Over the past 15 months, seven men have died in the Escambia County Jail while awaiting trial. Three of those deaths were suicides.
On Saturday, 60 family members and friends, joined by County Commissioner Lumon May and Assistant County Administrators Amy Lovey and Chip Simmons, held a prayer service and silent march to bring attention to the issue.
“I’m beating myself up a little in an embarrassing way because it took the death of my oldest brother (Alfred Wesley who died in January), to really wake me up to some of the problems that we’re having in our county jail,” said Rev. Lonnie Wesley, III. “When our brother was found dead in the cell on January 15 of this year, that was the catalyst for me. That was a personal wake up call. It caused me to dig deeper and to ultimately get in touch with as many families as I could to ask them to come together.”
Escambia County has made changes. Michael Tidwell was fired as the head of Corrections. Simmons stepped in on an interim basis. His focus has been to rework procedures and upgrade the medical care at the jail.
“The board approved a recommendation from County administrator Jack Brown to create and hire a full time medical director over the corrections department. We also had a vacant health service administrator position. Both of those positions have been filled. Corrinne Miller is now the health service administrator effective January 29th,” Simmons told Inweekly.
Dr. Paul Henning has taken over oversight of the jail medical staff.
“He has been interim the last couple of weeks, and he has already initiated and conducted a lot of training with the nursing staff, with the medical staff. He has reviewed protocols. He has assessed and determined what he thinks where we need to be regarding the input and what he calls the throughput of the entire process,” said Simmons.
County Administrator has made the decision to not look for a full-time replacement for Tidwell yet, according to Simmons.
“We don’t want to change horses in the middle of the stream here,” he said. “We’re on a bit of a roll here.”
Rev. Wesley is optimistic about the changes.
He said, “We have serious minded commissioners who want to do the right thing and are open to help and ideas. The people in the administration of the jail, they are like minded.”