Overdoses and Suicides In a Texas Prison. Does Anybody Care?

Guys are dying of overdoses and suicides in a Texas prison. One inmate, Jeremy Busby, tries to help. Then his best friend commits suicide. Do Texas prison officials care?

“Wake up Jeremy, Wake up!” shouted my cellmate, “Lil Troy just killed himself!” Unaware if I was in some type of bad dream, I jumped off my bunk like a soldier who had just been summoned by a superior officer. There had to have been some type of terrible mistake.

There had been a ton of senseless deaths throughout our unit, but Lil Troy was the last person anyone of us would have thought would take his own life. After all, Lil Troy, like myself, was working with the newly established “Self-Harm Office” as Certified Peer Health Educators to prevent deaths in prison. So how in the hell did the suicide prevention guy, commit suicide himself?

It all started three weeks ago, when a bad batch of meth hit our unit. First, a guy on J-cellblock — high on meth — beat his cellmate to death with a fan motor wrapped in a sheet. The cellmate’s body wasn’t recognizable when the guards finally extracted it because the assailant repeatedly mutilated the lifeless corpse long after the victim had taken his last breathe.

In fact, there were several violent outbursts on J-cellblock that were directly related to the bad batch of meth. Lil Troy and I reported our discoveries to our supervisors in the Self Harm Office but they weren’t  interested in helping us locate its origin.

Then a guard was nearly beaten to death in the middle of the night by a prisoner housed in the outside dormitory, a place reserved for role model prisoners. The guard had to be flight-lifted by helicopter to a nearby hospital and was not expected to survive. Lil Troy and I responded and even offered counseling to many confused guards who were shocked that this particular prisoner had committed the assault.

“There’s a bad batch of dope on this unit,” Lil Troy and I tried to explain. We went to the Warden’s office seeking some type of action, but the administration was completely dismissive of our pleas to locate the bad batch before someone else died.

So Lil Troy and I took matters into our own hands. Our plan was to travel to every cellblock and spread awareness that the Meth floating around the unit was dangerous and should not be used. We pooled our own money together and offered to purchase the bad batch just to get it off the unit so no one else died.

The Self-Harm Office got wind of our proactive efforts and attempted to intimidate us.

“Ya’ll can’t be walking around here telling people there is dope on the unit, ” a supervisor assigned to the Self-Harm office warned us. “It makes the Warden look bad.”

“People are dying,” I retorted, “What are we supposed to do?”

“Just mind your own business.”

The next day a little white kid was found dead in his cell. He overdosed on Meth. He had a colorful personality and was well liked by the other prisoners. Everyone, including Lil Troy, knew that this kid suffered from substance abuse, and his drug of choice was Meth.

Days prior, Lil Troy had requested that we make a special visit to the kid’s cell to ensure that he was aware of the dangers of the bad batch of dope floating around.

Lil Troy spoke with him for almost an hour while I spread the word to others.

The day this kid overdosed was enough to push Troy over the edge. As we walked back to our assigned cellblock, Troy started expressing a defeatist attitude. He felt all of our efforts to prevent unnecessary deaths were in vain. The administration didn’t share our empathetic identification.

“They are not like us,” Lil Troy said about the prison officials. “All I see is dead bodies.”

That night, my friend, Lil Troy Barksdale took his own life.

Jeremy Busby is a writer and activist incarcerated at Memorial Unit. While incarcerated, he has earned a graduate degree from the University of Houston-Clear Lake and is a former staff writer for The ECHO, the Texas prison newspaper. Follow him on JoinJeremy4Justice (IG) or write to him on:

Securus: Jeremy Busby #881193 / Texas.