by Abbey Kim, Arkansas Advocate
March 31, 2026
This article was produced as a collaboration between Arkansas Advocate and the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of death and mental health distress. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
The last time Brian Lewis saw his dad, Rodricus Lewis, they shared a meal.
“That was kind of our thing, eating together,” Lewis, 26, said. Over chicken wings and tenders, they’d debate the merits of their favorite basketball teams, the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Golden State Warriors.
He remembers the cold shock of learning his dad had died at age 47 in the Union County Jail in El Dorado in late 2023. Rodricus Lewis had spent 10 months in jail awaiting an evaluation about whether he was fit to stand trial. He had been charged with arson but had not been convicted of any crime. An autopsy by the Arkansas State Crime Lab listed his official cause of death as ischemic heart disease complicated by COVID-19.
Particularly concerning to his son was the medical examiner’s description of Rodricus Lewis’ body as “cachetic,” a clinical term conveying extreme weakening and weight loss. He had lost more than 50 pounds during the 10 months he awaited trial. At nearly 6 feet tall, he weighed only 128 pounds at the time of his death.
At first, Brian Lewis found the circumstances of his father’s death unfathomable. But as he began doing research online, he found reports of dozens of others who had died in jails around the country after losing shocking amounts of weight.
Lewis now believes that his father’s death is part of an alarming national pattern illuminated for the first time by “Starved For Care,” an investigation by the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale that identified more than 50 people across the United States who died of starvation, dehydration and other forms of neglect in local jails. Like Rodricus Lewis, many of those who died fell through the cracks of under-resourced mental health care and state hospital systems. In jails, which experts say exacerbate mental health symptoms, they deteriorated and often ceased to eat or drink, a common symptom of severe mental illness. Life-saving interventions came too late or not at all.
Two years before Lewis died, several counties away, 51-year-old Larry Price Jr. died of acute dehydration and malnutrition in the Sebastian County Jail. Price’s family received $6 million in a settlement split between the county and the jail’s private medical care provider, TK Health, which was then called Turn Key Health Clinics LLC. (Neither party admitted wrongdoing as part of the settlement.) TK Health is also the health care provider at the Union County Jail, where Lewis died.
Learning about Price’s death and others like it changed the way the younger Lewis viewed his dad’s passing.
“It was almost like his outcome was predetermined,” he said. “When he got arrested, that was pretty much his sentence right there.”
The Constitution requires that people accused of crimes receive speedy trials, due process, access to counsel and adequate care. But in counties across Arkansas, criminal justice reform advocates allege, many of these rights are being violated. In August, Lewis filed a lawsuit against Union County and TK Health over his dad’s death, seeking accountability for what his family views as a failure to provide adequate medical care and living conditions.
In a statement made publicly in response to questions for this story, Union County Sheriff Charlie Phillips blamed Rodricus Lewis’ death on his “dangerous lifestyle and health decisions.”
A spokesperson for TK Health said the company cannot comment on ongoing litigation but cited its response filed in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Arkansas. In it, TK Health denies that Rodricus Lewis languished in jail, that his death was preventable and that TK Health’s medical or mental health care was substandard or caused his death.
Rodricus Lewis is one of 34 people who died in Arkansas jails in 2023, according to state death in custody disclosures filed with the Bureau of Justice Assistance. This four-part investigation from Arkansas Advocate and the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale draws on hundreds of pages of records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with more than two dozen mental health experts, law enforcement officers, affected family members and elected officials. It begins with Lewis’ story and what his death reveals about Arkansas’ overburdened jail and health care systems. What follows is an examination of Arkansas’ network of jail health care providers, the powerful financial players fueling investments in jails and prisons and the persistent lack of transparency inside these facilities. As jails become de facto psychiatric facilities, some Arkansans awaiting trial have been left vulnerable to neglect — and death.
‘He wanted to become something’
Rodricus Lewis grew up in El Dorado, a former oil boomtown in southern Arkansas that’s now home to about 16,000 residents. His mother was 18 when she gave birth to him in 1976, and she struggled with addiction, according to family members. She raised Lewis and his siblings largely as a single mom. His maternal aunt, Felecia Green, who was six years his senior, took to him as a little brother and nicknamed him Bo Weeble because he followed her everywhere.
When Lewis was young, his maternal grandparents took custody of him and his brother. As a preteen in his grandparents’ care, he found his first loves: basketball and fashion. He would shoot hoops outside their house for hours and amassed a huge collection of sports hats — mostly the Golden State Warriors and the Denver Broncos — and tennis shoes.
“He was one of the best dressers,” Green said. “I stayed busy in the mall.”
Weeks after graduating high school in the 1990s, Lewis joined the Navy. His service took him to California and Florida, as well as abroad.
“Growing up, we were struggling a lot, but he wanted to become something,” his younger sister Checoata “Coco” Levingston said. “That’s why he ended up joining the Navy and going to do better for himself.”
While stationed in California, Lewis met his first wife, who gave birth to their eldest son, Brian. Brian Lewis remembers time with his dad through the activities they both loved: visiting arcades, dining out, playing basketball, go-karting.
“He was always trying to make somebody laugh. He was just a big clown,” he said, “really just a super gentle human being.” Brian Lewis grew up and moved away with his mom when his parents separated. He called his dad weekly to catch up.
After Rodricus Lewis retired from the Navy, he moved back to Arkansas to be closer to his childhood home. In 2021, his grandfather, who had raised him as a son and encouraged his military service, died. Lewis struggled with his mental health, family members said. Relatives noticed him talking to himself.
“He just started drifting off a bit,” Levingston said. “He would say things that were just off the wall.”
Green remembered attending church together and watching Lewis march around like a soldier. He would call himself “Rod the Truth Speaker” and explain erratic behavior by saying “God told me to.”
By 2022, Lewis was cycling through inpatient treatment centers, hospitals and the Union County Jail. Records from that August show he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by clinicians at Rivendell Behavioral Health Services. His mother petitioned to have him civilly committed and treated for mental health issues at a local Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.
In October, the trailer where Lewis was living caught fire, and he was airlifted out. He cursed at his family in the hospital, Green said, and accused them and doctors of conspiring to kill him. He was sent to Conway Behavioral Health Hospital but was quickly discharged, she said. In December, he was detained again, this time for walking naked through strangers’ properties in freezing temperatures.
Lewis landed in jail for the final time in January 2023 after allegedly setting fire to his family home. By that point, his relatives were exhausted and unsure how to best care for him. His bond, set at $350,000, was more than they could afford.
“The only thing we can call is the police: ‘Help him, get help, do something with him,’” Green explained, “because we didn’t know no other way.”
A larger crisis
“This is a problem that we’re having, that I’m having,” Ricky Roberts, the Union County Sheriff during Lewis’ incarceration, told his family members after his death, in a conversation Green recorded. “We have people in here that don’t deserve to be in here. And Rodricus was one of them. I’m sorry to say, this is not a mental institution. This is for criminals. This is not for people who need help.” Roberts did not respond to a request for comment.
In many counties across the country, jails have become de facto repositories for people with serious mental health issues. In the U.S., people with mental illnesses are 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than they are to be hospitalized. Nearly half of the people incarcerated in local jails have a history of mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
“Arkansas has a tendency to warehouse their mentally ill in county jails,” Erik Heipt, the attorney for Larry Price Jr.’s family, said. Hundreds of people are detained in Arkansas’ county jails awaiting psychiatric treatment or evaluation, according to data from the Arkansas Department of Human Services. “And the county jails are not equipped to handle people with severe mental illnesses.”
In Arkansas, more than 1 million people live in a community without enough mental health professionals, according to NAMI research. Seventeen Arkansas counties, including Union County, are marked as health professional shortage areas by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. Many of the more than 500,000 Arkansans who live with mental illness struggle to obtain services, according to Tricia Clem, director of the Arkansas chapter of NAMI.
“Pick your point along the need for mental health care — whether it’s preventative care, acute care, long-term care, we are chronically short on ability to meet those needs and demands,” said Holly Dickson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, “and this is why jails and prisons have served as a very inadequate backstop for that lack of resources.”
This reliance on jails to house people in need of mental health care only exacerbates other problems within the state’s jail system, namely overcrowding and understaffing.
“You don’t have sufficient staff on the medical mental health side, and you don’t have sufficient staff on the correction officers’ side,” Dickson said. “The inevitable happens: people suffer and die.”
How we reported “Jailed in Crisis”
Dickson said this system violates the rights of people with mental illness and puts an unfair burden on law enforcement to fill gaps in social services.
In 2023, the year Lewis died, the Union County Jail had a daily average of two unfilled staff positions, according to an annual inspection report by the Criminal Detention Facilities Review Committees, the group within the Arkansas Department of Public Safety that inspects county jails. The report noted that the jail can struggle to meet daily goals when vacancies occur.
Sebastian County Chief Deputy Sheriff John Miller said in an interview that jail staff jobs have a high turnover rate, as people get burnt out or move on to law enforcement jobs in cities and states that pay more. The Union County Jail has a stated operational capacity of about 180 incarcerated people, but its population often exceeds that. In 2023, the jail’s average population was 185, and hit a peak of 210.
In 2021, when Larry Price Jr. died in Sebastian County, the average daily population was 371, nearly 16% above the jail’s operational capacity of 320. Miller, the Sebastian County deputy sheriff, remembered once being short 16 staff members. Shortages at that level lead to errors, he said.
“You’ve got checks being missed. You’ve got legitimate cell inspections not being done properly. You don’t have the true overwatch of the inmates during the day-to-day activities,” Miller said. “It’s a snowball effect, and one thing will roll into something else. It’s a recipe for disaster.”
Waiting for care
Rodricus Lewis filed at least 40 grievances and requests during his time in jail as he awaited trial and evaluation. These requests were initially comprehensible, but they became increasingly difficult to understand and spiraled into inscrutable sets of letters and numbers, according to a review by the Advocate and the Lab.
On-site nurse notes from July 2023 — seven months into his detention — recorded Lewis sitting barefoot in a cell flooded with water speaking nonsensically. He was taken for a “crisis consultation” that month at Newhaven Counseling & Health Services in El Dorado, where a provider noted he had an existing diagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum along with other unspecified psychotic disorders. The provider added that he was “gravely disabled” and recommended psychiatric hospitalization.
On July 29, Lewis entered The BridgeWay, an inpatient psychiatric facility in Little Rock. He exhibited “acute psychosis” and was deemed a risk to himself or others if discharged, according to provider records referenced in his family’s legal complaint. On Aug. 3, a jail nurse wrote an internal patient note, reviewed by the Lab and Advocate, that BridgeWay intended to place a 45-day hold to keep him in psychiatric care and level out his mental state with medication.
But on that same day, Lewis was returned to jail. BridgeWay urged jail staff to administer nine medications to him after his discharge. The family’s lawsuit alleges none were administered. The county’s legal team did not respond to requests for comment.
When someone suffering from a mental illness is detained in a county jail, their options for mental health care immediately shrink. Lewis’ public defender filed a motion in April, four months after his initial incarceration, to have him evaluated for fitness to proceed. That meant he was entitled to a review by a medical provider.
If Lewis was determined to be unfit to stand trial, a “restoration” procedure overseen by the Arkansas Department of Human Services would be triggered. That procedure can entail anything from a bed in the Arkansas State Hospital to visits from a psychiatrist while in jail.
Some advocates say the competency restoration process is ineffective, as people with serious mental health issues can wait years in jail for a resolution, all without having been convicted of a crime.
In February 2022, Jennifer Johnson, 47, was arrested in Benton County while experiencing a mental health crisis, according to a legal petition filed by her mother. She spent nearly two years in jail awaiting evaluation and then inpatient psychiatric treatment.
“This is an untenable position,” a lawyer for her mother wrote in a letter to the court, and “something needs to be done other than further jailing of Ms. Johnson.”
Ultimately, Johnson was deemed “unrestorable”—mentally incapable of standing trial—in October 2024. The charges against her were dropped 10 months later, and she was released from jail.
Lewis never had that chance. At the time of his death, he was four months away from his scheduled competency evaluation, according to a memorandum obtained by his family’s legal team.
Some sheriffs have expressed concern about the long wait times for mental health care in their facilities. In 2024, several members of the Arkansas Sheriffs’ Association spoke out about the nearly 500 people detained in county jails awaiting mental health evaluations or beds at the state hospital for court-ordered treatment.
“Never are they going to get better in jail if there’s truly a mental health issue — I mean it’s the worst place they could be. It’s medieval.”
– Former Sebastian County Sheriff Hobe Runion
The Department of Human Services has since piloted a secured restoration facility, a 16-bed unit intended for shorter stays and less intensive treatment that has helped decrease wait times for care, but hundreds of people are still awaiting evaluation and treatment.
Sebastian County Chief Deputy Sheriff Miller said in an interview he only knew of two incarcerated people his jail had been able to send to a psychiatric care facility or the state hospital within a year of being arrested. He said he often sees behavioral declines in those detained who are struggling with mental illness.
Hobe Runion, former sheriff of Sebastian County, has become an outspoken advocate for greater mental health resources after Larry Price Jr.’s 2021 death in the jail he ran.
“Never are they going to get better in jail if there’s truly a mental health issue — I mean it’s the worst place they could be,” Runion said. “It’s medieval.”
An overburdened public defender system exacerbates the issue. In 2024, the Arkansas Advisory Committee reported to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that public defenders in Arkansas carry an average caseload of 200 felony cases or more at any given time. This is significantly more than the most recent guidance from the American Bar Association, which recommends caseloads as low as 63 cases per year for some of the most serious felonies.
Without being convicted of any crime, Lewis spent the vast majority of his 10 months in the Union County Jail in solitary confinement. The Vera Institute of Justice found that many people with mental illnesses land in restrictive housing as a result of behaviors related to their mental illness. The United Nations considers solitary confinement for more than 15 consecutive days as a form of torture. In an isolated cell for about 300 days, Lewis sharply declined.
‘It’s almost impossible for people to grasp’
Rodricus Lewis died three days after Thanksgiving in November 2023. After his body was taken to the coroner, jail staff documented four “cell checks” in the Guardian incarcerated person log noting only “inmate and cell OK”— despite the fact that his cell was empty and he was dead.
An autopsy by the Arkansas State Crime Lab ruled his death “natural,” caused by ischemic heart disease complicated by a COVID-19 infection, with contributing factors of schizophrenia, kidney disease, diabetes and pulmonary emphysema.
“I just don’t see a lot of deaths in the jails that are happening just because of purely natural causes,” said Daniel Smolen, Brian Lewis’ attorney who has litigated jail death cases across the U.S. “It’s the delay and the denial of care that’s leading to the deaths. It’s not just that the person happened to die in the facility.”
Union County Sheriff Charlie Phillips denied wrongdoing and said in a statement that it “became obvious that Mr. (Rodricus) Lewis was suffering from mental health issues” but blamed him for being “combative and uncooperative.”
The Union County Sheriffs’ Facebook page posted Phillips’ statement after he sent it to the Advocate and the Lab in late December.
Lewis’ death still reverberates through the lives of those who loved him. Levingston, his younger sister, has kept a ficus plant from his funeral and often talks to it as if it were her brother.
Now a father himself, Brian Lewis will never get to share his parenting milestones with his dad. He remembers how much he wanted to be a grandfather.
“Eventually, I’m going to have to explain to my son how his grandfather died,” Lewis said. He has only told a few people the conditions around his father’s death. “It’s still something that I keep close to myself, just because it’s almost impossible for people to grasp — that people can actually pass away like this.”
“Jailed in Crisis” is a 4-part series.
1: Rodricus Lewis died in jail awaiting trial and treatment. His story reveals the potentially deadly outcomes of Arkansas’ underfunded mental healthcare network and overburdened criminal justice system.
3: What’s motivating an investment in jails and prisons? Industry lobbying dollars, for one. We follow the money to find out.
4: A lack of transparency in Arkansas’ jail system limits family’s abilities to understand what happened to their loved ones and, advocates say, curtails meaningful reform.
Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew DeMillo for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.