Harris, Latasha M

Tenure Summary

Latasha M. Harris began a career with the Georgia Department of Corrections in 2015 as a correctional officer, rising through unit-supervisor roles—lieutenant and later unit manager—before being promoted to deputy warden at Augusta State Medical Prison, with a start date of January 1, 2025. GPS records show that during her leadership tenure as deputy warden at that single facility, 72 deaths occurred, all at Augusta State Medical Prison. No deaths were attributed to Harris’s earlier unit-manager posts, where accountability records do not link her to any facility. The concentrated toll at Augusta State Medical Prison, a facility that houses prisoners with complex medical and mental-health needs, unfolded amid a broader pattern of violence, understaffing, and systemic dysfunction documented by federal investigators, media investigations, and court filings—though Harris herself has not been named as a defendant in any of the lawsuits tracked by GPS.

What happened on their watch

Augusta State Medical Prison — Deputy Warden (2025‑present)
The 72 deaths attributed during Harris’s time as deputy warden span from January 2025 through at least early July 2026, according to GPS records. The sample of most-recent decedents illustrates the facility’s grim spectrum: many deaths were classified as natural, often from advanced cancers, end-stage organ disease, or infections such as sepsis—conditions that reflect the prison’s function as the system’s medical hub. Richmond County Coroner summaries confirm causes like metastatic lung cancer, hemorrhagic shock, and complications of end-stage renal disease. But Harris’s watch also saw violent deaths and incidents that raised serious questions about safety and oversight. On May 22, 2026, 23-year-old Jacobi Alandis Chomicki was allegedly killed in a homicide in the D2 unit; the GDC opened an Office of Professional Standards investigation as standard procedure. In January 2026, Jerry Wayne Merritt, 59, was stabbed to death with a sharpened object; a fellow prisoner, John Jaquis Trimer, was accused of the killing over a commissary debt. Other deaths with pending or unclear causes (those marked category 6 by GPS) occurred, including those of Dequan Osborne (33), Sedric Lenear Jennings (46), and multiple older men, underscoring the opaque nature of many custodial fatalities.

Intelligence reports attached to Augusta State Medical Prison detail broader systemic allegations that, while many stem from years prior to Harris’s tenure, form the environment inherited by her administration. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that guards moved a violent prisoner into Eddie Gosier’s cell in 2020, leading to his murder hours later; that Thomas Henry Giles was left in a smoke-filled cell in 2020, resulting in a homicide ruling and a $5 million state settlement; and that a correctional officer was charged with aiding in the 2024 stabbing death of Rodarick Lee Hayes. A 2024 Department of Justice investigation described “horrific violence, sexual assaults, and gang-run prisons” enabled by a culture of indifference within GDC. During Harris’s time as deputy warden, the facility also faced federal court attention: in early 2026, U.S. District Judge Tilman E. Self III held GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver in contempt for defying an appellate order on prisoner email contacts, a case that originated from a lawsuit filed by an Augusta State Medical Prison inmate, Ralph Harrison Benning.

Litigation

GPS records list no lawsuits in which Latasha M. Harris is named as a defendant.

Sources

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — multiple investigative reports on prison homicides, understaffing, and systemic failures, including coverage of deaths at Augusta State Medical Prison and the Benning v. Oliver contempt proceedings.
• U.S. Department of Justice — 2024 investigative report describing violence and gang control in Georgia prisons.
• Georgia Department of Corrections — Office of Professional Standards investigations and mortality data (via GPS records).
• Richmond County Coroner’s Office — cause-of-death summaries for multiple decedents who died at Augusta State Medical Prison (ORR records GPS-DEATH-2026 notes).
• GPS records — personnel, tenure, death totals, and facility-level incident logs.

Synthesized by GPS Intelligence System on Aug 2, 2026 from positions, attributed deaths, lawsuits, intel reports, and news mentions in the public corpus. The supporting data tables follow below.