After $750,000 Settlement, Georgia Guard Sued Second Time For Letting One Prisoner Murder Another
by Douglas Ankney
On July 26, 2024, the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) was sued by the surviving parents of murdered state prisoner Joseph Walter Brown, 36, who was killed in July 2022 by fellow prisoner Demarquis Antonio Glenn in their shared cell at Macon State Prison (MSP). An earlier suit filed on February 5, 2024, blamed DOC guard Lt. Latrice Hatcher for failing to protect Brown from the fatal assault—the second such accusation against her; Georgia paid $750,000 to settle a suit accusing the guard of failure to protect Coty Silvers from being killed by fellow prisoner William Kyle Little in their shared MSP cell in May 2020.
Darlene and Kelvin Brown filed the suits in federal court for the Middle District of Georgia, alleging violations of their son’s civil rights under 42 U.S.C. §1983; the claims in the first suit against Hatcher were repeated in the second against other MSP officials and DOC Director Timothy Ward. According to the complaints, Brown was 18 years into a 20-year sentence in 2022 when he was found guilty of a disciplinary infraction—for possessing a cellphone—and Hatcher celled him with Glenn, who was then 30 and serving life without parole for a double murder in Bainbridge in 2016.
Glenn allegedly had a known history of smoking “strips” of insecticide-soaked paper, and he was extremely high when he fatally stabbed Brown on July 25, 2022. It was the third time that Glenn had violently attacked a cellmate; a similar assault with a shank while high on “strips” in May 2022 hospitalized another cellmate with life-threatening injuries. An earlier violent assault put still another cellmate in the hospital in September 2021.
Yet after those two assaults, Glenn was not placed in high-security Tier III segregation; instead he was kept in Tier I segregation, reserved for prisoners with low-level disciplinary infractions and those awaiting transfer or in protective custody. Brown objected when Hatcher assigned him to a cell with Glenn, citing the prisoner’s reputation for violence. Glenn, too, reportedly warned the guard that “there will be problems.” The two prisoners proceeded to fight frequently and loudly, prompting Hatcher to tell them to “chill out.” But she didn’t separate them, and Brown was killed.
His parents’ suits were filed just before the federal Department of Justice wrapped up a three-year investigation into Georgia prisons, announcing on October 1, 2024, that conditions violate prisoners’ civil rights. PLN will update that report as well as developments in the suits over Brown’s death as they are available. Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Eshman Begnaud LLP in Atlanta. See: Brown v. Hatcher, USDC (M.D. Ga.), Case No. 5:24-cv-00045; and Brown v. Ward, USDC (M.D. Ga.), Case No 5:24-cv-00257.
$750,000 Settlement in
Death of Coty Silvers
The allegations against Hatcher are outrageous given that she was previously accused of letting another prisoner murder Coty Silvers, 39, at MSP on May 23, 2020. According to a complaint filed in the same district court by Silvers’ parents, Wanda Bartley and Ricky Lane Silvers, he had served 14 years of a 20-year sentence for aggravated assault and was just 10 months away from a tentative February 2021 parole date when he was fatally beaten by cellmate William Kyle Little.
Little was serving a life term for murdering Lauren Jones and leaving her body on a Twiggs County roadside in 2017, after the two rode around smoking meth with Little’s brother, Timothy Blake Little, and his girlfriend, Heather Nicole Tate. A member of the “ghostface gangsters” prison gang, William Little had already fought with Silvers and sent him to the prison infirmary with stab wounds. But for “some inexplicable reason,” as the complaint recalled, Silvers was returned to the same cell.
When the prisoners started fighting again, Hatcher was among the guards who responded. Silvers reportedly implored them, “Please get me out of here! Please separate us!” Agreed Little, “You gotta get him out of there before I do something to him.” To which Hatcher replied, “Y’all gotta get along. I’m about to go home, and I don’t have time for this.” The guards then left, and Little beat and stabbed Silvers, hogtying him to his bunk before shoving a bag over his head and suffocating him to death.
DOC settled the suit in June 2023 for $750,000, inclusive of costs and fees for Plaintiffs’ attorneys from Eshman Begnaud LLP in Atlanta, according to a statement the firm issued. See: Bartley v. Hatcher, USDC (M.D. Ga.), Case No. 5:22-cv-00126. Silvers’ killing was one of 57 DOC homicides in 2020 and 2021, a nearly 300% increase over 2018 and 2019, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Sep. 2022, p.1.]
Additional sources: WALB, WMAZ, WXGA
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