Minutes after staff at Dauphin County Prison pepper sprayed Ishmail Thompson, placed a spit hood over his head, and locked him into a restraint chair, he was found unresponsive and in cardiac arrest.

He died a few days later, on July 29, 2021.

PennLive obtained use-of-force and autopsy reports to determine what led up to Thompson's death, one of at least 16 connected to the jail since 2019, and to fill in gaps in the official disclosures that followed. 

In short: Guards used chemical weapons and restraints after a scuffle; soon after that Thompson slipped into a coma from which he never recovered.

The full subscribers-only report can be found here, while a Twitter thread of highlights from reporter Joshua Vaughn can be found here.

THE CONTEXT: County commissioners said Thompson, who was medically cleared before entering the jail, died from a "medical episode."

The autopsy found a minuscule amount of marijuana in his system and no indication of physical trauma to his head or skull.

The county didn't report it as an "in-custody" death because while Thompson was in a coma dying, his bail was reduced and he was released — such semantics are used to lower prison death counts statewide.

Shannon Pieper of Lexipol — a company that provides policy and training materials to thousands of U.S. law enforcement agencies — told PennLive that spit hoods and pepper spray can be a dangerous combination.

Coroner Graham Hetrick said the manner of death is still undetermined, but Roger Mitchell, chair of the pathology department at Howard University School of Medicine and former chief medical examiner for Washington D.C., was given a copy of the autopsy report and considers it a homicide.

Dauphin County officials have expressed a desire to improve conditions at the prison and hired former state Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel as an adviser. But while Wetzel has called for more transparency, PennLive found very little in the course of its reporting on Thompson's death.

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