Further reporting contributed by Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Immediately
This text is a part of a collaborative investigation into Mississippi’s Lethal Prisons.
When Mississippi officers knowledgeable Mary Anderson that her uncle had died in jail, they advised her he had suffered a coronary heart assault.
“They talked about nothing about anything,” she mentioned.
However now, the FBI is investigating the 2025 demise of Melvin Most cancers on the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility as a murder, and the guards as alleged perpetrators.
It’s the first time in at the very least the final decade that officers have confirmed that an incarcerated individual was killed by a use of pressure by jail safety.
Data uncovered this month by The Marshall Venture – Jackson and Mississippi Immediately revealed he died from blunt pressure trauma.
Most cancers died shortly after being “concerned in an altercation with Correctional Officers” on the Rankin County facility, in accordance with a latest report the state Division of Public Security despatched to the U.S. Justice Division.
The demise comes after fellow prisoners repeatedly complained in regards to the 53-year-old’s lack of non-public hygiene. On Jan. 22, 2025, a number of corrections officers went into Most cancers’s cell to take him to the bathe.
“He was transported to a different constructing, the place he collapsed within the bathe space,” the report acknowledged. “Most cancers was transported to a medical facility the place he was pronounced deceased.”
Most cancers had been serving eight years in jail after pleading responsible to a 2019 aggravated assault in Hinds County.
After jail officers’ preliminary point out of cardiac arrest as the rationale for Most cancers’s demise, Anderson heard from different incarcerated those who her uncle was taken into the bathe and overwhelmed, she mentioned. “The entire story began altering,” Anderson mentioned.
Public Security Commissioner Sean Tindell mentioned Feb. 19 in a press release that “The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation has turned its information and findings over to the FBI concerning the case involving the in-custody demise of Melvin Most cancers.”
The FBI didn’t reply to a request for remark. A spokesperson for the Mississippi Division of Corrections declined to touch upon the demise, citing an ongoing investigation.
The federal probe into Most cancers’s killing comes after a joint investigation by Mississippi Immediately, The Marshall Venture – Jackson, Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Hyperlink discovered that jail understaffing and gang violence probably contributed to the killings of practically 50 incarcerated individuals, together with Most cancers, since 2015. Solely eight instances led to legal convictions.
Of the 45 killed, 20 died by blunt pressure trauma. These embrace beatings by the hands of cellmates and different incarcerated individuals.
Bailey Martin, a spokesperson for the Division of Public Security, mentioned the bureau has solely investigated one demise brought on by use of pressure by guards inside state prisons since 2015.
Within the previous decade, federal prosecutors have convicted at the very least seven former Mississippi Division of Corrections staffers for assaults on incarcerated individuals. Melvin Hilson, a former deputy warden with the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman’s Okay-9 division, was convicted and sentenced to 24 months in jail in 2022 after beating a person who was ready to see a medical supplier in 2016.
Two former jail officers and a case supervisor had been convicted within the 2019 beating of a girl at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility. In accordance with court docket paperwork, they punched, kicked and beat the lady with a pepper spray canister as she lay in a fetal place. Three former officers had been additionally convicted in a 2016 beating on the identical jail.
Following the information crew’s 2025 investigation, state Rep. Becky Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, launched a jail demise oversight invoice that handed the Home unanimously on Feb. 10 and is now earlier than the state Senate Corrections Committee. Home Invoice 1739 would require that an oversight process pressure evaluation the deaths of state prisoners and make suggestions to stop future deaths.
Not less than eight males have died in MDOC custody this 12 months, in accordance with information stories.
Currie mentioned earlier this month that prisoners typically die beneath opaque circumstances, with no rationalization from jail officers.
“One of many issues I would like us to take a look at is the deaths that occur. We had three deaths within the jail system final week. They had been of their 20s and 30s,” Currie mentioned. “No matter it’s that the inmate is dying at 20 and 30 years previous each week from, this process pressure will look into that.”
