An inmate transported out of the Delaware County prison last week because of a medical emergency died Friday in the hospital, according to a social media post by a family member.
Broad + Liberty is not linking to or displaying the post out of family privacy concerns.
Christine Childress’s passing makes her the twelfth inmate to have either died in custody of the prison, or from an incident that began while in custody in the roughly two years that the county’s new warden, Laura Williams, has been on the job at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility.
Childress, 36, was admitted into the prison on Feb. 7 according to a court docket as well as the website Vinelink, a website which tracks prisoner data for hundreds of jails and prisons across the country.
One day after Childress was admitted, first responders were dispatched to the facility just before 3 p.m. for a medical emergency, according to records published on Delcodispatch.com. A well-placed source with knowledge of the prison tells Broad + Liberty that the dispatch was for Childress.
Vinelink shows that Childress was released from custody on Friday, February 9, even though she remained in critical condition in the hospital. Additionally, her docket notes that her bail was changed to “unsecured” on February 9. Given that she was technically released from custody, it is likely that the GWHCF will not have to count Childress as a fatality that it is responsible for when it submits statistics to state or federal authorities.
The county did not respond to a request for comment.
This coming April, the county will mark the two-year anniversary of taking back the management of the prison after it had been run privately for about three decades. Although the full management shift from private to government didn’t happen until April 6, 2022, Warden Williams began her tenure with the facility on January 31 of that year in order to be part of the transition.
Todd Shepherd is Broad + Liberty’s chief investigative reporter. Send him tips at tshepherd@broadandliberty.com, or use his encrypted email at shepherdreports@protonmail.com. @shepherdreports