Two Shelby County jailers indicted on charges of assaulting handcuffed inmate

Two Shelby County corrections officers have been indicted on charges of assaulting an inmate in May, Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy said Tuesday.

The indictments come about two months after nine corrections officers were indicted in connection to Gershun Freeman's death at the Shelby County Jail.

"I want to start by reiterating: When I believe the officers are right, I will stand by them," Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who oversees the jail, said at a news conference Tuesday with Mulroy. "However, when I believe they're wrong, I will be the first to say so and try to hold them accountable to the full extent of the law. This is one of those cases."

The two corrections officers indicted Tuesday — Reginald Wilkins, a 16-year veteran of the department, and Odell Underwood, a 25-year veteran of the department — are charged with simple assault, official oppression and official misconduct. Both were given a $20,000 bail when booked Tuesday, which Wilkins had posted at the time of publication, according to court records. Underwood did not appear to have posted bail at that same time.

The charges stem from an assault in May this year of an inmate Damian Florez-Ramirez. It is not clear what charge Florez-Ramirez was in jail for, since court records show a case that was dismissed in 2020 for having a fake license plate. The other charge connected with Florez-Ramirez is a misdemeanor assault charge from May 2023 that took place in the jail. Charges in that case were dismissed in late June this year.

Mulroy said Florez-Ramirez had assaulted a deputy jailer during that May incident that resulted in a misdemeanor assault charge being filed against him. In that incident, according to the affidavit, Florez-Ramirez had thrown two lunch trays at a corrections officer and then punched him. That corrections officer then sprayed a chemical agent at Florez-Ramirez, who then threw a chair at the officer. That chair was blocked with the officer's hands.

According to the affidavit, other deputies helped restrain Florez-Ramirez, and the deputy that was hit was taken to Methodist University Hospital to be treated for injuries to his hand.

According to Mulroy, two corrections officers, both of whom did not originally restrain Florez-Ramirez, assaulted the inmate later that day.

"At the time of the incident, [Florez-Ramirez] had been placed in handcuffs, had been treated with a medical agent and was being taken to the medical facility inside the jail for treatments," Mulroy said. "And at that location, we allege, without justification, the two officers assaulted Mr. Florez-Ramirez."

Florez-Ramirez was treated for non-life threatening injuries after the assault.

The two officers were suspended from duty with pay from May until they were indicted Tuesday. Those officers, Bonner said, are now suspended without pay.

"Our own internal procedures found troubling conduct, concerning conduct, by our corrections officers," Bonner said.

He said the office launched an internal investigation, which was "followed closely" by a criminal investigation carried out by SCSO. Both of the officers, Bonner said, will face departmental charges "in the near future" alongside the criminal charges.

Cameras, Shelby County Deputy District Attorney Paul Hagerman said, did not capture the assault, but there were cameras outside the room it took place in. Hagerman said those cameras contained "critical, corroborative evidence as far as the actual assault."

Bonner's comments on the new indictments differ starkly from how he responded to from the Freeman indictments.

Bonner, in statements Tuesday, said there is "a lot of difference between" the cases. Bonner voiced his opposition to the indictment of the nine corrections officers, and expressed an unconditional support for those officers when those indictments were unsealed in late September.

"I want this community to know that I stand with these officers," Bonner said in a September news conference about the Freeman indictments. "I believe that if I were not running for another office, these indictments never would have happened, and I find this despicable. The officers remained on administrative leave. If there is a fundraiser to help with their legal fees, I will be the first one to donate."

At the time, Bonner was running for Memphis mayor.

The Freeman case involved multiple officers hitting Freeman with fists, large canisters of what appeared to be pepper spray, kicking him and ultimately kneeling on his back for multiple minutes after he ran out from his cell. Freeman died during the altercation, and the Shelby County Medical Examiner said the cause of death was caused by a heart condition that was exacerbated by the physical altercation with the officers.

Freeman's case was caught on camera, and footage was released publicly by the Davidson County District Attorney's Office in March. The Nashville DA's office was chosen by a panel of district attorneys to run the investigation after Mulroy recused himself, and his office, from the case.

Bonner said, in the Florez-Ramirez case, "the evidence was very clear," but when asked if the footage from the Freeman case was not also clear by a reporter, he said that was "an opinion."

"That's your opinion of what you think you saw and what we believe we saw," Bonner said. "So, again, there's a difference of opinion and that [Freeman case] will work its way through the courts, as all cases will, so we will see at the end."

Bonner said the actions of the two deputies indicted Tuesday "do not represent the Shelby County Sheriff's Office," saying there is not a problem with the department's culture for corrections officers.

"I don't believe it is a culture," he said. "We have things in place — we have use of force forms that's reviewed at five different levels. We tried to run a facility that is very difficult, at times, to say the least. But this was one of the cases where I think you could say it worked. All the checks and double checks worked, and we saw what we needed to see to believe to go further in the investigation. There was some confusion at the very beginning about whether we were talking about two different assaults, and so once we finally got it straightened out, we were able to proceed with this."

Lucas Finton is a criminal justice reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @LucasFinton.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Shelby County: Two jailers indicted on charges of assaulting inmate