Four Ex-Jail Officers Are Sentenced in Death of West Virginia Inmate

U.S.|Four Ex-Jail Officers Are Sentenced in Death of West Virginia Inmate

Four former corrections officers at a West Virginia jail were sentenced this week to prison terms ranging from three years to more than two decades for their roles in the fatal beating of an inmate there three years ago, prosecutors said.

The former officers were among eight who have been convicted in connection with the death of the inmate, Quantez Burks, 37, and an attempt to cover up the assault at the Southern Regional Jail in Beaver, W.Va., on March 1, 2022. Seven have now been sentenced.

Mr. Burks had been at the jail for less than 24 hours when officers took him to “blind spots” — areas without surveillance video — to punish him for having tried to push past a corrections officer and leave his assigned pod, prosecutors said.

Officers kicked and punched Mr. Burks, slammed his head into a metal table, pulled and twisted his fingers and pepper-sprayed him while he was in handcuffs, prosecutors said. They continued to beat him, prosecutors said, even after he lay motionless on a cell floor.

When emergency medical workers arrived, they pronounced Mr. Burks dead.

An initial autopsy, performed by the state, concluded that he had died of a heart attack, but members of his family later questioned that finding when they saw his bruised and beaten body, his family’s lawyers said. They paid for their own autopsy, which found that the cause of death had been blunt force trauma to the head, neck, torso and extremities, as well as cardiovascular disease, the lawyers said.

After Mr. Burks died, officers at the jail tried to cover up the assault by writing false reports, giving a false story to investigators and threatening other officers with violence and retaliation if they confessed the truth to the authorities, prosecutors said.