WARNING: Distressing content
An US inmate who allegedly died after being tortured and sexually assaulted two weeks before his release posted a haunting last message on Facebook, asking people to “pray for me” as he looked forward to “coming home.”
Daniel Williams, 22, a dad of two infants, was near the end of his one-year jail stint for theft when he was found unresponsive on October 22 at Staton Correctional Facility. He died two weeks later in a hospital, officials said.
A week earlier, he took to Facebook to express his relief that his time behind bars was coming to a close, the New York Postreports.
“How every body doing I ain’t got to [sic] much longer left pray for me I’m coming home better then [sic] I was before drug free it’s been a crazy ride 3 different prisons now. It’s almost over,” he wrote.
It was unclear how he managed to go online while incarcerated.
Mr Williams’ death has been reported as a “possible inmate-on-inmate assault,” according to the Alabama Department of Corrections.
His family claims they were not informed until October 25 that he was brain dead at the hospital — and that warden Joseph Headley blamed it on a drug overdose.
But Mr Williams’ stepmum, Taylor Bostic, and dad, Terry, later learned he had been kidnapped and raped or “tied up, beaten and rented out for two to three days” by another inmate, according to the Alabama Political Reporter, which cited prison sources who claimed such violence was common there.
Mr Williams was taken off life support on November 5 and died four days later.
Corrections officials confirmed that he was the victim of a “possible inmate-on-inmate assault” that left him “unresponsive.”
“The decision was made to transfer him to an area hospital for further evaluation and treatment. He remained at the hospital until the family decided to remove him from life support,” DOC rep Kelly Windham Betts said in a statement.
His fiancee, Amber Williams, told WVTM: “I went to the hospital and the nurses told me that he was assaulted and beaten really badly.
“And when I went into the room, had bruises all down his arm, like down to his fingers, he had bruises over here. He had cuts up and down and bruises on his legs. And it was bad,” she told the outlet.
Amber added about their child together: “How am I supposed to tell her about her daddy? Like, why isn’t he here? Why didn’t he ever come home?”
Terry told WVTM that his son had very little brain function left, so he was taken off life support.
“I called the warden, and I cussed him. I said, ‘Dude, you know this is not an overdose case? You know exactly what happened. How is this crap going to happen like this?’ Well, it’s under investigation right now. And that’s the last time I even talked to the warden,” he told the outlet.
An official with an Alabama non-profit law and justice group said what happened to Mr Williams is all too common.
“The brutality, the violence, the dysfunction, it’s not an aberration anymore. It’s a feature of the Alabama Department of Corrections. It is our system,” Carla Crowder of Alabama Appleseed told WVTM.
“And so, the kind of horrific deaths that we’ve seen, what happened to Mr. Williams is not even uncommon anymore,” she added.
Meanwhile, the grieving family said the Department of Corrections will perform an autopsy — but they would like to have an independent one, which they can’t afford.
“I set up a GoFundMe account to get him cremated, it’s like a thousand bucks. I wanted him to be buried by my mum, but that’s, like, seven grand, you know? I know I can’t afford that,” Terry said.
This article originally appeared in the New York Post and has been reproduced with permission.