Last Wednesday, Jamycheal Mitchell, who had a history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was found dead in his Portsmouth, Virginia, jail cell after spending four months behind bars without bail for stealing $5 worth of groceries, the Guardian reports.
The 24-year-old Mitchell’s body is still awaiting an autopsy, but his family believe that he starved to death after refusing to eat or take his medication. “His body failed,” Mitchell’s aunt, Roxanne Adams, a registered nurse, said in an interview with the Guardian. “It is extraordinary. The person I saw deceased was not even the same person.”
Adams said that she’d seen Mitchell in court recently and estimated that he’d lost 65 pounds since his arrest: “He was extremely emaciated.” She also said that medics at the jail told her that Mitchell had been refusing to take his medication, which had included antipsychotic drugs and a mood stabilizer, as well as further antipsychotic drugs prescribed to him while in jail.
Mitchell’s family had not been able to visit him in jail, because he had not given officials his relatives’ names as approved visitors. “His mind was gone because he wasn’t taking his meds, so he didn’t have a list for anyone to see him,” Adams said.
The Guardian reports that, according to a clerk at Portsmouth district court, Mitchell was arrested on April 22nd for stealing a bottle of Mountain Dew, a Snickers bar, and a Zebra Cake from a 7-Eleven. Court, police, and jail officials could not explain why Mitchell was not offered bail. On the same day of Mitchell’s arrest, Portsmouth police officer Stephen Rankin shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old William Chapman outside a Walmart.
A court clerk said that Judge Morton Whitlow had ruled in May that Mitchell was not competent to stand trial, and that he be transferred to state-run mental health facility Eastern State hospital for treatment:
The clerk said that typically in such cases “we do an order to restore the defendant to competence, send it to the hospital, and when the hospital has a bed, we do a transportation order, and he’s taken to the hospital.” Whitlow reiterated the order on 31 July and was due to review the case again on 4 September, according to the clerk.
But the hospital said it had no vacancy and the 24-year-old was therefore detained in jail until his death on 19 August, according to Adams, Mitchell’s aunt, who said she had tried to assist the hospitalisation process herself but was left frustrated.
Asked which agency was ultimately accountable for ensuring Mitchell’s transfer to the hospital, the clerk said, “It’s hard to tell who’s responsible for it.” Senior prison officials said his death was not being treated as suspicious. “As of right now it is deemed ‘natural causes,’” said Natasha Perry, the master jail officer at the Hampton Roads regional jail.
Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.