/category/tellmystory/) and help the world understand what's really happening behind the walls. **Contact Your Representatives** — Your state legislators control GDC's budget, oversight, and the laws that created these failures. Find your Georgia legislators at [https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/](https://gps.press/find-your-legislator/) or call Governor Kemp at (404) 656-1776 or the GDC Commissioner at (478) 992-5246. **Demand Media Coverage** — Contact newsrooms at the AJC, local TV stations, and national criminal justice outlets. More coverage means more pressure. **Amplify on Social Media** — Share this article and tag @GovKemp, @GDC_Georgia, and your local representatives. Use #GAPrisons, #PrisonReform, #GeorgiaPrisonerSpeak. **Message the Board of Corrections** — The citizen board that oversees the GDC publishes no contact details for its members. GPS built the missing front door: pick a board member and a policy message and send it from your own email at [https://gps.press/write-the-board/.](https://gps.press/write-the-board/.) **File Public Records Requests** — Georgia's Open Records Act gives every citizen the right to request incident reports, death records, staffing data, medical logs, and financial documents. Start with the GPS Action Toolkits at [https://gps.press/toolkits/](https://gps.press/toolkits/) — the Open Records Toolkit walks you through what to ask for, gives you ready-to-file request templates, and tells you what to do when the state says no. File directly with GDC at [https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.](https://georgiadcor.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/SupportHome.aspx.) **Attend Public Meetings** — The Georgia Board of Corrections and legislative committees hold public meetings. Your presence is noticed. **Contact the Department of Justice** — File civil rights complaints at [https://civilrights.justice.gov.](https://civilrights.justice.gov.) Federal oversight has forced abusive systems to change before. **Support Organizations Doing This Work** — Donate to or volunteer with Georgia-based prison reform groups fighting for change on the ground. **Vote** — Research candidates' positions on criminal justice. Primary elections often determine outcomes in Georgia. **Contact GPS** — If you have information about conditions inside Georgia's prisons, reach us securely at GPS.press. --- ## Further Reading **[The Empty Column: Georgia Won't Say How Prisoners Die](https://gps.press/the-empty-column-georgia-wont-say-how-prisoners-die/)** *How GDC stopped publishing cause of death, and what the resulting blank space conceals.* **[The State Called His Death Natural. Reginald Jacobs Died of Thirst in a Prison Cell.](https://gps.press/the-state-called-his-death-natural-reginald-jacobs-died-of-thirst-in-a-prison-cell/)** *A death classified as natural that forensic records described very differently.* **[A Toothache Should Not Be a Death Sentence: The Last Three Weeks of James Byrd](https://gps.press/a-toothache-should-not-be-a-death-sentence-the-last-three-weeks-of-james-byrd/)** *An untreated infection, a documented decline, and a preventable death in Georgia custody.* **[The Cure Exists: A 41-Year-Old Died of Hepatitis C in a Georgia Prison](https://gps.press/the-cure-exists-a-41-year-old-died-of-hepatitis-c-in-a-georgia-prison/)** *A curable disease, a Washington State Prison death, and the treatment that never came.* **[At Least Nineteen: The Murders the State Didn't Prosecute](https://gps.press/at-least-nineteen-the-murders-the-state-didnt-prosecute/)** *What happens after a homicide in a Georgia prison when no one is charged.* **[Two Commanders Say Georgia Hides Its Prison Staffing Crisis](https://gps.press/two-commanders-say-georgia-hides-its-prison-staffing-crisis/)** *Former GDC supervisors on the vacancy rates behind unwatched cells and missed rounds.* --- ## GPS Intelligence System The GPS Intelligence System maintains living research profiles that aggregate data, news, settlements, and analysis on Georgia's prisons and the issues defining them. The profiles below provide deeper context for the issues raised in this article: **[Washington State Prison](https://gps.press/intelligence/facility/washington-state-prison/)** *The full record for the Davisboro facility where all four of these deaths occurred, including mortality data, incidents, and federal findings.* **[Medical Neglect](https://gps.press/intelligence/issue/medical-neglect/)** *Documented failures of medical response across the Georgia prison system, and the pattern these four deaths belong to.* --- ## Explore the Data GPS makes GDC statistics accessible to the public through several resources: - **[GPS Statistics Portal](https://gps.press/gdc-statistics/)** — Interactive dashboards translating complex GDC reports into accessible formats, updated within days of official releases. - **[GPS Lighthouse AI](https://gps.press/ask-ai/)** — Ask questions about Georgia's prison system and get answers drawn from GPS's investigative archive and data analysis. - **[GPS llms.txt](https://gps.press/llms.txt)** — A single machine-readable index of every GPS data resource, published using the open llms.txt standard. Point any AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) at this URL and the model can navigate to facility profiles, intelligence briefs, mortality records, statistics, and the full investigative archive — no other configuration needed. It is the fastest way to ground an AI conversation in verified GPS data. For a walkthrough of how to put these resources to work with AI, see **[How to Use GPS Data with AI Tools](https://gps.press/how-to-use-gps-data-with-ai-tools/)** — a step-by-step guide for researchers, advocates, families, and journalists analyzing Georgia prison conditions, statistics, and policy with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Contact GPS at media@gps.press for access to underlying datasets used in this analysis. --- ## About Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) Georgia Prisoners' Speak (GPS) is a nonprofit investigative newsroom built in partnership with incarcerated reporters, families, advocates, and data analysts. Operating independently from the Georgia Department of Corrections, GPS documents the truth the state refuses to acknowledge: extreme violence, fatal medical neglect, gang-controlled dorms, collapsed staffing, fraudulent reporting practices, and unconstitutional conditions across Georgia's prisons. Through confidential reporting channels, secure communication, evidence verification, public-records requests, legislative research, and professional investigative standards, GPS provides the transparency the system lacks. Our mission is to expose abuses, protect incarcerated people, support families, and push Georgia toward meaningful reform based on human rights, evidence, and public accountability. Every article is part of a larger fight — to end the silence, reveal the truth, and demand justice. ![GPS Footer](https://gps.press/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/GPS-Ad2.jpg) ---