Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Recent Tarrant County jail deaths unite groups from both sides of political aisle
January 31, 2025
A recent death in the county jail has brought together an unlikely alliance in Tarrant County. A group of conservative Second Amendment activists joined calls for the resignation of Sheriff…
Topics: 2025news, Commissioners Court, Custody Death, Medical, TCJS
Tarrant County
A recent death in the county jail has brought together an unlikely alliance in Tarrant County.
A group of conservative Second Amendment activists joined calls for the resignation of Sheriff Bill Waybourn at the commissioners court meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 14. Their calls joined those of others who have dedicated months — some years— to demand accountability for the growing death rate in the county jail.
Excited and vocal, the newcomers made it clear this was their first time to commissioners court. Sheriff’s deputies detained three and arrested two of them as tensions boiled over into shouting and scuffles.
Sporting American flags on their T-shirts and AR-15 rifles on their ballcaps, the cohort that came out to demand justice for the death of Mason Yancy in the county jail in December may have seemed like strange bedfellows for the activists from Broadway Baptist Church and relatives of Anthony Johnson Jr., the Black Marine veteran who was allegedly killed by guards in the jail in April.
“While the problems are not necessarily Black and white, I just find it ironic that when Chasity Bonner died, when Anthony Johnson Jr. died, the sheriff wouldn’t come,” [Bishop Kirkland] said. “No offense to these families, when two white boys die, he’s here. That’s a problem.”
The fact that these two seemingly disparate groups have found common ground on this issue came as no surprise to Krishnaveni Gundu, co-founder and executive director of Texas Jail Project. The United States incarcerates a larger percentage of its population than any other country in the world.
“Mass incarceration has impacted everybody,” she said. “So we all know somebody who’s connected, who’s impacted by the incarceration. … It touches everybody. It’s not just them and us. You hear people saying, well, it disproportionately impacts Black and Brown people, and I always add to that and poor white folks, because that’s the majority of our cases from rural counties.”