When someone is injured or dies in the Cuyahoga County jail, security cameras can help investigators understand what happened, who was responsible and how to avoid future mishaps.
But ceiling-mounted cameras have routinely failed to record some of the most significant events in the jail in recent years, including at least three deaths.
The problem stemmed from years of neglecting to replace old cameras, according to county emails obtained by The Marshall Project - Cleveland. For four years, more than 100 cameras were no longer compatible with the county’s video storage system, which led to the saved footage sometimes pausing for minutes at a time or skipping frames.
Jail officials had known about the issue since January 2022 but failed to replace the outdated devices until April of this year — a time period during which 17 incarcerated people died, sometimes under the blinking eye of the outdated cameras.
The four-year delay in fixing the broken surveillance system has left grieving families, the public and state regulators in the dark on multiple occasions.
“I just remain kind of horrified that it took so long,” said Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who studies government surveillance technology. “What is the point of the surveillance cameras if they are not usefully capturing footage in these kinds of situations?”
Some Cuyahoga County corrections officers wear body cameras. Unlike the stationary surveillance cameras, body cameras record time-stamped videos with audio that can be useful for investigators after an emergency.
But in several recent deaths, state investigators say county officials have withheld body camera videos and turned over only the silent footage from the cameras they knew to be unreliable. A county spokesperson declined to answer questions about why it failed to provide all the video footage.
In July 2024, two cameras paused when an officer approached Michael Papp’s locked cell door. Inside, Papp was cold, stiff and lying awkwardly on the floor. He was later pronounced dead. When the footage from both cameras resumed, the officer appeared to have teleported to the other side of the unit.
In February 2025, Jennifer Wade died on the floor of her cell in the jail’s mental health unit. Corrections officers wrote in a log that they had checked on her every 30 minutes in the hours before she was discovered cold to the touch and a nurse was finally called. Footage shows officers beginning each round, but the video stopped before they reached Wade’s cell, preventing investigators from determining the frequency and thoroughness of the checks.
In March 2025, footage from a camera in the jail’s gym froze — this time as Nathan Kinney suffered a fatal heart attack. In one frame, Kinney dribbled a basketball. In the next, he was on the ground as corrections officers surrounded his motionless body.
“Don't you get the sense from looking at these videos that it's unreliable, like, right when you need it to be reliable?” said Lipton, who reviewed the videos for The Marshall Project - Cleveland.
Kelly Woodard, a spokesperson for Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, said in an emailed statement that the motion-detection cameras simply didn’t sense motion when Papp and Kinney died.
But these weren’t the first episodes in which the cameras failed.
In 2021, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department investigated a corrections officer, who was later disciplined and criminally charged, for putting a chokehold on a woman incarcerated at the jail.
Two surveillance cameras should have captured the nonfatal use of force. But only one recorded the event. To explain why, investigators turned to an information technology employee, who emailed a technician contracted by the county.
“This event is already a criminal investigation and we want to avoid anyone suggesting we [are] covering something up,” the county employee wrote.
The private technician saw plenty of movement in the footage of the scuffle, so the motion detection software was working. The problem, he explained, was that more than 111 old Sony cameras mounted throughout the two-tower jail were failing to transmit footage to the county’s video storage system.
Woodard said in a recent statement that employees in the county’s Department of Information Technology have worked “to replace as many cameras as possible that had reached end of life.” But county officials didn’t find the more than $220,000 to replace the bulk of the outdated cameras until late last year, after the deaths of Papp, Kinney and Wade.
“We welcome the news about the updated camera systems. We should be able to rely on these cameras for safety and accountability,” said attorney Alex Bodiford, who has filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Wade’s family seeking $50 million and jail reforms. “It’s too bad these safeguards weren’t in place earlier.”
