Richard Graham was a father, a cook, a trained welder and a forklift driver. He was the firstborn child of Monica Graham, who said her son was “too smart for his own good.”
On May 18, 2024, Richard Graham was booked into the Louisville Metro jail. He didn’t survive the night.
“This is a place where you hope that, OK, he’s off the streets,” Delores Davis, Richard Graham’s grandmother, said. “People might shoot him up bang-bang on the streets, but now he’s in a place where he’s going to be safe.”
But Richard Graham wasn’t safe in jail. He died of an overdose. He had been in and out of jail many times. His mother said she usually posted bail quickly to get him out, but this May 2024 arrest was different.
“I said, ‘You know what? He’s got to learn,’ and the one time I said I didn’t want to get him out of there, that he had to learn, is the time I get the call that he’s dead,” Monica Graham said. “That stays on my heart.”
Before Richard Graham went to jail, he told his mother he was ready to stop using drugs and get clean. Monica Graham was in contact with a rehabilitation center in Florida that said it had a spot for him. But her son didn’t make it.
According to a lawsuit filed this summer, an X-ray of Richard Graham’s body taken at the time of his booking showed an object in his abdomen near his colon. Shortly after, surveillance footage showed him ingesting something through his nose and mouth. He started showing signs of distress, and hours went by with no help, the lawsuit said.
“I just wish that I was there to save him. I wish they would have checked on him like they were supposed to,” Monica Graham said. “I’m not saying he would be alive, but maybe there’s a chance that my son would still be here.”
In 2022, Louisville Metro Council launched an investigation after a spike in overdose and suicide deaths. Thirteen people died over 15 months, according to the report.
The report also cited poor leadership, low staffing with guards working 16-hour shifts, and a jail building in desperate need of repairs.
“We had to change the culture,” said chief Jerry Collins of the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections. “There’s got to be accountability. It’s a very serious job.”
Collins wouldn’t comment on Richard Graham’s death because of the pending lawsuit. But when he took over the job in spring 2022, he said he started making changes. He put NARCAN in every dorm, making it accessible to anyone in the case of an opioid overdose. He said he also removed bars from cell doors to prevent suicide and installed radar technology to monitor the vital signs of people in cells.
“I can make the promise we’re working every day to get a little bit better every day,” Collins said.
Still, those reforms weren’t enough to save Richard Graham’s life. Jail officials across the country say it’s incredibly hard to keep contraband substances out of jails, no matter how many precautions they take.
But Monica Graham said jails have a responsibility to care for incarcerated people, and she feels like the jail failed her son.
“I know there’s different feelings when people get locked up and all that,” she said, “but they’re still people.”
Monica Graham is still trying to make sense of the loss. So is Richard Graham’s grandmother, Delores Davis. Together, they visited his grave. The headstone reads, “Beloved son, father, brother and grandson. Only the strong can survive.”
“You expect for your kids to bury you. And today it seems it’s the parents who are burying their children,” Davis said. “So the question becomes, who is going to bury us?”
This reporting was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
____
Peter O’Dowd produced and edited this segment for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Grace Griffin produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR