An Alabama 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 Oct. 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 bars was coming to a close.
“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.
His family claims they were not informed until Oct. 25 that he was brain dead at the hospital – and that Warden Joseph Headley blamed it on a drug overdose.
But Williams’ stepmom, 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.
Williams was taken off life support on Nov. 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 fiancée, 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?”
“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.
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. The family created a GoFundMe to help with the costs.
Read the full story here.
Scroll down to leave a comment and share your thoughts.