Gardner, Rodney

Tenure Summary

Rodney Gardner began employment with the Georgia Department of Corrections in 2015 as a correctional officer and rose through the ranks over a decade, holding sergeant, lieutenant, and unit manager posts before being promoted to Deputy Warden at Baldwin State Prison in January 2024. GPS records indicate he remained in that facility‑leadership role at least through the early months of 2026. During Gardner’s tenure as Deputy Warden, 25 deaths were attributed to Baldwin State Prison — a total that encompasses multiple homicides and a series of deaths from medical causes, some of which drew allegations of neglect, excessive force, and staffing‑driven failures. While he was not personally accused in any of the incident reports, his watch coincided with a period of intense public scrutiny over violence, contraband smuggling, and unconstitutional conditions in the state prison system, including an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice investigation launched in 2021.

What happened on their watch

Gardner’s only leadership‑tier post is Deputy Warden at Baldwin State Prison, a facility that had already experienced a string of violent deaths and staff misconduct investigations before he arrived. Between January 2024 and April 2026, GPS records link 25 incarcerated people’s deaths to his tenure. The decedents ranged in age from 23 to 87, and the causes fall into two broad categories: homicides and medical events — though some deaths officially coded as medical later generated allegations of deliberate indifference.

At least seven deaths appear to be homicides. Isaac Evan Robinson (41) died on January 2, 2026, in a protective‑custody unit; a social‑media account attributed to a former inmate asserted that officers routinely dragged people back to their buildings while wardens looked on. Henry Finley died on January 19, 2025, from multiple puncture wounds, a death the death certificate lists as a homicide. Vincent Reshad Dyer (50) was stabbed to death on August 21, 2024, during an incident that the facility’s own incident report describes as a homicide and fight. Ricky Mathis died on April 5, 2026; the GDC reported no signs of an altercation, but the agency’s Office of Professional Standards and the GBI opened investigations. Two other deaths in the same period carry assault‑related cause codes, and the most recent, that of John Doe in February 2026, remains under review.

The remaining deaths were attributed to illness, yet several attracted allegations of medical neglect. The most prominent involves Al Mir Harris, a 23‑year‑old autistic man with Type 1 diabetes who died on December 31, 2024, from diabetic ketoacidosis; multiple incident records assert that Harris was denied essential medical care. Other individuals — ranging from 49‑year‑old Michael Jerome Brown to 87‑year‑old Douglas Jerome Salter — died from conditions such as metastatic cancer or heart disease while in custody.

Broader systemic patterns documented by the Atlanta Journal‑Constitution and other sources permeated Gardner’s tenure. A federal indictment in 2023 charged 23 members and associates of the Sex Money Murder gang — including three former Baldwin correctional officers — with murders, assaults, and drug trafficking that prosecutors said operated for more than a decade inside and outside Georgia prisons. In March 2025, inmate Akeim Burgest filed a lawsuit alleging that an officer threw a water bottle at him and later stabbed him with a shank while a lieutenant stood by; a federal judge ordered the preservation of all related evidence. Earlier, Lieutenant Tracey Wise admitted smuggling K‑2‑laced papers into Baldwin for an inmate and received probation. The AJC also reported that at least 360 Georgia prison employees had been arrested since 2018 for bringing contraband into facilities, a practice advocates said fueled violence, and protests outside the Governor’s Mansion in October 2023 decried understaffing and medical neglect across the system. The Department of Justice’s civil‑rights investigation into Georgia prisons, announced in 2021, remained open during Gardner’s watch.

Litigation

GPS records list four civil cases in which Gardner appears as a named defendant. Only one is clearly tied to his employment:

• Blackwell v. Gardner (No. 5:19‑cv‑00002, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, filed Jan. 2, 2019, terminated Mar. 31, 2020) — filed when Gardner held the rank of correctional lieutenant; no settlement amount is recorded.
• Dickerson v. Biden (No. 1:24‑cv‑04457, N.D. Ga., filed Oct. 1, 2024, terminated Mar. 14, 2025) — a suit against multiple officials that did not arise from prison conditions.
• In Re Equifax Inc. Customer Data Security Breach Litigation (No. 1:17‑md‑02800, N.D. Ga., filed Dec. 6, 2017, terminated Apr. 13, 2022) — a multidistrict data‑breach matter.
• Lewis v. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (No. 1:14‑cv‑03838, N.D. Ga., filed Dec. 2, 2014, terminated Aug. 11, 2015) — a pension‑related case.

Sources

• GPS death and personnel records — tenure timeline, count of 25 deaths attributed to Baldwin State Prison during Gardner’s deputy‑warden role
• Atlanta Journal‑Constitution — multiple investigative reports on Georgia prison violence, contraband arrests, gang prosecutions, and the 2021 DOJ investigation; homicide lists including deaths at Baldwin
• 13WMAZ — report on the officer‑shanking allegation and subsequent federal court order
• CourtListener / PACER — docket entries for Blackwell v. Gardner, Dickerson v. Biden, In Re Equifax, and Lewis v. PBGC

Synthesized by GPS Intelligence System on May 31, 2026 from positions, attributed deaths, lawsuits, intel reports, and news mentions in the public corpus. The supporting data tables follow below.