Mississippi state penitentiary inmate dies during investigation into infrastructure and violence

An inmate was found dead last week in a Mississippi state penitentiary at the center of a violence spike and infrastructure woes, a county coroner told CNN Monday.

Gabriel Carmen, 31, was found hanging in his cell by two corrections officers at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Saturday, Sunflower County Coroner Heather Burton said in a statement.

The official cause and manner of death for Carmen, who was serving a 17-year term, are pending autopsy results, Burton said.

He was last seen during a security check, the statement added, when “officers noted (him) to be irate and throwing feces on the wall in the hall.” A person cleaning alerted officers at 6:41 p.m. that he was hanging, Burton said.

Officers immediately ran to check on him and attempted to enter the cell, but it was jammed from the inside with a pipe removed from the toilet, the statement said. Maintenance had to assist for medical staff to tend to Carmen.

Parchman, where roughly 3,600 of Mississippi’s 19,000 inmates are incarcerated, has been subjected to criticism for “failing infrastructure” and recent deaths.

Last week, the state department of corrections released a 154-page report documenting crumbling, unsanitary conditions in which prisoners lacked power and water and it “rains inside” the cells of one unit.

Following a series of clashes in the prison that left at least four prisoners dead, rappers Jay-Z and Yo Gotti sought to assist prisoners in suing the state in federal court.

In August 2018, state corrections said its head, Commissioner Pelicia Hall, requested the FBI help investigate the deaths of 15 inmates, including three of them at Parchman, in the span of a month.