Fraser, Yolande

Tenure Summary

What happened on their watch

The cause-of-death determinations, drawn from DeKalb County Medical Examiner autopsy reports and GDC’s own mortality coding, paint a grim picture of a population aging and dying behind bars: Bobby Gayton (81, coronary artery disease), Charlie Bowen (78, metastatic prostate cancer), Jerry McBride (73, cardiac arrest with COVID-19), and others fell into this pattern. But GPS records also surface troubling operational details. When Rebecca Harkins, a 56-year-old woman with end-stage liver cancer, died in November 2022, a medical examiner’s investigator noted facility staff were “uncooperative and could not account for last-known-alive time or next of kin.” That same month, Farrell Collins (43) died of an acute myocardial infarct; toxicology later detected trace fentanyl and lorazepam in his system, though the medical examiner did not deem them contributory, and jail records reportedly showed no known heart condition.

Three deaths in 2022 and 2023 — those of Terrence Taylor, James Marino, and Larry Fowler — are coded under a less-specific cause category (category 6), for which GPS currently lacks a detailed manner-of-death description. Together with the Collins case, they leave open questions about the adequacy of medical surveillance inside the facility. After Fraser departed Metro Reentry at the close of 2023, the facility continued to face scrutiny: in January 2026, an incarcerated man named Silas Westbrook died soon after arriving from another prison, and the GDC Office of Professional Standards opened an investigation. That incident, however, falls outside Fraser’s tenure.

Litigation

Sources

• GPS mortality records — 14 attributed deaths at Metro Reentry Facility, 2020‑2023
• DeKalb County Medical Examiner case files (nos. 20‑…, 21‑1956, 22‑0361, 22‑2102, 22‑2126, 22‑2446, 23‑0226, 23‑1865)
• UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project — GDC custodial mortality dataset (open‑records release) for 2015‑2021, used to supplement cause-of-death for several earlier cases
• GPS intelligence events — records of the 2026 Westbrook death and subsequent GDC investigation at Metro Reentry

Synthesized by GPS Intelligence System on Aug 9, 2026 from positions, attributed deaths, lawsuits, intel reports, and news mentions in the public corpus. The supporting data tables follow below.