Louisville jail guards engaged in misconduct amid surge in deaths

Jul 21, 2023

Between November 2021 and July 2023, 15 people died while in the custody of the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections.

In that same period, 16 jail employees — almost all of them officers — were fired or resigned in lieu of termination as a result of misconduct, discipline records obtained by The Courier Journal under Kentucky’s open records law show.

As people were dying at LMDC — largely by suicides and overdoses — officers were allegedly involved in plots to smuggle contraband into the troubled downtown jail, the documents show.

Others were engaging in inappropriate relationships with incarcerated people, receiving phone calls from them and having romantic and sexually explicit conversations.

There were also excessive and improper uses of force, with officers at one point dragging a handcuffed man through a puddle of urine.

Between staff, there were repeated incidents of sexual harassment that, investigators concluded, created a hostile work environment for women working at the jail.

“We’ve always heard of misconduct going on, from sexual harassment to potentially officers bringing in contraband,” said Kungu Njuguna, a policy strategist with the ACLU of Kentucky. “It is great to see that there has been some accountability for those incidences and that [LMDC Director Jerry Collins] is willing to fire folks and change the culture within LMDC.”

Metro Corrections turned down a request to interview Collins, who took over in April 2022.

However, speaking to The Courier Journal in June, Collins portrayed the terminations and resignations in lieu of termination as part of an effort to change the culture at LMDC.

“A lot of folks that didn’t need to be here were being ... let go,” he said. “That stuff’s not fun for me. But for the good of the folks that are working here, we want that environment.”

In April 2022, shortly after Collins started and a few weeks after another overdose death at LMDC, Officer Cynthia Kosman was texting with an acquaintance of an incarcerated person about meeting up.

“Dude just called me,” the acquaintance wrote to Kosman, according to investigators. “I’ma meet up with him when he get off then wen u get off u gotta come meet me so I can give u the bag and the bread.”

Kosman told her she’d meet up after work, telling the woman it was a 40-minute drive for her.

The woman wrote to Kosman that she had never done anything similar before, "... and I’ma b honest with you I’m kinda nervous.”

Investigators said the acquaintance and the incarcerated person had had “numerous jail phone calls” where they discussed Kosman smuggling contraband into the facility.

Later, Kosman would deny there was a plot to smuggle contraband.

“I did meet up with her, but I got food, because she worked at a restaurant,” Kosman told investigators. “There was no bag or bread.”

The day after those text exchanges about the meet up, Kosman texted the acquaintance, writing “can you let him know it’s NOT happening anytime soon. It’s HOT outside. The stars look great under a microscope.”

According to an internal affairs investigation, Kosman appeared to develop a romantic relationship with the incarcerated man in this case and told investigators she knew him for two years before joining LMDC.

When he was held at Oldham County’s jail at one point, she transferred money to his mother for his commissary account and video chatted with him while in her LMDC uniform and on break.

Investigators said Kosman communicated with friends, family and acquaintances of six different incarcerated people — as well as with people locked up directly.

Over the span of nearly three years, her phone received 96 calls from incarcerated people, according to LMDC investigators.

Another incarcerated person, in an April 26, 2022, phone call with his child’s mother, discussed getting a package for Kosman to pick up and bring into the jail. The pair used a nickname investigators said referred to Kosman and mentioned her phone number. They talked about getting Kosman a package with tobacco, matches and Suboxone to bring into the jail.

Kosman, 29, would deny smuggling drugs into the jail. An incarcerated person told Louisville Metro Police investigators that she never brought anything into the jail and that she wanted to be paid for smuggling contraband.

Kosman resigned from LMDC on Feb. 13.

Two months later, she was arrested for promoting contraband, conspiring to promote contraband and official misconduct. According to court records, she pleaded guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge of official misconduct and had her contraband charges dismissed.

She was sentenced to conditional discharge, meaning she will not be incarcerated unless she faces additional charges or violates conditions. As part of those conditions, Kosman is not to seek employment with any law enforcement agency.

In response to a request for comment from The Courier Journal, Casey McCall, an attorney for Kosman, said “there is no evidence of promoting contraband.”

Kosman was not the only jail employee allegedly involved in plots to smuggle contraband.

In 2022, LMDC investigators listened to phone calls between an incarcerated person and a civilian employee, where the pair discussed the jail employee bringing a “present” inside the jail. In one call, the incarcerated person told the employee the “package will be small and to put it in (a body cavity).” They suggested the employee pass it to them through a food slot on a cell door.

That employee resigned in June 2022.

There is no indication in the findings summary provided to The Courier Journal that investigators probed whether drugs or other contraband were smuggled into the jail. Instead, LMDC determined the employee had violated the jail’s employee code of ethics and conduct.

In late December, LMDC investigators received another tip an officer was smuggling drugs.

They found phone calls from an incarcerated man to her while she was off the clock. They also found phone calls between that incarcerated man and an unidentified person where the pair discussed smuggling “jumpsuits” — a term LMDC said is slang for Suboxone, a combination of two drugs that helps reduce the severity of opioid withdrawal.

The officer resigned within days of the probe. While investigators determined she had an inappropriate relationship with an incarcerated person, there is no indication in the documents provided to The Courier Journal they looked into whether she conspired to smuggle drugs into the facility.

On June 23, 2022 — just three weeks after LMDC Officer Ramon Skaggs was found to have sexually harassed a colleague by running his hands through her hair without permission — he became the subject of another sexual harassment probe.

This time, however, it was five additional women describing how Skaggs had touched their hair.

LMDC investigators dismissed the allegations of three of the women, finding no evidence the events occurred and in one determining the contact to be consensual after reviewing sexually explicit text messages between a woman and Skaggs.

However, investigators concluded Skaggs had inappropriately touched two women.

One, a nurse, described the fear she felt after Skaggs touched her hair when he allegedly followed her into a hallway that had no cameras.

“I thought I was going to have a panic attack and die right there, because I didn’t know what his intentions were,” she told investigators.

Another, a fellow corrections officer, said Skaggs told her he had a “hair fetish,” although Skaggs denied saying this in interviews with investigators.

“It does not appear that Officer Skaggs conducted himself in a respectful and courteous manner with these individuals or in a way that could promote mutual respect between them,” investigators wrote. “It is reasonable to believe that the inappropriate behavior of Officer Skaggs would interfere with their job performance and create an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment for them.”

Collins terminated Skaggs in February. Separately, Skaggs is being sued by the woman who brought forth the earlier harassment investigation.

An attorney for Skaggs did not respond to requests for comment.

In an April report commissioned by Metro Council, former FBI agent David Beyer wrote that "there seems to have developed a culture whereby sexual harassment is not seen as inappropriate" at LMDC.

One of the women that LMDC determined Skaggs had inappropriately touched also launched a complaint against another officer over harassment, saying he picked her up and physically carried her away after she told an incarcerated work aide to move away from a cell’s food slot, fearing they could be moving contraband.

In picking her up, the officer said her colleague “grabbed me through the legs, had his forearm sitting on my vaginal area, and his hand grabbed my inner thigh.”

Investigators wrote the officer’s action “created a hostile work environment.” He was terminated in November.

Another officer, a white woman, resigned in lieu of termination after she was accused of using a racial slur against another corrections officer. She denied using a slur, but according to investigators she “admitted she says a lot of inappropriate stuff while goofing off that if said to the right person could be taken racial.”

LMDC officers were also terminated for using excessive force on people under their watch.

In a December 2021 incident, an officer struck an incarcerated man “approximately” 40 times in the head and body and “made little effort to temper the amount of force.” Investigators wrote he did not give the man time to comply with his orders to surrender his hands and that the incarcerated man was “attempting to protect himself from the barrage of strikes by covering his head, the main target of the strikes.”

Investigators noted that the officer involved, Daniel Wells, was a member of LMDC’s Special Operations Response Team, which is tasked with handling disruptive prisoners and unrest.

The case, investigators said, was referred to the FBI, who “returned” it to LMDC in January of this year. Wells resigned in June.

The man who was subjected to the beating filed a federal lawsuit against LMDC, Wells and other officers. In that lawsuit, the man states that officers threatened him, telling him if he told a nurse treating him how he got injured, they would beat him again. The lawsuit claims that despite a nurse determining the man “potentially had broken ribs and head trauma,” he was not sent to a hospital for a week.

Attorneys for Wells did not respond to requests for comment.

Other officers lost their jobs over uses of force, as well.

In March of this year, a lieutenant used force on an incarcerated person and forced him to the ground after claiming he spit in his face. Investigators, however, determined it was “more likely than not” that the lieutenant was not spit on after reviewing video footage of the incident.

The lieutenant was not wearing a body camera at the time, telling investigators it had gone missing a few weeks prior.

In May, Collins terminated him.

In a third incident that occurred in March 2022, two officers handcuffed an incarcerated man and dragged him through a puddle of urine on the floor of a cell. Investigators found the man did not resist being handcuffed and concluded that “it is more likely than not” the dragging of the incarcerated person through urine was premeditated.

Another officer sounded the alarm on the misconduct. Had he not, investigators wrote, “this incident may have not ever been reported nor discovered.”

The two officers involved in that incident resigned in July 2022.

Some of the documents obtained by The Courier Journal outlined misconduct that was not related to use of force, smuggling contraband or harassment.

One officer resigned after an investigation found he regularly skipped his shifts to work at area Kroger supermarkets. He resigned in November 2022.

Another officer was terminated after being pulled over in Indiana with marijuana in their car. He claimed it was not his, but then failed a drug test and was terminated in February.

Asked by investigators why he failed the drug test, the officer said: “Just seeing those deaths in the jail and going home, still seeing the same thing, because I’ve still got family overdosing, and I’ve still got family killing their selves.”

Reach reporter Josh Wood at [email protected] or on Twitter at @JWoodJourno.