Nash, Torika R

Tenure Summary

Torika R. Nash spent nearly two decades inside the Georgia Department of Corrections in behavioral health, beginning in 2006 as a Behavioral Health Counselor II at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison. Between 2015 and 2024 she held a series of counselor and supervising counselor posts — with salaries rising from $31,798.56 in 2015 to $66,532.45 in 2024 — before moving into facility leadership as Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment at the Special Management Unit on October 16, 2024. Records also list her as DEPUTY WARDEN at the Special Management Unit for 2025, and show subsequent Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment and Deputy Warden entries at the same facility dated 2026. Her personnel status is listed as active.

Four deaths are attributed to her leadership tenure, all of them at the Special Management Unit. No lawsuit names Nash as a defendant. The deaths are recorded in GPS's death registry with the cause listed as Unknown/Pending for each — GPS does not yet know the cause in any of the four cases.

What happened on their watch

Special Management Unit — Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment (from October 16, 2024) and Deputy Warden (2025)

Four men died at the Special Management Unit during Nash's leadership there:

• Emilio Christopher Canales died October 22, 2024, at the Special Management Unit; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending.
• Lashon Boddie died September 2, 2025, at the Special Management Unit; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending.
• Michael Ogletree died October 31, 2025, at the Special Management Unit; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending.
• Antony Ramon Penick died May 30, 2026, at the Special Management Unit; GPS's registry lists the cause as Unknown/Pending.

Canales's death was recorded six days after Nash began as Deputy Warden of Care and Treatment; the other three occurred while she held the Deputy Warden role or the Care and Treatment role per the registry's own role-at-time entries.

Her tenure overlapped a period of sustained investigative scrutiny of the Special Management Unit and of GDC. Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting dated January 2025 alleged that GDC defendants ran a stalling strategy to avoid complying with a court injunction over conditions at the Special Management Unit, "thumbing their noses" at a 2019 settlement, and that the agency presented false or misleading information to federal investigators, lawmakers and a federal judge. The AJC also reported that U.S. District Judge Marc T. Treadwell held the GDC in contempt over the Special Management Unit settlement, and that GDC falsified and backdated prisoner review forms to make required hearings appear timely — allegations the newspaper directed at the agency and its officials, not at Nash individually.

Other AJC-reported allegations from the same period include: that GDC failed to check on Ricardo Daughtry for nearly seven hours before his body was found, despite a 15-to-30-minute check policy, and that records showed him at "table time," recreation and the book cart after he had been pronounced dead; that GDC stopped publishing preliminary cause of death in monthly mortality reports in March 2024; that consultants retained by GDC reviewed 388 PREA investigative files in May 2022 and found none met Prison Rape Elimination Act standards; that GDC obstructed DOJ investigators; and that Ahmed Holt swore under oath that prisoners were receiving required out-of-cell time and programming that evidence contradicted. A U.S. Department of Justice report described conditions in Georgia's prisons as inhumane, with people assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed in understaffed facilities, per AJC coverage.

Records for the facility during her tenure also note an incident in which warden Jose Morales discovered the contraband cellphone Arthur Lee Cofield Jr. used to steal $11 million, a 2025 reference to Jason Palmer's wrongful murder conviction, the settlement of Timothy Gunn's lawsuit over five years in solitary confinement, Governor Brian Kemp's proposal of $600 million in additional prison funding, and legislative study efforts by House Speaker Jon Burns and the state Senate.

Sources

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — investigations reporting dated January 21, 2025 on GDC contempt, PREA failures, mortality-report changes and the Daughtry case
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — editorial coverage dated January 10, 2025 on the DOJ findings, the Special Management Unit settlement and the Timothy Gunn settlement
• GPS death registry — four deaths at the Special Management Unit with cause listed as Unknown/Pending
• Court records referenced in that coverage — the 2019 Special Management Unit settlement and U.S. District Judge Marc T. Treadwell's contempt order against GDC

Synthesized by GPS Intelligence System on Oct 11, 2026 from positions, attributed deaths, lawsuits, intel reports, and news mentions in the public corpus. The supporting data tables follow below.