Atlanta: Family of Christon Collins demands truth and accountability

Atlanta, GA – The family of Christon Collins, a 27-year-old veteran who died in Dekalb County Jail, held a press conference on Monday morning, July 22, to share new information about their son’s death.

Jonia Milburn, Collins’s mother, says she got mixed and confusing stories from the sheriff’s office. The family is asking for an independent investigation and for those responsible to be held accountable.

Emotions filled the room as Jonia Milburn talked about what she saw in the video of her son’s last moments in the jail. “My son laid on the floor for three hours with no care. Nobody noticed. No guards, no supervisors, no one but the inmates.” Milburn says the video shows her son losing balance and hitting his head, then lying on the floor for three hours in the common area of the jail with no one checking on him but the inmates. Documents shared by the family show that when Collins was finally attended to hours later, EMTs did not perform life-saving measures on him.

Christon Collins was a veteran with PTSD and had severe mental health issues. He was sent to the Dekalb County Jail after having an episode and was placed on the maximum security floor. “He needed to go to the hospital, not the jail,” his mother says. Collins ’s family had been trying to get him sent to the VA hospital instead of the jail for months before his death. The VA accepted, but the sheriff’s office refused to transport him until after he died in jail. Collins had not been sentenced.

Collins’s family shared their frustration with the lack of transparency from the sheriff’s office. Milburn says the coroner’s office kept her son’s brain and spleen without her knowledge, which she only found out in an independent autopsy afterward. The independent autopsy also showed no drugs in Christon’s system, which contradicts the Dekalb County coroner’s office toxicology report. The family says the jail gave them some documents for the wrong inmate, which only added to their confusion and frustration. Milburn stated she wants change “for all the other Christons suffering in there.”

There were over 30 deaths in Fulton and Dekalb County jails in the past year due to neglect and deadly conditions. Inmates can be heard yelling for help through broken windows in Dekalb County Jail. Current and former Inmates speak of overcrowding, no running water, medical neglect, and unsanitary conditions. These inhumane conditions are in a county jail where most inmates have not been convicted of a crime. The working-class Black residents of Dekalb County are most affected by the deadly jail. While Black residents make up about 50% of Dekalb County, Black inmates make up over 80% of the jail population. Nearly all inmates who died in Dekalb County Jail since 2022 were Black. This is a symptom of over policing of Black communities and racist mass incarceration.

The Dekalb County NAACP, the Atlanta Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and New Order Human Rights Organization attended the press conference and vowed to keep fighting for transparency and accountability from the sheriff’s office.

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