Impoverished Ohio County Gets New Jail Space After Settling Suit for Bloody Detainee Assault
On June 18, 2024, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) announced $32 million in state funding for a new regional jail to serve Jackson, Lawrence, and Pike Counties. That promises significant savings for Pike County, among the state’s smallest and poorest; with no jail of its own, it currently spends about $2 million annually to house an average of 40 detainees in neighboring county lockups.
Pike County citizens can only hope the new jail does a better job than County sheriff’s deputies did with Thomas Friend; as PLN reported, Friend, then 27, was handcuffed and strapped in a holding area restraint chair for a bloody hour-long beatdown in November 2019. Former Dep. Jeremy C. Mooney hit Friend so hard that he broke his own hand—an injury for which Mooney, now 49, even filed a workman’s compensation claim. It was unclear if that was paid, but Mooney was charged and sentenced for the assault to 100 months in federal prison in March 2024. [See: PLN, June 2024, p.24.]
Mooney’s then-supervisor, former Sgt. William Stansberry, Jr., 47, was initially put on a two-week leave and demoted, before he also was charged. At sentencing in March 2024 for failing to intervene in the assault, he was handed a six-month federal prison term, followed by three years of supervised release, plus a $100 special assessment. See: United States v. Mooney, USDC (S.D. Ohio), Case No. 2:22-cr-00201.
The alleged crime that incarcerated Friend was reported in November 2019 by an unidentified woman who saw him getting into cars and honking the horns. After throwing a credit card at responding deputies, Friend was arrested and assaulted—because, then-Sheriff Jim Nelson said, he had been “disruptive.” A year later, when a civil rights complaint was filed for his Estate in federal court for the Southern District of Ohio, Friend was dead of unreported causes. That case was reportedly settled in 2022 by County commissioners, who stonewalled PLN’s request for details. The Estate was represented in the suit by Wheelersburg attorney Rick L. Faulkner. See: Friend v. Pike Cty., USDC (S.D. Ohio), Case No. 2:20-cv-05924.
Nelson replaced corrupt former Sheriff Charlie Reader, who gained fame during the investigation into a 2016 mass slaying that left eight members of the Rhoden family dead. Reader later spent 42 months in state prison after pleading guilty in 2021 to rigging auctions for seized vehicles and stealing seized drug money to fuel his gambling habit.
Additional sources: Scioto Valley Guardian, Vice, WCHS, WKRC
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login