Georgia settles a suit by the family of a man killed in a state prison

Caption

The cemetery for people who die in custody of the Georgia Department of Corrections but whose bodies are never claimed, outside Reidsville, in 2022.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

A lawsuit by the family of a man killed by his cellmate while incarcerated in a Georgia prison has ended in a $4 million settlement with the state. 

David Henegar was 44 and in the Georgia Department of Corrections’ Johnson State Prison near Wrightsville in 2021 when he first began telling prison officials he was afraid his cellmate would hurt him. 

In the complaint filed two years later in Georgia’s Southern District Federal Court, attorneys for Henegar’s family describe how those concerns were ignored even after Henegar’s cellmate choked him unconscious.

A second, hourslong assault a week after the first ended in Henegar’s death.  

"His cellmate suffered from severe mental illness and psychosis, and to a pretty high degree there was not much that he could do — he or David could do, to stop this from happening,” said Henegar family attorney Rachel Brady. 

"The prison, on the other hand, and the correctional guards, had every opportunity to prevent this from happening starting weeks before the murder — and certainly while the murder was happening.”

The original filing describes testimony from other inmates at Johnson State Prison who tried to raise the alarm during the hours of the assault during which Henegar was bound hand and foot, experienced deep organ injuries and a broken neck. 

“I talked to a guy who was incarcerated in the same dorm that night and he said, ‘I've been waiting four years for somebody to ask me about this case because I think about it every day,’” Brady said. “That's how bad it was; that's how traumatic it was for everybody who had to listen to it.”

The family’s suit, originally naming Georgia Department of Corrections head Timothy Ward among the defendants, follows an argument echoing the findings of a Biden-era Department of Justice investigation into Georgia’s prison system: Prison officials are indifferent to the safety of the incarcerated, leading to violations of protections against cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“If the state is going to incarcerate people and deprive them of any opportunity to care for themselves, then with that comes the duty to keep them safe,” Brady said. “Prison officials cannot turn a blind eye to a known risk of serious harm to an inmate.”

After three years of motions and legal table setting, the suit had been set for a jury trial this spring. Brady said the judge suggested instead the state and Henegar’s attorneys come to a settlement before then. 

News of the settlement was released by Chicago-based Loevy & Loevy, the law firm for which Brady practices.

The Georgia Department of Corrections has not answered requests by GPB for comment, and agreeing to a settlement in a civil suit cannot be interpreted as an acceptance of a suit’s allegations by defendants.