Jimmy Lee Trammell was due out of prison on Wednesday. Instead, his family got a call late Sunday from a warden: Trammell, 42, had been stabbed to death in a fight at Washington State Prison in Davisboro, Georgia.
Two other inmates died in the same melee, which also injured a corrections officer and 13 more prisoners, the Georgia Department of Corrections said Monday. The agency named the dead as Trammell, Ahmod Dewayne Hatcher, 23, and Teddy Dewayne Jackson, 27. Trammell was serving a 20-year sentence for burglary. Hatcher and Jackson had both been convicted of aggravated assault.
What officials say happened
The violence began on an outdoor sidewalk at about 1:25 p.m., according to the department. Several injured inmates made it into the visitation area, and staff moved visitors out. None were hurt. Guards used non-lethal weapons, and the agency said the situation was under control in about 90 minutes.
The department called the fighting “gang-affiliated” but said little else, including how the three men died. Washington County Sheriff Joel Cochran said it had been “quite some time” since the county saw an incident this large. One of the injured died at a hospital and two died inside the prison, he said.
The Human and Civil Rights Coalition of Georgia, a prisoner advocacy group, posted video it said came from an inmate. It shows at least 20 men running along a fenced walkway, some of them apparently holding clubs or makeshift weapons. The group called the scene “complete chaos and violence.”
A family’s anger
Michelle Lett, Trammell’s aunt, said word of his death reached relatives first through an inmate with a contraband cellphone. “It’s like they’re just letting them run around, do whatever,” she told The Associated Press. “They weren’t trying to stop nothing.”
Staffing and the Justice Department report
Atteeyah Hollie of the Southern Center for Human Rights called the violence “predictable.” She pointed to July figures showing 72% of authorized staff positions at Washington State Prison were vacant. “Unfortunately, we are in a state of normalized crisis,” she said.
Bryce Peterson, a corrections researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses, said fights happen daily in U.S. prisons but deaths on this scale are rare. “By any definition, this would fall under what we would call collective violence or a riot,” he said. Protections usually exist and have failed when something like this happens, he added.
A 2024 Justice Department report found Georgia officials “deliberately indifferent” to deadly violence, drug use, extortion and sexual abuse in state prisons. It counted homicides rising from seven in 2018 to 35 in 2023. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution later put the 2024 figure at 66.
The state has put more than $600 million in new money into the department. Commissioner Tyrone Oliver told lawmakers in December that Georgia is still 1,000 guards short of recommended levels.
Sources
- Georgia prison fight kills 3 inmates and injures over a dozen, including a guard
- Three inmates dead after ‘possible riot’ at Georgia state prison
