Scott, Tracey

Tenure Summary

Tracey Scott entered Georgia Department of Corrections payroll in 2015 as a behavioral health counselor ($31,773.73 that year), moving through supervisory behavioral health roles and correctional officer ranks across 2016–2019. By 2020 Scott was serving as Deputy Warden at Calhoun State Prison, a post the salary records show held continuously through 2025, with additional single-date entries on Nov. 22, 2023 and Aug. 27, 2026. Prior non-leadership roles are recorded only as titles and dates; no incident data is attached to them here.

Per GPS's death-attribution records, 29 deaths are attributed to Scott's leadership tenure, all of them at Calhoun State Prison. No lawsuit naming Scott as a defendant appears in the available records. Two State of Georgia liability settlements tied to Calhoun incidents fall inside the deputy-warden period: a $3,250,000 payout to Reginald Jacobs Sr. for the estate of Reginald Jacobs Jr. (2023 incident) and a $1,400 payout to Lasharon Brantley (2020 incident), both listed in the GA DOAS Risk Management settlement ledger.

What happened on their watch

Calhoun State Prison — Deputy Warden, 2020 to 2026 (29 deaths attributed)

The deaths attributed to this tenure span April 2020 to May 2026 and include decedents aged 21 to 81 — among them Jack Swayne Turner (81, April 2020), DaQuavious Lackey (21, May 2022), Reginald Jerome Jacobs Jr. (24, February 2023), Martel Orlando Dorsey (32, November 2023), Kenneth Scott Piper (37, May 2024), Gonzalo Colmenero-Ayala (54, July 2024), and Freddie Lee Patterson (51, May 2026).

Several of the deaths named in the record set are documented homicides. Lackey, 21, died May 16, 2022 of a stab wound to the neck and multiple blunt force injuries; the AJC reported, citing the DOJ, that staff failed to follow procedures when moving Lackey's assailant between segregation and general population, leaving Lackey housed with and killed by his cellmate. Dorsey was stabbed by other prisoners and, per the AJC, GDC told a TV station that witnesses saw him chased from a dorm. Piper (2024) and Colmenero-Ayala (2024) were killed in inmate-to-inmate assaults, per incident report data.

A separate AJC-reported allegation describes a 24-year-old prisoner at Calhoun dying of dehydration with renal failure after staff cut off his food and water following an incident in which he threw water through his cell door flap — a claim the AJC attributes to its own reporting, not to a court finding. In another case, Willie Andrew Willis Jr. died after a reported balcony fall; medical records list sepsis as the cause of death, and the family alleges it took nearly an hour before he was airlifted.

Broader systemic findings at the facility, reported by the AJC during this tenure, include a contraband-phone economy that produced federal sentences for prisoners directing drug operations from inside Calhoun — Edwin Murillo (300 months; later life for directing a 2021 torture-murder), Irvin Falcon (260 months), Pedro Barragan Valencia (400 months), and Jonathan Alvin Pope (20 years). The AJC also reported that GDC deployed a Managed Access System across 34 state prisons in June 2025 at $50 million in capital cost (plus $15M+ annual operating), installed at Calhoun after a contraband-phone fraud operation and a wire-fraud scam targeting 119 victims across six states had already occurred.

Separately, the AJC's June 19, 2025 investigation found that GDC failed to submit drug evidence for testing in at least 11 Calhoun-related cases — about 23 cases and 33 arrests between 2018 and 2021 were dismissed by District Attorney Joe Mulholland, and five prison employees walked free. Two of those employees, officers Corlethia Lattimore and Imani Ferguson, were arrested in February 2020 after arriving for shifts with Hot Pockets packages alleged to contain methamphetamine and tobacco; charges were dismissed in July 2023 for lack of a crime lab or law enforcement report. On June 2, 2025, a grand jury heard 35 Calhoun-related cases while more than 300 remained pending.

Litigation

• No lawsuit naming Tracey Scott as a defendant appears in the available records.
• GDC settlement — Reginald Jacobs Sr., for the Estate of Reginald Jacobs Jr. (Calhoun State Prison, 2023 incident): $3,250,000 state liability payout, per the GA DOAS Risk Management settlement ledger.
• GDC settlement — Lasharon Brantley (Calhoun State Prison, 2020 incident): $1,400 state liability payout, per the same ledger.

Sources

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — Calhoun homicide reporting and "Georgia prison homicides" list (Lackey, 2022; Dorsey, 2023; Piper and Colmenero-Ayala, 2024); DOJ findings on Lackey's housing transfer
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — "Smuggling cases at Georgia prison fizzle; drugs were never tested," June 19, 2025 (dismissed cases, Hot Pockets arrests, grand jury caseload)
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — "Locked up but not stopped: Georgia prisoners run drug trafficking networks," Sept. 5, 2024 (Murillo, Falcon, Valencia, Pope)
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — reporting on prisoner death from dehydration/renal failure at Calhoun
• U.S. Department of Justice investigation findings on Georgia prison conditions, as reported by the AJC
• Georgia DOAS Risk Management settlement ledger (Open Records) — Jacobs and Brantley payouts

Synthesized by GPS Intelligence System on Sep 23, 2026 from positions, attributed deaths, lawsuits, intel reports, and news mentions in the public corpus. The supporting data tables follow below.