Female prisoner’s body was found decomposing in hot cell
When Sheqweetta Vaughan gave birth to a healthy baby boy at Southern Regional Medical Center in January, the joyous occasion was short-lived. Vaughan had just entered the state prison system to begin a two-year sentence, and so, per hospital regulations, she could spend only a few days with her newborn son.
As it turned out, it would be her only time with him.
Six months after giving birth, Vaughn became yet another statistic in the Georgia prison death toll, dying at Lee Arrendale State Prison under conditions that dramatically show how, even with heightened attention from lawmakers, the Department of Corrections remains mired in dysfunction.
The GBI has labeled the cause of Vaughan’s death as undetermined. But the circumstances surrounding it, pieced together by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through documents and interviews, reveal a 32-year-old woman, six months postpartum, dying alone in a sweltering hot cell and nobody doing anything about it until her body had already begun to decompose.
When Habersham County’s deputy coroner, Kenneth Franklin, was summoned to Lee Arrendale shortly after noon on July 9, he found a grim scene. According to his report, Vaughan was sprawled on the floor of her cell, and her body was already showing signs of decomposition, including “a strong odor of decay.” The temperature in the cell was in the 90s, and there was little ventilation, the report said.
The coroner found no signs of trauma and no evidence of drugs or other forms of contraband.
Vaughan was in a segregation unit in which prisoners occupy single cells and are supposed to be under regular supervision. GDC procedure requires officers in those units to look in on prisoners at least every 30 minutes and sign door sheets attesting that they did so. But the level of decomposition cited in the coroner’s report raises the possibility that such checks weren’t made in the hours before Vaughan’s death _ or, if they were, evidence of death was ignored.
Dr. Paul Uribe, a former chief of pathology at Fort Benning who now serves as the deputy chief medical examiner in Fort Bend County, Texas, outside Houston, said the heat in the cell would have accelerated the decomposition. Even so, Vaughan likely had been dead at least a day before paramedics were called, he said.
“There was no checking every 30 minutes,” Uribe said. “That degree of decomposition doesn’t come within 30 minutes, within an hour or within two hours.”
Uribe, a licensed physician in Georgia and other states, has also investigated deaths for the state of Mississippi and Clark County, Nev. He was asked by the AJC to respond to the circumstances of Vaughan’s death. He is not involved in investigating it.
When Vaughan’s family made funeral arrangements, they were told by the funeral home that her body was so badly decomposed it couldn’t be properly prepared for a viewing.
“It’s inhumane,” said Tamecka Vaughan, an older sister who lives in New York. “Nobody should be treated like that. (Prison workers) wouldn’t want their family members treated like that. Why would they treat anybody else like that?”
In response to questions for this story, GDC spokesperson Joan Heath said Vaughan’s death is being investigated by the agency’s Office of Professional Standards “as undetermined and believed to be natural” pending autopsy results. She did not address whether proper checks had been made.
More questions
Vaughan’s death is yet another troubling incident for the GDC, which earlier this year received a $600 million infusion of new spending to deal with massive understaffing, insufficient security and other issues. The money was appropriated at the direction of Gov. Brian Kemp after a two-year investigation by the AJC revealed record homicides and rampant corruption in the prison system.
Lee Arrendale, located in Alto, has long been the largest of Georgia’s four prisons for women. In January 2023, the GDC announced that prisoners at Lee Arrendale would be transferred to a newer facility in Telfair County. But more than 1,000 women remain at the aging facility as transfers have occurred only intermittently.
Vaughan’s death also marks the second known instance in the last two years in which the body of a Georgia prisoner was discovered decomposing in a cell. In April 2023, the AJC reported that Anthony Zino, 71, was dead for five days at Smith State Prison before officers noticed after he was allegedly strangled to death by his cellmate and stuffed inside a mattress. Zino’s body was so badly decomposed that two body bags were needed to remove it.
Vaughan’s case raises the additional issue of how the GDC cares for women dealing with the physical and mental stresses of childbirth. Like most Georgia prisons, Lee Arrendale isn’t air conditioned. It has a special living area for women who have recently given birth, and that area, known as the postpartum room, is air conditioned. But women typically aren’t allowed to spend more than six weeks there.
Vaughan’s ability to deal with the heat may also have been compromised by her medications. According to Franklin’s report, Vaughan was being treated by a prison psychiatrist and had been prescribed buspirone, an anti-anxiety drug, and haloperidol, an antipsychotic. One of the side effects of haloperidol is an increased risk of heat stroke.
“Nobody should be put in a solitary cell that’s over 90 degrees,” said Amy Ard, executive director of Motherhood Beyond Bars, a Georgia nonprofit that provides support for women who give birth while incarcerated, as well as support for their infants. “But this particular woman was really at high risk. They had already diagnosed her with a psychotic disorder. She’s six months postpartum. That’s not someone who belongs in a cell by themselves, especially if (the GDC) cannot guarantee someone is going to be checking regularly.”
`A lot of grief’
The crime that sent Vaughan to prison, homicide by vehicle, was as much a devastating personal tragedy as it was a criminal offense.
On a December morning in 2020, the car Vaughan was driving spun out on 285 South at Campbellton Road, killing her 3-year-old son, Sameze. The, vehicle, a 2017 Chevy Cruze, hit the outside guard rail, skidded across the highway and hit the median. As Vaughan tried to regain control, the car was struck by another vehicle.
Sameze was in the back seat and not buckled in. He died three days later from blunt force injuries to his head and torso. Vaughan suffered a serious head injury as well. Another son, then 8, suffered minor injuries.
The accident occurred two weeks after Vaughan’s 67-year-old mother died from complications from diabetes.
“Shequeetta was living a lot of grief, and the biggest one was the death of her own child,” said Rodderick Jackson, a Fairburn resident who has since become the older boy’s foster parent.
Vaughan, then living in Jonesboro, was subsequently indicted on a myriad of charges, including cruelty to children. According to the indictment, she was driving 76 mph, 11 miles over the speed limit, and was under the influence of fentanyl and anti-anxiety medications.
When Vaughan violated terms of her bond in May 2024, she was booked into the Fulton County Jail, and that’s where she participated in Ard’s program.
According to Ard, Vaughan never said anything about the baby’s father. She spoke of having a man “on the outside,” but he wasn’t the father, Ard said.
Vaughan told Ard that she didn’t expect to spend any time in prison and would be able to deliver the baby in a place of her choosing.
But that proved to be a serious miscalculation. When Vaughan appeared before Superior Court Judge C.I. McBurney last October, she accepted a non-negotiated plea requiring her to spend two years inside the GDC and another six on probation.
On Dec. 18, she entered the prison system. Less than three weeks later, she had the baby.
Death in segregation
According to a GDC incident report, Vaughan was moved to segregation at Lee Arrendale in late May after an altercation with two other prisoners turned physical, and it was there, in cell H-19, that she died.
Heather Parker, a prisoner at Lee Arrendale, told the AJC that she occupied the cell next to Vaughan’s during the week Vaughan died. The heat in the unit that week was “miserable, way more than usual,” she said.
Parker said she heard Vaughan call out for medical attention about 6 a.m. on July 8. She said she never heard from Vaughan again, and, as far as she could tell, no one responded to Vaughan’s request for help.
At 10:45 a.m. on July 9, an officer at Lee Arrendale called Habersham County 911 to report that an inmate was unconscious and not breathing. The dispatcher asked the officer, James Gerald, whether anyone had started CPR. Gerald replied: “Yeah, we got medical on the scene.”
EMTs were sent to the prison. But as soon as they arrived, they reported that the prisoner was dead. Contact the coroner, they said.
In addition to the smell emanating from Vaughan’s body, Franklin’s report noted several other signs of decomposition: Blisters had formed on the right thigh, chest and arms, evidence of gas buildup. The eyes were swollen and the skin on the eyelids was slipping. Green streaks had appeared on the arms, a phenomenon known as marbling that stems from bacteria spreading throughout the body.
Franklin wrote that prison personnel told him Vaughan was found dead at 10:40 that morning and that video surveillance showed her being checked at 10:08. The report did not speculate on how long Vaughan had been dead, but in an interview, Franklin said it’s possible that she was alive at 10 that morning.
“Normally, when you see what I saw, it means she’d been dead two, two and a half days,” he said. “But when you have no ventilation and that kind of temperature, you can have a situation where the person hadn’t been deceased very long (before decomposition set in).”
The GBI conducted an autopsy and informed Franklin last Wednesday that it could not determine the cause or manner of Vaughan’s death. The GBI said it could not provide the autopsy and toxicology reports to the AJC because they are “part of a pending investigation or prosecution.”
A child’s future
The baby, now eight months old, is in the care of a College Park woman, Nigeria Harris, whose brother is the father of Vaughan’s eldest child. The older boy’s father is serving a 50-year prison sentence for a sex crime and has been incarcerated since 2013, according to the GDC’s offender website.
Harris said the Division of Family and Children Services placed the baby with her and she expects to raise him.
“(DFCS) called me one day and said that was Sheqweetta’s request,” she told the AJC, adding that she has been vetted by the agency.
However, a member of Vaughan’s family in New York, Rita Thomas, an aunt, is in court seeking custody of the baby as well as the other boy, now 13. A retired nurse, Thomas is the sister of Vaughan’s father, who is deceased. The boys should be with her, a blood relative, she said.
“We are not strangers or foster parents,” she said. “We are family.”
Ard said her organization is ready to help anyone caring for Vaughan’s baby. But she worries about what the future might hold for him with his father unknown and his mother now gone.
This is a child born “with the deck stacked against him,” she said.
AJC data reporter Jennifer Peebles contributed to this story.
The AJC Prison Corruption Series
Read an ongoing series about Georgia’s prison system from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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About the Author
Danny Robbins is a long-time investigative reporter who has worked for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Associated Press, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and other media outlets. He was part of the team at the AJC that was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in national reporting in 2017 for its investigation of sexually abusive doctors.
