For four days, deputies from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office barred entry to Evan Lee’s hospital room. By the time his mother, Jacilet Griffin, was allowed inside, doctors told her he was brain-dead.
It wasn’t jail officials who explained what had happened to her 31-year-old son, Griffin said. The few details she got came from hospital staff, who said Lee had arrived at Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital with a critical brain injury. Just four months earlier, he was alive and in generally good health, with his diabetes and other underlying conditions under control, his mother said. Then he was booked into the county jail.
Though the county medical examiner ruled his death a homicide due to a head injury, no public agency has ever provided a clear account of what led to his injury — and no one has been charged.
“I know God is in the midst of this,” Griffin said. “I know I’m gonna get the answers that I’m searching for.”
More than three years later, she’s still waiting.
Lee’s case is one of thousands nationwide that reveal how the criminal justice system fails to account for deaths behind bars. Each year, about 6,000 people die in prisons and jails, and another 2,000 during encounters with police, according to estimates by government agencies and nonprofit groups — numbers that experts believe are likely undercounts. Federal law has for 25 years required local agencies to report in-custody deaths, but the mandate is not enforced. In many places, there’s no reliable public accounting of what happened or why.
Families who lose loved ones in custody are often met with silence or conflicting accounts. The authorities tasked with finding the truth — from jail officials to medical examiners to state investigators — often operate slowly, without coordination, or behind closed doors.
In Lee’s case, the agencies that could have explained what happened offered competing timelines and contradictory narratives. The burden of uncovering the truth fell not to the system — but to his grieving mother.
About a year before he died, Evan Lee called his mother from a bus stop in Houston. He’d gotten into an altercation with a man who didn’t speak English after asking for the time.
According to police, a third man at the stop said Lee had threatened him with a pocketknife. Lee told officers he pulled the knife in self-defense, after someone grabbed him. No one was hurt, but Lee was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
He was released on bail with an ankle monitor. Eight months later, the device stopped sending a signal. Lee insisted it had malfunctioned and that he hadn’t realized it wasn’t working. Prosecutors accused him of failing to charge it. His bond was revoked, and he was sent back to jail.
To get out again, he likely would have had to pay more than $3,000, local bail companies told The Marshall Project — a sum he couldn’t afford, even with his full-time job. His attempts to get a judge to reduce his bail were not approved, court records show.
Calling from the Harris County jail, Lee told his mother that when staff didn’t provide his diabetes medication or enough food, he experienced cold sweats, panic attacks and blood sugar crashes so severe that other detainees had to wake him.
Still, in phone calls to Griffin and other friends and family, he sounded hopeful. He was using the time to read and reflect. “There’s so much to learn in these books … They’re changing the way I think,” he said in a recorded call obtained by The Marshall Project. “I ain’t gonna be the same [person] when I come home.”
Four months into his incarceration, Lee was hospitalized. Four days later, on March 22, 2022, he was dead.
Jason Spencer, senior policy and communications advisor for the sheriff’s office, declined to answer most of our questions about Lee’s case, citing pending litigation. Spencer noted that the case had been investigated, and no criminal charges had been filed.
If you’re searching for answers while mourning the loss of a loved one who died behind bars, check out this guide on how to request information from a prison or jail. If you’ve had a friend or family member die in custody, you can tell us about your experience here.
Lee was still on life support when the sheriff’s office floated the first public explanation for what might have happened. Eleven days before he died, Lee had been in a fight with another detainee, sheriff’s office spokesperson Deputy Thomas Gilliland told the media. Medical staff checked him afterward and cleared him to return to his cell, Gilliland said.
That claim later resurfaced in official accounts. But as documents emerged over the next year, they revealed conflicting timelines and differing theories about what caused Lee’s fatal injury.
About a week after his death, the sheriff’s office submitted a custodial death report stating that on the day he was hospitalized Lee had told jail staff he wasn’t feeling well. A clinician determined he had “Altered Mental Status due to possible head trauma or ingestion of an unknown substance.”
The county medical examiner conducted an autopsy shortly after his death but withheld the results for nine months. When a partial report was released, it revealed the examiner had ruled his death a homicide, caused by “blunt head trauma with subdural hemorrhage.” The autopsy never explained how Lee had been injured.
The Texas Rangers, who are required to investigate all in-custody deaths in the state, gave considerable attention to the theory about the fight, but did not appear to conclude it was the cause of Lee’s death. In their report, obtained by The Marshall Project, a jail officer said she saw Lee and another man striking each other in a cell before guards quickly broke it up. She later recalled the man approaching her and saying, “I didn’t kill Lee.” He was never named as a suspect or charged. (The Marshall Project is withholding his name.)
The lead Rangers investigator seemed unconvinced that the altercation was serious enough to cause Lee’s head trauma. In an audio recording, he confided to the jail officer: “If he really didn’t injure him, I gotta figure out what happened — what caused him to die?”
The Rangers did not report a definitive conclusion.
The final line of the full autopsy report cast further doubt on the fight, which had happened eleven days before Lee died, noting that Lee’s brain injury was “unlikely to have arisen a week or more prior to death.”
Griffin decided to join a lawsuit that points the finger at how Lee was treated by jail staff from the moment he entered the facility.
Filed as part of a broader class-action suit against Harris County, the complaint alleges that the county deprived Lee of his constitutional rights when jail staff failed to protect him from violence and ignored serious medical needs that may have contributed to his death. Griffin is represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who also represented George Floyd’s family after he was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
According to the suit, Lee entered the jail with prescriptions for mental health and diabetes medications, but staff did not provide them consistently. The resulting symptoms — mental health deterioration and serious side effects from untreated diabetes — likely affected his interactions with other detainees.
Further, the lawsuit claims that another detainee beat Lee, leaving visible facial injuries, and they were not adequately treated by the jail.
The complaint argues that systemic failures at the jail — including chronic understaffing, lack of mental health care, and a culture of violence — contributed not only to Lee’s death, but to the serious injuries or deaths of 22 people whose families are bringing the suit.
In a court filing responding to the lawsuit, Harris County officials argued the plaintiffs are unable to show that jail staff “acted with subjective deliberate indifference” and, at the most, detainees or their families had a “disagreement with their medical treatment” — which the county said does not rise to a constitutional violation.
Whether or not that fight caused Lee’s death, the incident highlighted a larger risk to detainees, experts say. The Rangers’ report revealed that the reported altercation took place in what detainees in the jail referred to as the “fight cell” — a known blind spot in the facility’s surveillance system.
That blind spot put Lee and others in danger, regardless of whether the fight was fatal, said UCLA professor Terence Keel, who leads the Coroner Report Project and wrote The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. “The burden of responsibility there is on the officers who allow for this blind spot to persist,” Keel said. “Why is this blind spot there?”
To better understand what happened, The Marshall Project reviewed Lee’s jail records, autopsy report, incident summaries and court filings. We asked a group of independent experts to assess Lee’s case with information we provided from the documents. The reviewers — including doctors, researchers and former law enforcement officials — considered a range of possible explanations for Lee’s brain injury that had been suggested by officials or found in the records: trauma from a fall or fight, complications from untreated medical conditions, a diabetic crisis or exposure to a toxic substance. Some of these factors may have contributed indirectly, by impairing Lee’s behavior and making him more vulnerable to a fall or violent encounter.
According to the Rangers’ investigation, Lee frequently participated in slap-boxing — a form of open-palmed sparring common in the jail, which witnesses said was often used as a way to teach basic fighting skills. One person interviewed said he saw Lee fall during a match and hit his head on a toilet. This version of events aligned with one of the explanations the sheriff’s office floated, in 2022, that slap-boxing likely played a role in Lee’s death.
Afterward, other detainees told the Rangers investigator, Lee appeared disoriented and slurred his speech. He passed out, they said, then woke up vomiting and coughing up blood. They said officers ignored his symptoms and denied him access to the jail’s medical clinic. Several witnesses said that later that day, Lee was sent to the clinic for his scheduled insulin dose. When clinic staff there saw his symptoms, paramedics were called. Lee was taken to the hospital and never returned.
While this series of events could explain how Lee sustained his fatal injury, the details in the records were too limited to draw definitive conclusions, according to the experts who reviewed them.
UCLA professor Keel said Lee’s symptoms could also have pointed to serious complications caused by missed or improperly administered diabetes and mental health medications. “Maybe he was having a health condition or health crises as a result of low blood sugar levels, which can be interpreted as an altered state of mind,” he said.
Jeffrey Reese, a former Harris County law enforcement officer, said the phrase “Altered Mental Status,” cited in Lee’s death report, might have signaled something more acute. “He was beaten up … or he was having a [mental health] meltdown,” he said.
“It’s just a complete void,” said Keel.
The circumstances surrounding Lee’s death were a tangle of conflicting official statements, non-answers from agencies, and crucial gaps in the records that were released. For example, the medical examiner did not provide a narrative summary explaining their interpretation of events. None of the agencies tasked with documenting deaths in custody answered the question of how he died, or acknowledged that they didn’t know.
What remained, the experts said, was not just a mystery about one man’s death — but an indictment of a system unable to explain it.
Lee’s death is one of dozens of cases that have drawn scrutiny to the Harris County jail in recent years.
A 2024 investigation by Houston’s KHOU 11 captured detention officers repeatedly punching detainees in the head with little to no consequences. A state commission that oversees county jails has designated Harris County as non-compliant with minimum jail standards. The commission has reportedly asked the state attorney general to intervene, citing ongoing failures in medical care, deterring violence and monitoring people facing mental health crises.
Even the Texas Ranger assigned to investigate Lee’s death seemed to acknowledge a broader crisis. In audio recordings from the inquiry, he expressed frustration with the repeated violence and lack of accountability at the jail.
“All the assaults that are occurring in here is getting kind of out of control,” the Ranger said. “I get tired of doing this, ’cause this happens all the time. I don’t want to see people get away with it, either.”
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez has said many of the recent deaths in the jail stemmed from natural causes or preexisting conditions, noting that detainees often have poorer health than the general population.
“We process over 100,000 individuals that come through our doors every year, and many come with poor health,” he told local news station KPRC 2 in 2023. “They find themselves … here in the county jail, as a temporary home, and tragedy might strike.”
He also cited overcrowding, understaffing and outdated infrastructure as contributing factors. “Our condolences go out to any family that’s been impacted … by the loss of life of someone that was under our custody,” he said. ”As an agency, and me personally, I take it very hard, it’s something that we want to improve on.”
Under the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act, state and local law enforcement agencies are required to report in-custody deaths to the U.S. Department of Justice. The law, passed in 2000 and updated in 2014, was meant to help officials analyze systemic failures and prevent future deaths.
But data collection under the law remains incomplete and unreliable.
Late last year, the Justice Department published aggregated totals of deaths reported between 2019 and 2023. Due to a technical glitch, The Marshall Project was able to download the full dataset — a loophole that was quickly closed. (The department has not published unredacted death in custody datasets in the past because of privacy issues and concerns about data quality.) The records we reviewed showed widespread gaps: missing causes of death, vague entries and inconsistent details from jail to jail.
Those gaps make it nearly impossible to hold institutions accountable, experts say.
“You can’t have that discussion without the data,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and one of the law’s original authors. “That’s why we passed the law.”
Lee’s death was included in the database. But the entry was minimal: the manner of death listed as “Unavailable, investigation pending.” It made no mention of the homicide ruling — or any of the conflicting theories that have emerged since.
Of the 72 people listed as having died in the Harris County jail during that four-year period, most entries contained little more than “pending autopsy results.”
At Houston Memorial Gardens, a cemetery south of the hospital where her son died, Griffin remembers standing with him in 2020, watching George Floyd’s casket pass through the iron gates. They were masked, grieving strangers among thousands — mourning a man whose death sparked a nationwide reckoning.
Now her son rests nearby.
Floyd’s killer was convicted. Griffin said she still dreams of holding someone accountable for what happened to her child.
Since Lee’s death, she has thrown herself into advocacy — joining the class-action lawsuit, working with her state representative on jail safety legislation, and advising Houston’s public defender office on how to better support families after in-custody deaths. Joining forces with other grieving families, she has garnered significant local media coverage.
But the search for answers has come at a steep cost.
Griffin told The Marshall Project she tried to keep working, but the grief overwhelmed her. She had dizzy spells and other stress-related health problems, and eventually went on medical leave from her nonprofit job. Soon after, she said, she was terminated. She lost her savings and her home. Today she lives in a small apartment, relying on help from friends and family. A longtime reverend, she now depends financially on donations from her church community.
More than three years later, she said, no one from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office has officially informed her of her son’s death or explained it. “Not a postcard, or anything,” she said. “Like nothing happened.”
In 2023, Griffin traveled to Austin for a meeting of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, where the sheriff was present. At first, she hesitated to confront him. But after hearing another advocate speak out, she did too.
“Someone murdered my son in your care,” she told the sheriff, “and nobody said anything.”
Gonzalez told Griffin that her son’s death was being investigated by an independent agency, and offered his condolences. He did not share any information about what might have led to Lee’s fatal injury.
Griffin said she saw fear in Gonzalez’s eyes. “[It was] like he just stopped breathing,” she added later, with a small smile. “I’m not gonna lie to you, that made me feel really good.”
When Lee had called her from jail, she never imagined it would be the start of a years-long fight for accountability. He spoke with optimism about his future. He told her he loved her. He believed he would be coming home.
“I’m not going to let [the jail] … take my life from me for no reason,” he said.