On a Sunday morning in March 2025, hours after Dennis Francis Barrett left his parents’ home in West Alton, Missouri, he got into the fender-bender that led to his death.
Police officers responding to the crash found that Barrett, 38, had a warrant for violating probation on a 2019 marijuana possession charge. He was taken to Granite City Jail before being transferred to Madison County Jail.
Despite repeatedly telling staff at both jails that he’d been in a car accident and was in worsening pain, and asking to be taken to an emergency room, he didn’t get help, according to a report obtained from the Illinois State Police (ISP). Staff and other people who had been in the jail with Barrett later told ISP investigators that as his condition visibly deteriorated, they thought he was going through withdrawal.
Kelly Barrett said that she knew something was wrong with Dennis when she overheard him on a phone call from jail with her husband, Joseph Barrett. “I could just tell, a mother knows,” Kelly said. “We both got to say ‘I love you,’ and that was the last words I ever got to say to him.”
After less than a week in jail, Barrett suffered what the ISP report describes as “an acute medical issue.” Staff found him lying on the floor of his cell and placed him in a wheelchair, where he “appeared to have a seizure.” The jail called emergency services, who did CPR and took Barrett to a hospital. He died a little over an hour later. The coroner determined that he died because his spleen had been ruptured in the car crash.
When St. Charles police arrived at the Barretts’ house to bring them the news of their son’s death, it was dark out. Joseph had already gone to bed, and Kelly was putting the dogs out when she heard the knock at the front door.
“It was awful,” Kelly said. “It was the most awful nightmare.”
Dennis Barrett is one of hundreds of people who died in Illinois county jails, or shortly after being released, between 2019 and 2025. But his case was not included in data on deaths in custody that the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) is required by state law to collect and make public.
He’s not the only one missing from the data. At least 63 of those people — more than a quarter of jail-related fatalities statewide during that time period — did not appear on the state’s list of in-custody deaths, Illinois Answers found.
Families say many of the deaths were preventable. And taxpayers are footing the bill. Since 2019, families of people who died in jails have sued in at least 69 cases statewide, and Illinois counties paid more than $50 million in settlements and legal fees related to jail deaths during that timeframe. Cook County, which has the state’s largest jail, accounted for about one-third of both deaths and settlements.
Many of the deaths happened in facilities that weren’t meeting state standards for how to safely operate a jail, according to an Illinois Answers analysis of inspection reports. Nearly every year, a majority of Illinois jails fail annual inspections, typically for violations around insufficient staffing and supervision. Others violate standards for poor sanitation, healthcare, food services and more.
State lawmakers tried to improve transparency and accountability around in-custody deaths in 2021, when they passed the Reporting of Deaths in Custody Act (RDCA) as part of the omnibus criminal justice reform legislation known as the SAFE-T Act. The John Howard Association (JHA), a prison watchdog group, spearheaded the RDCA.
“It is deeply concerning when anybody dies in custody,” said Jennifer Vollen-Katz, JHA’s executive director. “They are away from their loved ones. The eyes of the public are not on them. And we have very little information.”
The RDCA aims to make data on in-custody deaths publicly accessible and ensure families receive information about a loved one’s passing. The legislation tasked ICJIA with collecting data, providing recommendations and sharing updates on efforts to prevent deaths in various custodial settings, including jails.
But years after the law’s passage, ICJIA still wasn’t maintaining a complete list of everyone who died in a jail-related incident, while people continued to die from injuries, suicide and withdrawal, Illinois Answers found. ICJIA has acknowledged challenges and said they’ve made efforts to improve data quality, but the agency says many of the underlying issues are beyond its scope.
“The principal challenge is that deaths-in-custody reporting depends on information submitted by different agencies, each with their own personnel, procedures, and recordkeeping systems. Reports may be delayed, incomplete, or contain information that differs from other available records,” ICJIA said in a statement. “These challenges are not unique to Illinois and largely fall outside ICJIA’s statutory authority.”
Illinois Answers found that in most cases where someone was not listed in ICJIA’s official data, counties had reported the deaths to one or more state agencies. In a small number of cases, counties contested whether deaths qualified as “in-custody,” revealing inconsistencies in how agencies define such deaths and interpret reporting requirements.
“I can imagine on any side of the equation that those who are reporting, as well as those who are collecting the information, would say they lack capacity to do this as robustly as they are supposed to or would like to,” Vollen-Katz said. “And I don’t doubt that that’s true. But that’s something that should be addressed.”
Neither the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) nor the office of Governor JB Pritzker, which oversees the department, responded to requests for comment.
After Illinois Answers asked ICJIA about the uncounted deaths, the agency said its staff were working to incorporate the missing fatalities into its data.
“Thank you for notifying ICJIA of the record discrepancies,” the agency said. “The commitment to transparency, accuracy, and accountability remains ICJIA’s highest priority.”
Hundreds died in Illinois county jails
Dennis Barrett is one of 238 people who died between 2019 and 2025 while being held in Illinois county jails or shortly after being released, according to coroner records, county and state reports, news articles, obituaries and lawsuits reviewed by Illinois Answers. People are typically detained in county jails while awaiting trial; in some cases, they are serving short sentences after being convicted.
The people who died ranged in age from a teenager to a 94-year-old. The median age was 42. Nearly half of them died within two weeks of being booked into jail; some within a day.
A handful were serving brief sentences, ranging from five days to a month, for offenses such as DUIs. Several had been found unfit to stand trial and were waiting for a bed at a state psychiatric hospital. One man being held for possession of a controlled substance was unable to post a $300 bond and died of suicide days before he was set to be released.
The state’s data recorded the manner of death as missing, undetermined or unavailable for most of these jail deaths. Illinois Answers independently analyzed county coroner reports to determine the manner and cause of each death. The most common manner listed by coroners was natural causes, followed by suicides, accidents and homicides. Coroners marked only four as undetermined.
Statewide, coroners attributed more than a hundred deaths to natural causes. Heart disease was a common cause. A 55-year-old man — a skilled carpenter who loved fishing — died of a heart attack after a little over two weeks at Adams County Jail, where he was being held on a theft charge. His son sued, saying jail staff knew he had a heart condition but didn’t follow medical orders; the case was settled for $5,000. People also died of COVID-19, ulcers, blood clots and septic shock.
At least 65 people died by suicide. One woman remained hanging for an hour and a half before jail staff noticed her. State rules require jail officers to check on detained people every half hour. A state inspector looking into the case of a man who had died by suicide in Stark County Jail determined that staff hadn’t checked on him for three hours, and that they “falsified” records to indicate that checks were done when they were not.
Nearly 50 people died accidentally, according to coroners. The vast majority of those deaths were overdoses — typically from fentanyl or methamphetamine — but others involved choking or other causes. One man in Cook County Jail who had a history of schizophrenia died from drinking too much water, and a young woman in Macon County died of dehydration while she was going through withdrawal. Each of their families settled for millions.
Homicides were less common; there were 14 between 2019 and 2025. People died from beatings and injuries sustained prior to booking, including gunshot and stab wounds.
Some deaths involved interactions with jail staff, according to reports jails submitted to the state. A man in Cook County Jail died of heart disease after a “physical altercation” with staff. Sangamon County Jail reported that when he wouldn’t let medical staff examine him, officers tased Jaimeson Cody, a 39-year-old father of two, and he “became unresponsive.” A wrongful-death lawsuit brought by his family alleges that three jail officers held Cody face down on the concrete floor for several minutes and tased him four more times before he stopped breathing.
The RDCA requires correctional facilities to name a staffer to act as a “dedicated family liaison officer” to contact the family and keep them updated on any investigations. The Barretts spoke to St. Charles police, ISP investigators, and the Madison County Coroner, but said the Madison County Sheriff's Office didn’t contact them. Sheriff Jeff Connor declined to comment on specific cases. “Anytime we have a case like that, we have a case agent that is assigned a case; they’re the liaison with state police and the family,” Connor said.
Many other families similarly expressed frustration about poor communication from county and state officials. Two mothers separately told Illinois Answers that they first heard about a son or daughter’s passing from another person who was being held in the jail. One widow said she initially received a call from the county saying her husband had been released, only to find out later that he had died. Multiple families said they weren’t even aware that ISP had investigated their cases.
Anita Babcock said that after her daughter, Tammy Wolf, died in Vermilion County Jail in 2019, the county coroner was the only agency that gave her any information. “I never got anything from the jail. No written report. No video tapes. No nothing. So all these years I’ve had questions about this jail,” Babcock said. “We always wanted answers.”
State agency failed to count dozens of people
Like Dennis Barrett, at least 62 other people who died while in the custody of or shortly after being released from a county jail between 2019 and 2025 weren’t captured in ICJIA data, Illinois Answers found. The people missing from the data died in 33 counties across Illinois.
They include mothers, fathers, musicians, cooks, welders, painters and veterans of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. Their hobbies included riding dirt bikes, scuba diving, piloting airplanes, playing basketball, fishing with family, reading history books, spending time with their dogs and cheering for their favorite teams — the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals or Dallas Cowboys. Many had mental illnesses or substance abuse disorders.