Dena Wynn watched from the courtroom gallery while the judge questioned her son, Anthony McDonald. She noticed that he was a bit off, she says. The judge appeared to notice, too.
Wynn says the judge repeatedly checked on McDonald throughout the hearing, asking if he was OK and if he was tired. McDonald said he had a headache, Wynn recalls.
“Before he left the courtroom, the judge stressed to them that she didn’t like the way he looked, to take him to medical,” Wynn says. “And they did not. They took him to jail.”
McDonald, 35, was arrested in September 2023 after D.C. police officers claimed he was smoking weed in his car and then allegedly found a gun and drugs in the vehicle. He had been out of jail on his personal recognizance ahead of the Feb. 14 court hearing that Wynn attended.
After the hearing, McDonald went into the DC Jail, and later that night, Wynn says, she spoke with him on the phone. He told her that Department of Corrections staff did not send him to get medical care. He also asked her to pick up some of his stuff from a friend’s house and to put money on his books. Then he told his mom he loves her.
That was the last time she would ever speak to him.
On Feb. 16, after just two days in DOC’s custody, McDonald was found unresponsive in his cell. The medical examiner ruled his death a suicide by ligature hanging, according to Rodney Adams, general counsel for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
“He was just a fun-loving person, a protector,” Wynn says. “He was the fun guy, the guy that kept us all on our toes. He loved family, he loved his friends. He was just that person, you know, you could call on to come and help put up a TV or help you cut the grass or just anything you asked of him. He was always there.”
Four months after her son’s death, Wynn is still searching for answers. She’s working with an attorney and plans to file a Freedom of Information Act request for the information about the circumstances that led up to his death.
“I don’t know what the inside of a cell looks like,” Wynn says. “I want to know what the inside of his cell looked like when he hung himself. I want a copy of the video in the hallway [of his cell], I want the body cam, I want the logbook, I want all that.”
She’s not alone in her pursuit.
McDonald was one of five people who died inside the DC Jail in 2024, three of whom—Sheena Weatherspoon, Sincere Howard, and Dominique Brown—died in the span of less than two weeks in May. DOC’s public notices, which the agency is legally required to publish, say that all three people were found unresponsive in their cells but provide little more information. The medical examiner has not released the cause and manner of the three in-custody deaths in May.
Eighteen people have died in DOC custody since 2022, including the five deaths so far this year.
Aleta White is familiar with Wynn’s struggle. White is the mother of three of Giles Warrick’s children and has been trying to get information about his death inside the DC Jail for the past two years. Warrick, 63, was found unresponsive in his cell in November 2022, according to the DOC. Investigative reports indicate that Warrick died by suicide.
Warrick was arrested in 2019 and charged with murder in the 1998 death of Christine Mirzayan. He was the suspect in several more sexual assaults that occurred in D.C. and Montgomery County throughout the 1990s, and was allegedly linked to the crimes via DNA evidence. Years before Warrick’s arrest, law enforcement investigators named the suspect in those crimes the “Potomac River Rapist.”
Since Warrick’s death, White has largely met roadblocks in her efforts to find out exactly what happened to him inside the DC Jail.
“I shouldn’t be jumping through all of these hoops to attorneys and contacting the director,” she says. “I’ve contacted the mayor, I’ve contacted congressmen, representatives in D.C. I’ve had to force everything in order to get the limited answers that I’ve gotten so far. We still don’t have the answers, and they’re still fighting us.”
The most information she’s gotten out of the DOC is from a heavily redacted, 11-page internal administrative report.
A corporal in the DC Jail found Warrick “hanging by a sheet tied around his neck, with the other end attached to the cell’s metal locker,” just after 8 a.m. on Nov. 19, 2022, according to the report. He was pronounced dead at 8:28 a.m.
The report cites Warrick’s medical records that indicate that he denied having suicidal thoughts when he first entered DOC custody in November 2019. But by 2020, he told medical staff that “he had been struggling with depression and not being able to sleep appropriately since March/April 2020, due to the seriousness of his charges.” (Warrick maintained his innocence and had pleaded not guilty.)
He denied thoughts of self-harm in 2020, and continued to do so through September 2022, according to the report. For his depression and difficulty sleeping, he was prescribed Benadryl, the document says.
Although Warrick’s medical information, such as the medication he was given and some details of his mental health assessments, are unredacted in the report released to White, pertinent pieces of investigators’ findings are withheld.
Investigator Charles White writes in the report that “the responding DC DOC staff along with the Unity Medical Staff appeared to adhere to the agency’s policy.” But sections of the report where White describes further conclusions based on surveillance video, interviews, and other documents are completely blacked out.
White says Warrick had been having a hard time after one of their sons died in a motorcycle accident in August 2022.
Both McDonald and Warrick’s stories are not new or uncommon occurrences for the DC Jail. The deaths, and the lack of transparency from DOC, has local attorneys and advocacy groups calling for change.
The Corrections Oversight Improvement Omnibus Amendment Act became law in 2023 and contained several provisions requiring transparency around in-custody deaths and aimed at strengthening oversight of the DOC. The law, for example, would allow the Corrections Information Council and the chair of the Council’s judiciary and public safety committee to conduct unannounced inspections of the jail. (CIC is an independent body responsible for monitoring conditions of confinement for D.C. residents.)
Although the bill has become law in D.C., it was passed with the dreaded “subject to appropriations” tag, meaning many of its provisions cannot take effect until the Council approves funding for them. On Wednesday, the Council gave final approval for the 2025 budget, which does not include sufficient funding for the law to take full effect.
Darby Hickey, policy counsel for the DC Justice Lab, says the law needed more than $500,000 in funding to take full effect.
“There’s obviously a lot more that the mayor could do, that the Council could do, to be demanding answers from the DOC, to be bringing more transparency, to be bringing more accountability,” Hickey says. “There could be hearings, the mayor could be demanding the release of more information. That’s her agency, she’s in charge. They could be expediting investigations.”
Melissa Wasser, policy counsel for the ACLU’s D.C. chapter, says now the struggle for funds to improve oversight and transparency for DOC must start all over again.
“Residents at the jail shouldn’t be given a potential death sentence because of the conditions of confinement,” Wasser says. “Nobody should be dying in jail, and we want to make sure that there’s more consistent oversight so that these deaths stop happening because they’re happening at an alarming rate.”
A 2021 report from the U.S. Department of Justice found that 1,200 people died in local jails throughout the country in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available. The country’s mortality rate in jails for 2019 is 167 per 100,000 people; the 2023 mortality rate for the DC Jail is 387 per 100,000.
In addition to the five people who died in DOC custody so far this year, five people died in the jail in 2023, and eight people died in the jail in 2022.
“The only way we can make change is by getting those answers and forcing them to acknowledge their faults so that they can be corrected,” White says. “If they can’t handle the population, if they don’t have enough employees, or they don’t have the proper employees with training required to run that jail, the jail has to be shut down. … There’s too many lives being lost.”