North Texas Sheriff Running for Reelection Faces Grief and Anger Over Rising Jail Deaths 

They came to the podium one after another. One woman accused officials of supporting a “deadly culture” inside the Tarrant County jail after her brother, a 31-year-old former Marine with schizophrenia who had been turned away from a mental health facility and arrested the next day, was killed by jail guards. Another woman, whose 23-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose inside the jail six months after he entered the lockup, told officials that it was hard for families to speak about their losses, but that she wasn’t going anywhere. The sister of 35-year old Chasity Bonner, who died suddenly at the jail in May, said her family was still seeking basic information about her death more than four months later and couldn’t understand why they still hadn’t seen a full autopsy report; officials listed Bonner’s cause of death as “natural” due to a kind of heart disease, but her family has said she didn’t have a history of heart problems. 

Later in the meeting, LaMonica Bratton, the woman’s mother, walked up and placed a red urn with a silver rose on the podium before introducing herself to the Tarrant County commissioners seated in front of her: “I’m Ms. Bratton, Chasity Bonner’s mother.” Then she tapped the urn. “This is Chasity Bonner.”

“Because you are failing at your job, this is where my baby is,” she said.

The procession of grief and anger during the commission’s early October meeting speaks to the spike in deaths at the jail under Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, and the rising public pressure and outcry over jail conditions as he faces reelection in November. Since Waybourn took office in January 2017, at least 65 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody, compared to 25 jail deaths during the 8-year period that preceded him. Most of the people held in the jail are pre-trial, meaning they have never been convicted of their alleged crime.

As Waybourn faces increased scrutiny from local advocates, his office also appears to be flouting a state law requiring sheriffs to commission outside law enforcement investigations into all deaths in their jails. After Bolts filed a public records request for those investigations with the Fort Worth Police Department, which the sheriff’s office has listed as the agency looking into more than 20 jail deaths over the past three years, a police spokesperson said there were no responsive records. When asked about the discrepancy, the spokesperson wrote in an email, “I’m told that the Tarrant County Sheriff Department investigates those.”  

Waybourn, who did not respond to requests for an interview or questions for this story, has said his office is working on improvements and blamed the deaths on people entering custody who are already sick or intoxicated, calling his jail the “largest psychiatric hospital in Tarrant County.” 

In recent years, Tarrant County has paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits alleging horrific treatment of vulnerable people in Waybourn’s jail. One case, the largest settlement in the county’s history, involved a pregnant woman with a slew of mental health disorders who deteriorated in the jail for months until she became non-verbal, and eventually gave birth to her daughter alone inside her cell. The baby died ten days later. This fall, the county settled another case with the family of a woman with severe mental illness who died of apparent dehydration after five months in jail, one of three people with mental illness who died of thirst in the jail in recent years. Another lawsuit filed this year that’s still pending says an intellectually disabled woman with epilepsy was refused proper treatment and seized repeatedly in an unpadded cell during her week and a half in jail. According to the lawsuit, the woman left the jail covered in bruises and had to be hospitalized for weeks on a ventilator in the ICU. 

Advocates for better jail conditions in Tarrant County have long accused Waybourn, a Republican, of neglecting his core duties at home as he cultivated his celebrity status in far-right politics. Waybourn has expanded his office’s involvement in immigration enforcement and has testified in Congress about border security despite his county being hundreds of miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Last year he helped form an “election integrity task force” following pressure from North Texas election deniers to increase investigations of voter fraud—even though local election administrators had been lauded for running secure elections. 

“He came in here to make his base happy, to be a law and order sheriff, to put his foot down on ‘illegal aliens.’ And in so doing, he has wrought havoc on this community,” said Pamela Young, executive director of United Fort Worth, a group that has protested Waybourn and called for his ouster for years over the allegations of brutality and neglect at his jail. “He is a regular guest on conservative talk radio, podcasts, TV,” said Young, noting he headlined a Stop the Steal rally in the wake of the 2020 election, and posed for a photo with Kyle Rittenhouse at a fundraiser last year. “Instead of making sure that the people in his jail are safe, making sure that his jail is not overcrowded, making sure that people in the jail are not getting beat,” she said. 

Young is part of a group of local organizers, faith leaders and families of people who died at the jail who have held protests outside the lockup in recent years and flooded county commission meetings to demand intervention from other officials. In early June, a sister of Anthony Johnson Jr., the former marine who was pepper-sprayed and killed by guards in April, was kicked out of a commissioners meeting by the far-right county executive after she confronted elected officials during the public comment period. Later that month, two of Johnson’s jailers were indicted on murder charges, and 15 are now named in a lawsuit filed by his family. During a July commission meeting, a Baptist pastor in Fort Worth who often speaks out about jail deaths was also kicked out for going eight seconds over his allotted three minutes, and banned from attending for a year. (He successfully appealed and has since returned to commission meetings.)  

Advocates point to a pattern of people with mental illness being jailed instead of taken to a medical facility, and then facing neglect and brutality behind bars. In May, many showed up to a commission meeting to urge for the release of Kai’Yere Campbell, an intellectually and developmentally disabled 21-year-old who had been arrested from his group home and spent six months in jail despite being deemed incompetent to stand trial. “Here is a laboratory demonstration of how people with mental health issues die in our jail,” one speaker told commissioners, describing how he deteriorated in lockup and lost significant weight. “If you just wait, if there’s no intervention, we will be here before long about the death of Kai’Yere Campbell.” He was released to a state-supported living center the following month. 

Last year, local advocates worked with the civil rights clinic at Texas A&M University’s law school to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice and ask for a federal investigation into the jail. “The Tarrant County jail is a danger to the Tarrant County community,” the complaint stated. “This system of violence, failure to provide medical care, and failure to adequately investigate is characteristic of a culture of secrecy and coverup.” 

During a county forum in January about conditions at the jail, Waybourn insisted that deaths in custody are appropriately investigated and displayed a photo showing stacks of documents—an image of papers that he said represented thorough inquiries into jail deaths. “If you’re talking about conspiracy to cover up, there’s probably 100 people who have written reports in that thing—it’s just impossible,” the sheriff said, pointing to the photo on the screen behind him. “And I don’t know, maybe you’re a conspiracy theorist. I’m not, I believe Oswald killed the president.” 

Patrick Moses, Waybourn’s Democratic challenger in the November election, confronted the sheriff when it was time for audience questions, asking why taxpayers were funding an “election integrity” unit without evidence of fraud. “You just mentioned to us, sheriff, that you dont chase conspiracy theories,” Moses said. “While neglecting the people that are dying in the jail, you’re part of this great conspiracy.”

Moses, a Fort Worth pastor and retired federal law enforcement officer, didn’t respond to an interview request for this story. He has pointed to reducing jail deaths as one of his top priorities.

Waybourn won an overwhelming 81 percent of the vote in 2016 when he first ran for sheriff in Tarrant County, the last urban stronghold for the Texas GOP. But politics in Tarrant County have seen a shift in recent elections, with a majority of the county’s voters choosing Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz in the 2018 election for U.S. Senate. In 2020, Donald Trump lost Tarrant County, the first time a Republican presidential candidate failed to carry it since 1964, while Waybourn won re-election that year by just 5 points.

As deaths in Waybourn’s jail have increased, the sheriff has pushed for legislation to erode a key element of the Sandra Bland Act, a reform law Texas passed in 2017 that was meant to bolster accountability. The law mandates independent law enforcement investigations into jail deaths, a requirement that Waybourn said was often time-consuming and unnecessary when he testified in 2022 at a state Senate committee for legislation to limit outside investigations. The resulting bill, which did not pass, would have absolved sheriffs of having to commission these third-party investigations whenever deaths are blamed on “natural causes or occurring in a manner that does not indicate an offense has been committed.” 

These independent investigations, meant to ensure that sheriffs don’t investigate themselves, regularly document dehumanizing conditions and treatment that can lead to preventable deaths, and provide important evidence of wrongdoing, including criminal activity, even in cases where the deaths were ruled “natural.” 

But even so, they still sometimes echo the same pro-police bias that such investigations are supposed to prevent. For example, when 38-year-old Robert Miller died in 2019 after Tarrant County jail guards pepper-sprayed him, the Texas Rangers, the detective arm of state police, were called to investigate. The Ranger who investigated Miller’s death, Clarence “Trace” McDonald, didn’t watch any surveillance video from the jail, instead asking a sheriff’s deputy to review it, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The report he filed also did not include mention of the inconsistencies in guards’ accounts, or note speaking with jail hospital staff or medical experts about Miller’s cause of death, which a medical examiner ruled was “natural,” due to sickle cell crisis—an explanation that outside experts later challenged. 

McDonald, who as a Ranger investigated at least 20 jail deaths under Waybourn, was hired by the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office in 2021. Since then, the sheriff has mostly picked the Fort Worth Police Department for outside investigations into jail deaths, according to reports the jail must file with the Texas Attorney General’s Office after every death. Yet when Bolts filed a request with Fort Worth police for records of all investigations into Tarrant County jail deaths, the department said it had none.  

Brandon Wood, executive director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, which regulates county jails across the state, told Bolts that he wasn’t previously aware of the discrepancy and would look into the matter further. In at least some cases, he said, it appeared that the police department simply reviewed the investigation done by the sheriff’s office, rather than conducting their own. “That is not what is supposed to be occurring,” Wood said. “There’s supposed to be an outside law enforcement agency investigate deaths in custody. There’s nothing that prohibits the county from also conducting their own investigation. But the statute clearly states that it shall be an investigation—not simply a review, not a cover sheet on an investigation that Tarrant County did.”  

A legislative agency that audits state departments wrote in a 2021 report that the Texas jail commission largely fails to hold jails accountable due to unclear regulations and limited enforcement power. While sheriffs continue to run dangerous jails with little accountability or oversight, county commissions still have a role in operating local lockups, such as powers over funding and contracts for operating the facilities. 

Local county commissions in many large Texas counties have responded to jail overcrowding by approving multi million dollar contracts to ship people in jail custody to for-profit prisons. Over the past two years, Tarrant County commissioners approved more than $40 million to send people hundreds of miles away to a private prison in West Texas; last year, a man sent there from Tarrant County died of leukemia. But after North Texas public radio station KERA reported on state jail commission records showing neglect at the private prison, commissioners voted unanimously to end the contract early. The company that operated the West Texas prison shut down the facility on Sept. 30, the same day Tarrant County’s contract ended.  

As circumstances surrounding deaths inside the Tarrant County jail remain opaque, local advocates pushing for more transparency have looked to other county officials for help. Alisa Simmons, one of two Democrats on the five-member Tarrant County commission, organized the January town hall about deaths at the jail and has joined the calls for Waybourn to resign and for a federal inquiry into his jail. 

Simmons told Bolts that “the only people who can fire [Waybourn] are the voters,” but added that county commissioners could be doing more to force changes at the jail. “We need to, as a court, utilize the power of the purse strings and withhold funds from the sheriff’s office until conditions improve in the jail,” she said. Otherwise, “Tarrant county taxpayers are going to continue to pay a heavy price to subsidize that dehumanizing culture in our jail.”