At the age of 19, Robert Allen Nelson of Mechanicsville was sitting in jail last week, awaiting trial on charges from a series of burglaries. Authorities report they found him hanging by a noose in his cell Friday morning, and he died the next day.
“He was upset about different parts of his life, ... different events that had occurred in his life,” St. Mary’s sheriff’s detective Lt. John Horne said this week as an investigation of Nelson’s death continued.
Arrested last July, Nelson at one time had been under observation at the St. Mary’s detention center, Horne said, but it had been determined that the inmate was not a danger to himself.
Inmates were in their cells for the night after 11 p.m. Thursday, the detective said, and two hours later, correctional officers carrying out their hourly check on inmates found Nelson hanging in his cell. He was its only occupant.
“He braided a rope, ... probably [from] a bed sheet,” Horne said, and the other end was tied to a vent cover in the cell wall. “They got him down, and they performed CPR, and had the rescue squad respond.”
The chest compressions and artificial resuscitation did not revive Nelson, but he still had brain activity when he got to St. Mary’s Hospital, the detective said. A helicopter crew flew Nelson to the Washington Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead on Saturday.
Sheriff Richard Voorhaar said, “His life was probably prolonged by the first aid of correctional officers who found him. It was very traumatic for them. It was a very unfortunate incident, but ... when you’re short staffed, when you have people who are determined to take this course of action, it’s not always easy to deal with.”
The sheriff said it was the first time in his career with the agency that an inmate had killed himself, either at the former jail behind the county courthouse in Leonardtown or the current facility behind the Carter state office building on the north end of town.
“We’ve had attempts,” Voorhaar said. “This is the first one that succeeded.”
In 1996, a Charles County man charged with drunk driving hanged himself with a shirt in a holding cell at the Maryland State Police barrack in Leonardtown.
Nelson was arrested last July on charges of breaking into two businesses, stealing two rifles from one of the stores, and the grand jurors charged him with two more burglaries. He also was charged with harassing a female by making repeated telephone calls from the jail to her home.
On Friday, after Nelson was taken to the hospital, Assistant State’s Attorney Theodore Weiner filed a motion in court stating that the inmate was “brain dead,” and asking that he be formally released on personal recognizance. District Judge John F. Slade III granted the request, which meant Nelson was no longer in police custody and did not have to be accompanied by them at the hospitals.
Horne declined to say if a note was found in Nelson’s cell. “We’re not going to talk about anything found at the scene,” he said.
Victoria Nelson was working upstairs at St. Mary’s Hospital early last Friday morning when a supervisor told her that her son was in the emergency room. She found him there dying, after he’d hanged himself in jail.
Robert Allen Nelson was in pretrial custody on charges from a series of burglaries in northern St. Mary’s, the latest bad turn in the 19-year-old Mechanicsville man’s troubled life. He also was charged with misusing the telephone while in jail, and his mother said that less than two hours before he was found hanging in his cell, he was charged again with breaking jailhouse rules. She said that might have pushed him over the edge.
“Do you think the discipline action could have waited?” Victoria Nelson asked this week, as her pain over her son’s death and a briefing from sheriff’s officials left her with more questions and concerns about his treatment in the detention center.
Arrested last July, Robert Nelson at one time had been under observation at the jail, sheriff’s officials said this week, but it ultimately had been determined that he was not a danger to himself.
At 9 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 27, Nelson’s mother said, he wanted a new pair of shoes inmates wear when they go to take a shower, but he didn’t have the money to buy them. He threw one of his old shower shoes, she said, and when he was told to pick it up, he threatened to kill a correctional officer.
“My son was very impulsive. That’s how he was,” his mother said. “Over a shoe, a guard got into an argument with him and sent him to his bed.”
The teen-ager wrote two letters that night, his mother said, one at 9:30 p.m. that spoke of plans to marry his girlfriend. He wrote another at 11:15 p.m., she said, one stating “that he’s worthless and nobody loves him, and wasn’t good enough for his girlfriend, ... that it was better this way.”
Between those two times and two letters, Nelson was charged with infractions from the dispute with the guard. Inmates are locked in their cells for the night at 11 p.m., and sheriff’s officials said that’s when Nelson was served with the charges. A correctional officer later talked with other inmates in Nelson’s cell pod who witnessed the incident, and checked on Nelson’s cell, where he was its lone occupant.
“He was seen at midnight,” sheriff’s detective Lt. John Horne said. “He gave a thumbs up [through] the door.”
Nelson’s mother said her son was despondent because he was told he probably would be returning to solitary confinement because of the new infraction, but sheriff’s officials said inmates are not told what their penalty will be when they are charged with infractions. Horne said there have been no indications from the ongoing investigation that Nelson was told his confinement status would change.
At 1 a.m., correctional officers found Nelson hanging from a noose made with a braided bed sheet and tied to a vent cover, sheriff’s officials report, and the guards tried to revive him before rescue volunteers took him to the hospital.
Victoria Nelson works as a nurse in the hospital, and didn’t know correctional officers had found her dying son and had him brought to the facility.
“They didn’t bother to call us at home. I was notified by my supervisor, [who had been] working on my son,” she said. “I came down to the ER, and found my son lying there. I saw what was left of my son.”
The teen-ager was listed as brain dead by that afternoon in court pleadings, and he died the next day, Saturday, at the Washington Hospital Center. “We had no idea that she worked at the hospital,” Horne said of the inmate’s mother. “I’m sure notifications would have been made as soon as [the correctional officers] had an opportunity. They were in the process of trying to save his life.”
Sheriff Richard Voorhaar said this week that his office has policies and procedures regarding the classification, housing and observation of inmates, in compliance with state requirements and standards.
“We’re looking into the whole situation,” the sheriff said. “We’ll go from there once the review has been completed.”
Victoria Nelson said her son had twice attempted suicide while in juvenile facilities, and that the jail’s staff was treating him for a mental disorder and knew he had braided ropes before in his cell. “They knew my son was upset,” she said. “They knew my son had a history of depression.”
