Washington County Sheriff Joel Cochran on Monday confirmed the identities of three inmates killed during a weekend fight at a Middle Georgia prison.
Jimmy Trammell, Teddy Jackson and Ahmod Hatcher died after a fight broke out Sunday afternoon at Washington State Prison, according to the sheriff. Thirteen inmates also were injured and taken to area hospitals, said a statement from the Georgia Department of Corrections, which oversees the facility.
A guard sustained non-life-threatening injuries during the incident, which started on a sidewalk and spilled into a visitation area of the prison around 1:25 p.m., according to the GDC. Prison staff regained control of the facility around 3 p.m. The prison remained on lockdown Monday.
The department is investigating the incident, which it believes “to be gang-affiliated,” according to a news release issued Monday afternoon.
Officials did not immediately release the cause of the inmates’ deaths.
“We have prisons all across the state, mainly in very small, rural places and it’s easy for these kinds of horrors to go unreported,” Atteeyah Hollie, deputy director of the Atlanta-based nonprofit Southern Center for Human Rights, said.
The medium-security prison, constructed in 1991, is in Davisboro, about 130 miles southeast of Atlanta between Macon and Augusta. It has the capacity to house more than 1,500 inmates.
Cochran said his office was asked Sunday to help secure the outside of the prison while state corrections officers handled the situation inside. By 6 p.m., the GDC told the sheriff’s office the facility had been secured.
Georgia’s prison system is plagued by violence, understaffing, security lapses and criminal enterprises, a two-year investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found.
Top Georgia lawmakers acknowledged last year costly steps needed to repair the state’s prisons and allocated more than $600 million in new funding to the department to add staffing positions, improve salaries and tackle a backlog of maintenance projects, including repairing locks.
Consultants hired by Gov. Brian Kemp found that buildings with maintenance issues enabled prisoners to strip off materials from walls and ceilings to make weapons. They could also easily leave cells because the locks don’t work.
Understaffing meant there often were no officers around to monitor the movements, the consultants reported, and officers working alone reported being fearful of retribution if they enforced the rules, the AJC reported.
A scathing report published by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2024 described violence, sexual assaults and gang-run prisons in Georgia fueled by a culture of indifference.
— This is a developing story. We are working to learn more.
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