Family members of people who died in the Tarrant County jail were in Austin on Thursday to plead with members of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards to take action and help find answers about what happened to their loved ones.
It was Tamra Ramsey’s first time to speak before the commission. Her husband, Vernon Ramsey, died in the Tarrant County jail in December.
She told the commissioners that her husband suffered “superficial medical care, constant pain, poor nutrition, high levels of stress, a full body allergic reaction to unwashed jumpers and severe sleep deprivation.”
Vernon Ramsey was arrested in September on charges of child sexual assault. The Tarrant County district attorney sought to indict him on the charges a week after his death.
Ramsey begged her husband to file a grievance with the jail administration, but he was hesitant out of fear of retaliation. When she finally convinced him to do so, he was told the jail was out of the forms, she said.
She emailed a complaint to the jail commission on Nov. 2. She did not receive a response, but her husband was given a form the next day, she said.
“Thank you for making sure he had a form,” she said. “It didn’t really help.”
Ramsey challenged the medical examiner’s findings that diabetes played a part in his death. The medical examiner ruled that it was a secondary cause of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
“He did not have diabetes, but it’s listed as a significant contributing factor,” she said. “In my opinion, the contributing factors were the appalling conditions and medical neglect in the jail.”
Jail medical staff did not provide him medications in a timely or adequate manner, she said.
“His death was ruled natural,” she said. “His death was preventable. If we had $600,000 in assets for bail, I could have saved his life, and he could have a chance to go to trial and prove his innocence from 15-year-old allegations that had been investigated and dropped.”
The Star-Telegram reached out to the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office and the medical examiner’s office for comment, but did not receive a response.
The John Peter Smith Health Network, which employs the jail medical staff, said after publication that it is not able to provide information about individual patients due to state and federal privacy laws.
Jail commission Executive Director Brandon Wood did not respond to a request for comment.
For Cassandra Johnson, it was her third trip to Austin to speak to the jail commission. Her son, Trelynn Wormley, died in the Tarrant County jail in July 2022. The medical examiner ruled his death the result of a fentanyl overdose.
“We need leaders that can hear our voices,” she said. “We need leaders who can mentally remove their thoughts in order to hear what’s being spoken.”
Johnson alleged that drugs ‘run rampant’ in Tarrant County jail facilities in a lawsuit filed in July 2024.
Her son was one of over two dozen detainees whose deaths were not independently investigated by an outside law enforcement agency per state law in recent years.
Those deaths were reviewed by the Fort Worth Police Department, despite police officers being listed on the Sheriff’s Office’s custody death notification roster, a list of pre-approved third-party investigating agencies sent to the jail commission. The Police Department said it did not know how the officers’ names ended up on the roster.
A Star-Telegram investigation from February found that by having sheriff’s offices submit the rosters, the jail commission had been violating the Sandra Bland Act since it went into effect in 2017.
The Sandra Bland Act, named after a Black woman who died in jail near Houston after being arrested over a traffic violation, sought to enshrine additional layers of accountability for how inmates are treated in jail, particularly those with mental health or intellectual disabilities. The law requires the state’s regulatory agency, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, to “appoint” third-party law enforcement to investigate deaths “as soon as possible.”
Johnson urged the commission to hold the Sheriff’s Office accountable for her son’s death. She and others from Tarrant County made similar calls at the previous meeting in February, asking the commission to deem the Tarrant County out of compliance with minimum jail standards. Wood told the Star-Telegram then that the Sheriff’s Office had not committed any administrative errors that would warrant a notice of noncompliance.
In March, the Sheriff’s Office cited a “clerical error” for its failure to report the Feb. 8 death of Charles Stephen Johnson to the attorney general’s office within 30 days as state law requires.
“I need this agency to do their job,” Johnson said. “You’re supposed to ensure independent investigations, and you failed. You failed me. You failed his daughter. You failed our family.”
By Cody Copeland, Fort Worth Star-Telegram