WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (WAVY) — An inmate in the Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail was allegedly strangled and beaten Sunday evening to the point that he stopped breathing after his family said he was attacked by another inmate.
The family also alleges that it took longer for the authorities to notify them of the incident, which took place around 7:45 p.m. April 28, and that their loved one had been taken to the ICU, than it did for them to drive up to Virginia from where they live in Florida.
Three siblings told 10 On Your Side they all left as soon as they heard the news.
In an interview Wednesday, they said they weren’t notified until getting a call from a James City County Police detective at around noon the day after the incident, more than 15 hours after it happened. Now, as the man who 10 On Your Side is only identifying as Curtis S. at the family’s request fights for his life on a ventilator, they say they want answers and justice.
VPRJ announced Tuesday that James City County Police were leading an investigation into an assault incident involving two inmates.
“One of the two inmates involved was transported from VPRJ via EMS for emergency medical treatment to a local hospital,” a release stated. “The inmate that was transported for emergency care has been released from custody and is on an unsecured bond due to the current medical conditions.”
“We just were told he was just brutally attacked and he was dead upon when they found him,” said the man’s brother, Dena Cook, in an interview Wednesday. “They were able to bring him back and get a pulse and they brought him [to the hospital].”
Curtis is in a medically-induced coma, according to the family, and needs a ventilator to breathe. They say he is in a vegetative state.
“He’s breathing on a ventilator,” said Ginger Cook. “He can’t breathe on his own.”
The family said they were initially contacted by the detective on the case, who’d felt like the jail had waited too long. They were told to contact the jail.
“We just know that they are doing a thorough investigation,” Dena Cook said. “James City-County Police Department — they’re looking into it and trying to find answer. We just haven’t received any answers. But it wasn’t just a quote-unquote inmate altercation, it was a brutal attack, one way.”
One family member said they’d never seen something so brutal done by another human being.
David Cook said the word assault does not do justice to the number of injuries he saw on his brother. The injuries were so gruesome, they said, they did not want them described.
“It was severe, it was so severe,” David Cook said. “I’ve not seen anything like this from a human being to a human being and even have somebody survive.”
The first tip that the 10 On Your Side team received about the incident alluded to Curtis having accidentally wandered into the wrong cell.
“My brother has a lot of disabilities and he has a child’s mind — it’s been proven medically,” said David Cook, Curtis’ brother. “We’re trying to make sure that people understand that he is one of the most kindest, loving brothers that you could ever have. … If you ever met my brother, upon meeting him, you would see that he’s a child in mind and you would understand what kind of care he needs.”
In fact, David Cook said, they’d been working for a long time to get him into a different kind of facility.
“I can say that the decisions were being made and we were in the process of having decisions made for his disability,” David Cook said, “to have a different placement based off of his disability than where he was at. They were planning on, yes, placing him in another facility.”
When WAVY interviewed the family, they had just been told that Curtis was in a vegetative state, and that if he survived, he wouldn’t be the same person. They want to remember him for his kind and fun-loving personality, but most of all, they want answers.
“We have faith that the justice system is not going to let us down, that they are going to do this and they are going to get to the bottom of it,” David Cook said. “But we want all the people out there that have people that are incarcerated to understand these things happen more so than they want to believe, more than we even knew while we were here.”
He said they’d heard that the day after Curtis’ incident, another inmate in the facility had to be taken for emergency services.
“Guilty or not, you still have humanity, I mean, right,” he said. “So we’re hoping that humanity strikes the people’s hearts that are in control of this situation, specifically so that this can stop happening and we can fix it as a whole with them for other families.”
