Daniel Terry Williams (Williams Family). Background: The Alabama prison where Williams was fatally beaten (Alabama Department of Corrections).
The family of a man repeatedly sexually assaulted, drugged and beaten to death in a dayslong attack in an Alabama prison by a violent inmate with a documented history of sexual assaults has filed a lawsuit alleging jailers failed to prevent it and did nothing to intervene.
Daniel Terry Williams, 22, died on Nov. 9, 2023, the day he was set to be released from the Staton Correctional Facility, a beleaguered, understaffed and overcrowded medium-security prison in Elmore, about 180 miles northeast of Mobile, the lawsuit said.
“There are several unanswered questions surrounding Daniel’s death,” said Kirby Farris, an attorney for the family, in an email to Law&Crime. “The biggest priority for us — and for Daniel’s family — is getting to the bottom of this horrific situation to find some sort of healing. From there, we are set on holding the people for his death accountable.”
The lawsuit names three wardens and the commissioner for the Alabama Department of Corrections. A media representative for the Alabama Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Law&Crime.
The deadly violence is spelled out in court documents outlining the three-day assault that occurred as Williams was serving a one-year prison sentence with time served that started on July 25, 2023, after he pleaded guilty to assault and theft charges, court documents said.
By October, he was looking forward to getting out.
“How every body doing I ain’t got to much longer left pray for me I’m coming home better then i was before drug free it’s been a crazy ride 3 different prisons now. it’s almost over,” he wrote in a Facebook post on Oct. 15, the lawsuit said.
Four days later, Williams was tied up, held hostage in a corner of a housing dormitory that was not his assigned dorm, forced to consume drugs, beaten, assaulted, and repeatedly raped, court documents allege.
An inmate reported Williams’ ongoing attack to jailers on Oct. 22. Officials found Williams unresponsive in the bed of the inmate accused of leading the fatal attack. He was transported to a medical facility and a warden contacted Williams’ family, not mentioning he was attacked but saying he had overdosed on drugs, the lawsuit alleged.
At the hospital, Williams’ family saw their loved one severely beaten and with apparent restraint marks on his wrists, court documents said. Williams was taken off life support and pronounced dead on Nov. 9, 2023. He was a father of two young children.
Williams’ father, Terry Williams, told NBC News his son had been shot up with heroin and he described indentations on his head from the horrific attack.
“He had bruises, cuts,” Terry Williams said. “Looked like a mop handle went across his head a couple of times. Before he even got to the hospital, he was already gone.”
The medical examiner has ruled the death a homicide, but it’s unclear whether any charges have been filed against inmates involved, a spokesperson for the law firm handling the family’s lawsuit told Law&Crime.
Court documents detail the background of the alleged instigator, Lamont Wilson. He is described in court documents as a violent offender with nine reported sexual assaults — some involving additional violence such as stabbing — between 2017 and 2022 at five different lockups. Wilson received no disciplinary reports for these inmate-reported assaults.
“Thus, while ADOC received numerous reports of rampant sexual violence against other incarcerated men, it failed to take disciplinary measures that would have resulted in Wilson being placed in segregation, away from Daniel Williams,” the lawsuit said. “Remarkably, an ADOC risk assessment conducted on October 13, 2023, roughly nine days before the attack on Daniel Terry Williams, gives Lamont Wilson a perfect score of zero for the category of ‘History of Institutional Violence’ for his last five years.”
That and other scores resulted in a recommendation that he remain in medium-security custody, housed in an open bay dorm at Staton, where he would continue to have “free rein to continue violently sexually assaulting and raping other inmates,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said that during the “two-day torture,” jailers conducted no headcount checks on the dorm that would have alerted them to it.
The lawsuit said that one of the wardens and the prison commissioner “had a custom or practice of allowing ADOC to underreport, understaff and over-house Alabama prisons, as well as a custom or practice of misclassifying deaths as natural causes or ‘overdoses’ that were unnatural or not occurring due to an overdose, which allowed Defendants to underreport the violence in Alabama prisons.”
At the time of the attack, the prison was housing about 1,394 inmates, 275% over the designed 508-person capacity, and reported 14 assaults that month.
A U.S. Department of Justice report noted that deaths that were misclassified as “natural causes” were potentially unnatural — thereby underreporting the extent of violence, the lawsuit said.
“The Report further discussed that the Alabama Department of Corrections often failed to protect inmates from violence even when they were previously warned of threats to inmate’s safety,” the lawsuit said. “Despite being apprised of these conditions, defendants acted with deliberate indifference to the care and safety of inmates like Daniel Williams and took no action to remedy the conditions at Staton Correctional Facility.”
