When Sandy Ray went to see her dying son Steven in hospital, she was in such a hurry, she had to leave her oxygen tank at home.
61-year-old Sandy, who is awaiting a lung transplant, suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and has to wear a nasal tube at all times. So as she stayed up all night holding on to Steven’s hand, she hooked up to his oxygen supply.
Steven, who was on life support, had already taken his last unaided breath.
Steven, 35, had been brutally beaten by guards at the Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2019 and, as doctors confirmed there was nothing more to be done, Sandy was told the machines would need to be switched off.
‘But I didn’t get to make that decision. They had to call the prison warden. Steven belonged to the state of Alabama. So they called her, she wasn’t there, and we had to wait around until they found her. She called back and said “Do it”’. It was shocking. Horrible’, Sandy tells Metro over Zoom from her Texas home.
A disturbing photo taken by Steven’s brother Brandon as the officers guarding the room slept, shows him bruised and intubated on the hospital bed. With blood crusted around his mouth and nostrils, his eyes so were so black and badly swollen that he was unrecognisable.
Sandy says she will never get that image out of her mind.
‘It wasn’t just his head they stomped on. His whole body had footprints on. It was so bad, we had to have a closed casket. He didn’t deserve that.’
As the machines were turned off, Sandy was comforted by a nurse. Her brother, Randy, and Steven’s dad – also named Steven – were not permitted to be the room.
‘They didn’t want us in there, to have our phones in there. I realise now that it was all part of the cover up,’ Sandy says.
The family weren’t initially told what happened to Steven, but saw on the news that he had rushed out his cell and attacked the guards with plastic shivs – improvised knives – and that they had had to resort to deadly force.
Later, an anonymous member of staff from the prison called to tell Sandy that he was murdered by a prison officer. Inmates who witnessed the attack corroborated this and that internal investigators had told them they could be eligible for transfer if they claimed ignorance.
The William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility have not responded to Metro’s request for comment.
Roderick Gadson, the officer alleged to have beaten Steven to death, was cleared following an internal investigation and has been promoted twice since.
‘A dog wouldn’t be treated in that way. To lose a son like that – I was just in disbelief. It was hurtful, and frustrating and there were so many lies. I didn’t know what to do – to cry or be mad.’
Remembering Steven as a child, Sandy tells Metro: ‘Stevie was on the get go from the time I went into labour. He was born in four hours and always on the go.’
‘He stayed that way for the rest of his life. He was very energetic. He loved to play jokes on people, was always happy,’ she remembers.
A talented athlete who played football and baseball for the city leagues, Stevie struggled with ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder.
‘He wouldn’t be quiet at school and couldn’t sit in the classroom. He spent a lot of time in the principal’s office. He was labelled a bad kid, but he wasn’t. He was very smart’, Sandy recalls.
Sandy tried to get help managing his conditions, but Stevie hated medication and by the 12th grade, dropped out of school and moved from their home in Texas to Florida, and then on to Alabama where he made a terrible mistake that eventually cost him his life.
‘Stevie and his girlfriend were in the car with another couple who went into a house to get some drugs. They went in and they shot him and they come back to the car running with their gun. They told Stevie: drive. What do you do? You drive. Then he and called me and I told him to call the police.
‘So that’s what he did and he was charged with murder.’ Steven was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2009.
Sandy is telling Steven’s story as part of HBO documentary The Alabama Solution, directed and produced by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman. Andrew tells Metro he wants to expose the brutality, corruption and inhumanity that takes place behind prison walls.
‘Wardens can basically deny journalists access to prisons and that has always bothered me. We’ve got two million people incarcerated in the US.Why aren’t we allowed to see what’s going on inside?’
Using footage filmed on contraband phones, the documentary shows horrific scenes that the authorities have tried to keep under wraps. Reports of men beaten so badly they defecated themselves, of daily stabbings that go on unreported and of men leaving the prison in body bags.
In the course of his six-year-long investigation, Andrew said he had conversations with prison guards and inmates alike that ‘made my hair stand on end’. He cited one chat with a former officer who dropped into conversation that he had put people in solitary confinement for up to five years.
‘The United Nations says that that’s torture. I asked him if he had to ask someone or appeal to a board. He said – no you don’t really have to ask anybody.’
Footage from the documentary shows flooded and filthy corridors with rubbish piled up, evidence of an attack, blood mopped up with napkins, an emaciated man close to death – or perhaps already passed – and a corpse in a bunk bed.
Alabama’s 14 prisons have the highest murder and the highest suicide rate in the nation and Andrew says 1,400 people have died in state custody since they began filming in 2019.
‘I was shocked by the level of brutality and the lack of justice we saw…Everybody wants to to to not have crime on their doorstep. But there are very few people out there who are just serial killers, dangerous from one minute to the next.
‘Most people who are in prison are there for some form of a crime of poverty, people who are trying to feed their families. And so there, there ought to be a better way to address all these issues. In the US and in the UK.’
Five years on, and in ill health, Sandy is fighting for prison reform.
‘People are killing our family members like they are nothing. They are not nothing. They are human too. People have done wrong and they deserve punishment, but lets try to steer them in the right direction. They are just dying left and right for no reason.’
Sandy still gets calls from other bereaved mothers who have lost their sons and are struggling to uncover the truth.
‘I’m on a mission. They can’t knock me out. I’m going to get justice for Stevie, and then we’re going to change things within the system. That way other mothers don’t go through what I went through.’
The Alabama Solution is available on HBO now
