Free agent NFL QB and activist Colin Kaepernick is paying for the independent autopsy of a prison inmate in Georgia, a man whose family alleges was “eaten alive” by bed bugs and other insects.
The family of Lashawn Thompson, who died in the Fulton County Jail in the metropolitan Atlanta area in 2022, claims he was eaten alive by insects and bed bugs in a filthy jail cell.
Did The Jail Staff Allow Thompson To Die?
According to jail records, Thompson was being kept in the psychiatric wing of the jail due to schizophrenia, with medical staff noting that Thompson was deteriorating and doing nothing to help.
“They literally watched his health decline until he died,” said Michael Harper, the family’s attorney. “When his body was found one of the detention officers refused to administer CPR because in her words she ‘freaked out.'”
Nationally renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump also has been retained by the family and will serve as co-counsel with Harper.
“We’re going to get an independent autopsy done and Colin Kaepernick has told the family that he will pay for it no matter what so we can get to the truth,” Crump said during a news conference outside Fulton County Jail, where Thompson was held and died.
“We want to thank Colin Kaepernick for helping this family get to the truth. And as soon as we get the results of that independent autopsy we’re going to come right back here and let people know what happened to him.”
The Ugliness Of The Prison Industrial Complex
It’s not unreasonable to ask questions surrounding the conditions to which Thompson reportedly was subjected. Harper released photos of a disgusting jail cell where Thompson was held.
The state of prisons in this country is awful and inhumane. Thompson was arrested for a misdemeanor simple battery charge last June and kept in the psychiatric ward of the jail.
When mental health struggles are more challenging today, why does society think prison is the proper place to deal with a situation like Thompson’s?
The legendary and iconic political activist and intellectual, professor Angela Davis long has called for the abolition of prisons.
“We have to go beyond the amelioration of prison practice,” Davis said in a lecture at the Kennedy School of Government’s ARCO Forum in 2003.
“This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and their families,” Davis continued. “It relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism.”
Abolition might sound radical to some, but what’s crazy is the idea that the way the prison industrial complex operates now is a good thing. Do more jails and more prisoners make anyone feel safer?
Within a week of the announcement regarding Thompson’s death, the resignations of the jail’s three leaders in the sheriff’s office, that of chief jailer, assistant chief jailer and assistant chief jailer, were requested and received by the sheriff.
“It’s clear to me that it’s time, past time, to clean house,” Fulton County sheriff Patrick Labat said in a news release. “When leveraged at its very best, that experience [65 combined years of prison administration and law enforcement] can be invaluable. However, it can also lend itself to complacency, stagnation and settling for the status quo.”
It could also lead to subhuman conditions and the potential death of an inmate.
