Bolts: 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.”

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.