When someone dies in jail or prison, the circumstances surrounding their death are often shrouded in secrecy. Along with grief, their loved ones are left with basic, unanswered questions.
Accessing records can be difficult. And facility staff may refuse to speak. The silence allows medical neglect, violence or other forms of misconduct to remain hidden. In the absence of answers, families often have to become detectives — finding creative ways to learn what happened to their loved one.
In these as-told-to’s, edited for length and clarity, three women detail their search for answers. One describes her process as “putting together a puzzle with no picture.”
“I was making it very clear that my dad had someone.”
By Courtney Crosby, as told to Aala Abdullahi
Courtney Crosby remembers her father, Craig, as someone who defied age. At 55, he prided himself on being active, managing his diabetes carefully and keeping a blood pressure cuff in his living room. “He would always say he was like Benjamin Button, aging in reverse,” she recalled.
The last time Courtney and her father hung out, it was at his apartment in Atlantic City. She remembers him dropping to the ground abruptly to do pushups: “So youthful and so full of life and energy, that’s how I remember him,” she said.
That image made his death inside Nevada’s High Desert State Prison especially hard to accept. Craig was serving a short sentence for a decade-old DUI and was only expected to be there for a year. After his release, he hoped to finally make his longtime dream come true by moving to New York, where Courtney also lives.
On March 15, 2025, an associate warden at the prison called Courtney to tell her that her father had died of natural causes. At the time of our interview in early June, she had not yet received the full autopsy report and had turned to a Facebook group for answers.
The report, which she received later that month, ruled his death an accident. But Courtney says she still has questions: “If it was an accident, does that mean it could have been prevented?” And, “Was he scared?”
My father was very into his health, and he was managing his diabetes fine before he went to prison. Throughout his short incarceration — about five months from his sentencing in October until his death that March — we maintained constant contact. He was routinely telling me that he wasn’t getting his medication. It was either the wrong kind, or he didn’t get it when he was supposed to have it. I was calling the facility’s family liaison, actively advocating for him to receive his medication. I’m a public defender, so they didn’t intimidate me. I was making it very clear that my dad had someone. It was like, I’m on it. I’m watching.
There was a span of time where I didn’t hear from him for like, two weeks, which was really unusual, because he was calling me like every day. Once we got back in contact — on Valentine’s Day — he told me that he had his big toe amputated. He was in extreme pain. My understanding is, when you have issues with your feet, that’s like a side effect of diabetes being mismanaged.
When one of the associate wardens called on March 15 to tell me my father passed away early in the morning. I was flooded with questions: How did it happen? Was it abrupt? Was he found in bed? Was he asleep? Was he found on the floor? Did he hit something on the way down?
He had talked about his bunkie before, but they were saying he was alone. I found that unusual.
I wanted to know if he suffered, too.
I turned to a Facebook group for answers. I found a private group meant for the family of people incarcerated at the prison where my father died. There’s a rigorous process for being accepted; you have to prove that you have a loved one incarcerated at High Desert State Prison.
In the group, people post routine questions all the time: How do you put money on someone’s commissary? How do you send someone messages? What’s the visiting schedule? It’s like a brain hive.
Four days after my father’s death in March, someone in the Facebook group posted about a man with diabetes who had passed away at the prison. I think they were trying to identify if anyone in the group was related to the person who died. It was my dad that they were talking about.
“This is my dad. Does anybody have any information that they could share?” I wrote.
A few people even messaged me privately to say they would ask their loved one if they knew anything about what happened with my father, and report back.
The things I heard helped guide my next steps, even if they were just rumors or hearsay. I heard there was a “man down” button in every cell, which is an emergency button or bell you would hit if you needed help. Someone shared that my dad had rung it multiple times and nobody answered. The men he was incarcerated with knew that he was struggling with diabetes.
I didn’t know about the “man down” button, and I felt like that was something that could be verified. I would think that a prison would have some sort of record-keeping for when a “man down” button is rang. It occurred to me that this is something an attorney could request in discovery, so I flagged it to my attorney that my dad may have rung the “man down” button multiple times.
All of this was very speculative, but my family and I were really desperate to know the truth.
We still are.
The Nevada Department of Corrections Public Information Officer did not respond to fact-checking questions about emergency buttons in cells or about why Crosby was alone, without a cellmate present, when he died.
“It was soothing to put the puzzle together.”
By Jacqueline Ciccone, as told to Shannon Heffernan
Justin Ciccone died on May 3, 2020, after deputies in Kentucky’s Rowan County Detention Center tased, beat and choked him, according to the wrongful death lawsuit that his parents settled in 2022.
The 34-year-old amateur photographer was driving from his family home in Virginia to Colorado when he was detained in Morehead, Kent. He’d knocked on a stranger’s door in the middle of the night.
Justin was likely suffering a mental health crisis, according to the lawsuit, which named Rowan County, its jailer and six deputies involved in the incident. But police arrested him for public intoxication without performing a sobriety test. At the jail, deputies blocked a nurse from screening or treating him, says the suit.
Within 15 hours of his stay, Justin was in his cell naked, refusing dinner and incoherently taunting a deputy who, according to the lawsuit, stuck a Taser into his food slot and called for his door to be opened. Justin ran out, and several deputies fatally assaulted him. A blood test performed an hour after the beating found no illicit drugs or alcohol in his system. His mother, Jacqueline, describes her investigation into the end of her middle child’s life.
Justin was kind of the quiet one among my three sons. He was interested in people and nature, and he was planning to get into the cannabis industry. When I didn’t hear from him the morning after he left for Colorado with his dog, Marley, I got worried.
That afternoon, around noon, a family in Kentucky called me; they’d found Marley running around by herself, and my number was on her tag. I then called Justin. After he didn’t answer, I looked at his Chime account and saw that he’d gotten gas in Kentucky. From there, I called the state police.
“Oh, yeah, we found him,” I remember them telling me. “He’s at this jail.”
I called [Rowan County jail] five times that day. And it was, “Oh no, he’s acting out right now. He’s too aggressive right now to talk.” I called into the evening.
My oldest son and I set off at 8 a.m. the next morning to go pick up Marley. We were about five hours into the six-hour drive from Virginia when officials called and said [something like], “There’s been an incident, and you need to come now.” It was like an apologetic kind of thing.
When I first saw Justin in the hospital in Lexington, he was bruised. He looked like he had a grapefruit on the side of his head from the swelling. He was on life support, so I couldn’t ask him what happened.
For [most of] his 34 years of life, I knew everything that happened to him. I couldn’t close the book, not knowing. I wanted to be able to tell his friends what happened. It would have been easier if he had died in a car accident, because at least then I could say: This is what happened.
The first few months after he died, I felt that I needed to collect all the information I could about his last days. I was so focused. It was like I was putting together a puzzle with no picture.
I called the gas station, where I saw from bank records that he had paid for gas about an hour before all this happened. I called the people at the house where he knocked on the door at about 1 a.m.; he was probably looking for Marley. They sent me their home security video showing Justin knocking and then kind of backing away. I called the hospital and got a half-inch-thick stack of documents. I called the coroner every week, and I remember talking to an old man at the coroner’s office to make sure they sent me the report.
It was soothing to put the puzzle together. It’s not like I wasn’t sad, but putting the pieces together kept me from crying when I was making phone calls or filling out a form to request records.
I called the jail and asked them for their surveillance videos of what happened to Justin, and they just sent them to me. I never watched the videos, though; I don’t know if I’ll ever want to. I know enough from how the footage was described to me. Our attorney said that nobody would have thought he was in his right mind.
There was a point it was clear we needed to talk to an attorney. The lawyer for the officers who beat Justin decided to settle, but asked if they could remove the individual names from the suit.
“Absolutely not,” I remember telling them.
I wanted their names to be there in perpetuity. I didn’t want them to forget. I didn’t want that to happen to anybody else.
After the lawsuit was over, I wrote one of the officers a letter. I may have read and edited that letter hundreds of times. During his deposition, he was asked if he would do anything different.
“No,” I remember him saying.
It was a cold feeling to know that. How would your mother feel if this happened to her child? I wrote. I just needed to get my anger out. I just needed to say: You did this.
“It feels like someone got away with hurting someone in my family.”
By LaDawna Hill, as told to Brittany Hailer
LaDawna Hill regarded her cousin Nathan Kinney as her brother. “There were eight of us, and he was the youngest,” the Cleveland native said. “We all grew up together in the same house.”
Kinney — who played basketball regularly and walked a lot — collapsed in the recreation room of Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Jail on March 6, 2025. A medical examiner ruled that the father of two had died from a sudden cardiac death as a result of cardiomyopathy. His family is still waiting on footage from the jail of his last hours.
Nathan was a good person. He had two children, ages 1 and 2, and he was a great father. As the self-taught fixer of our family, he would learn everything from YouTube, then fix your whole house and put an engine in your car.
Nathan was also very energetic. He was always playing basketball. He never even had a car until he got older, so he used to walk all the time. For him to even collapse like that in jail, when he was so healthy? That just didn’t make sense to me.
I knew there were supposed to be cameras all over that jail. I reached out to a lot of people when it first happened, including different news organizations and nonprofits — and no one got back to me except a journalist named Scott Noll. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep at night until I found out what happened to my brother.
Since ChatGPT knows me so well because I talk to it every day, I turned to it when no one else had answers. When people die at the jail, how do people try to get information? I wrote.
I used ChatGPT to come up with the questions I needed to ask the county and an attorney. I told ChatGPT what I knew about Nathan’s death:
He collapsed while playing basketball in the gym. The county said they “immediately” transferred him to MetroHealth Medical Center, where he died. But men incarcerated at the jail contacted my mom and said Nathan was foaming at the mouth, and he died there in the gym. I think the correctional officers neglected my brother.
“If I get a lawyer,” I wanted to know, “what are the things that I need to be telling them? What should I be asking a lawyer to look out for?”
ChatGPT gave me a list.
“Be clear about what you want,” it told me.
ChatGPT said I needed evidence, including the surveillance footage from the day Nathan collapsed, the autopsy report, the incident report and any bodycam footage or jail audio. It also told me to ask for a full, independent investigation.
First, my mom went to the county to ask for the evidence, but they gave her the runaround. They said they could not give her footage from the jail. So, I reached out to a lawyer to submit a public records request on our behalf. We asked for the video of the moment Nathan woke up the day he died to the moment he collapsed in the gym. We also asked for emails for anything to do with “Nathan Kinney.” The county still hasn’t given us what we requested.
We’ve been waiting for months for information. The jail is beating around the bush with the footage. It feels like someone got away with hurting someone in my family.
I wanted to start a movement. I wanted to have a press conference and call for transparency. I had people all over social media backing me up, but the lawyer said to wait until we have more information.
So, now we wait.
In response to The Marshall Project’s fact-checking questions about when and where Kinney died, the Cuyahoga County Executive’s communications director stated, “According to the Medical Examiner’s Office, Nathan Kinney had a pulse when he was transported from the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center to MetroHealth.”
The official Cuyahoga County medical examiner’s verdict obtained by The Marshall Project states that Kinney was in “full cardiopulmonary arrest,” by the time he entered the MetroHealth emergency room.
When The Marshall Project asked about video footage from the jail not being provided to Kinney’s family, the communications director stated that they “do not have a record of the family requesting video footage. We understand how important this matter is to the family, and we can provide the video footage in accordance with public records laws and our policies.”
The Marshall Project reviewed multiple records requests from the family’s attorney to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department. In one response, dated two days before Kinney died, the agency’s records manager acknowledged receipt of the request for “[a]ll video footage capturing Nathan Kinney on March 6, 2025 — including but not limited to any surveillance, hallway, body-camera and all recording devices in use that day,” and responded, “The request for video is being processed, and a response will be sent at a later date.”