A woman has died at the Baltimore Central Booking & Intake Center, making her at least the fourth person to die this year in the custody of the city’s jail system.
Helen Williams, 43, of Baltimore, died on June 26, hours after law enforcement arrested her on a fugitive warrant. She was wanted after failing to appear at a probation violation hearing in Prince William Circuit Court in Virginia.
During a bail review hearing on June 27, Baltimore Police Detective Eric Green said the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services — which runs the city’s pretrial detention system — informed him that Williams died the previous night while in custody at Central Booking. He asked for the case to be dismissed.
Baltimore District Judge Darren L. Kadish marked the case as such on a criminal trial docket and handwrote, “Fugitive passed while in custody.”
In an email, Mark Vernarelli, a spokesperson for the corrections department, said correctional officers at about 7 p.m. discovered a 43-year-old woman who was unresponsive. He declined to release her name.
Correctional staff immediately started providing life-saving measures, Vernarelli said. The Baltimore City Fire Department, he said, pronounced her dead at 7:41 p.m.
Detectives are investigating the death, he said.
In 2015, Williams pleaded guilty to prescription fraud and received a five-year suspended sentence, Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney Amy Ashworth said in an email.
On Feb. 26, 2013, Williams went to a CVS in Woodbridge, Virginia, and tried to fill a prescription for 120 30-milligram oxycodone pills that was in the name of Sharon Carter, Prince William County Police reported.
Williams told detectives that she gets paid to pass fraudulent prescriptions, police alleged, and that people sold the painkillers on the street for $25 per pill.
A probation and parole officer, Nancy Neale, reported that Williams was supposed to complete an intake for probation in Maryland. That’s where she was going to be supervised.
More than three months later, after several phone calls and voicemails urging her to go through with that process, Williams failed to do so, Neale asserted. Williams, she alleged, appeared to be in violation of her probation.
Her attorney, Jeremiah Adair, reported that his client tried to complete intake for probation in Maryland but was rebuffed. He wrote in court documents those efforts were “further complicated by her poor health.”
Eventually, Williams failed to appear at a probation violation hearing on Oct. 3, 2019, Ashworth said.
The state has continued to face scrutiny over the health care and mental health services at the city’s jail system and struggled to come into full compliance with a settlement in a decades-old lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the state is moving forward with a plan to open a $1 billion facility called the Baltimore Therapeutic Treatment Center.
