Family, friends, and fellow activists were shocked, saddened, and angry to learn that 31-year-old Mason Yancy was the latest person to die while in custody inside the Tarrant County Jail, and they are demanding transparency and accountability.
According to a statement from Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn’s office, Yancy died on December 27 after he “suffered a medical emergency while in custody and was treated by JPS Medical staff inside the jail.”
He was the eighth person to die while in custody inside the Tarrant County Jail this year. Another inmate died in the hospital in December.
Yancy was well known to grassroots activists in North Texas and across the state as an advocate for limited government and First and Second Amendment rights.
He co-founded Open Carry Texas with activist-turned-attorney CJ Grisham.
“It’s not only the fact that he was a member of this freedom movement, but when anybody was affected by the wrongful acts of cops who were arresting people involved in the freedom movement, even when it didn’t affect him, he showed up,” Grisham told Texas Scorecard.
Because he knew that—I think it was Martin Luther King who said—injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere, and that’s what this is about.
Mason Yancy just happened to be a friend, which is what makes this personal. But I look at this as he’s now a number. He’s number nine, which means there had to be eight other people before him this year.
“Each of those people are a Mason Yancy to somebody,” he said. “They mean something to someone.”
Grisham and others had already raised concerns about the number of in-custody deaths in Tarrant County.
“This just made me care more now that it’s one of our own,” Grisham said in an interview with WFAA Sunday night.
Yancy was arrested on December 23 by the Grapevine Police Department and charged with possession of a controlled substance, then transferred to the Tarrant County Jail on December 24.
Waybourn said Yancy had “disclosed a long history of medical issues” during booking and was then scheduled for medical and mental health evaluations and placed on “detox protocol.”
The medical examiner has not yet released Yancy’s cause of death.
More than 60 inmates have died while in Tarrant County Jail custody since Waybourn, a Republican, became sheriff in 2017.
A review of the jail conducted in May noted that 54 of those deaths occurred in hospitals.
However, the site visit report recommended changes to the jail’s treatment of inmates like Yancy, who are placed on a detoxification protocol.
A string of recent jailhouse deaths and mistreatment allegations have resulted in costly legal fees and lawsuit settlements for the county.
Two jail employees are facing murder charges in the April jailhouse death of 31-year-old Anthony Johnson Jr., which was ruled a homicide.
Johnson’s family is also suing multiple county employees. In November, Tarrant County Commissioners Court approved spending $340,000 on outside attorneys to defend the case.
Waybourn blamed Johnson’s death on a lack of mental health care.
Another inmate, Georgia Kay Baldwin, died of severe hypernatremia in 2021 after months in custody awaiting transfer to a psychiatric hospital. Her family was offered a $750,000 settlement.
Inmate Chastity Congious, who also suffered from mental health issues, gave birth alone in her cell in 2020, and the baby later died. She sued and won a $1.2 million settlement—the largest in Tarrant County history.
Tarrant County agreed to a $1 million settlement for the 2020 death of inmate Javonte Myers, who died in his cell from a seizure disorder and wasn’t discovered for hours. In May, a jail guard pleaded guilty to lying about checking on Williams and was sentenced to five years’ probation and a $250,000 fine.
Grisham, who went from civil rights activist to civil rights attorney “because I got fed up with the system and decided I want to fight it from the inside,” said the problem is that “once you get arrested, the system doesn’t look at you as a human anymore.”
“As soon as an officer just identifies you as allegedly committing a crime, you’re no longer a human being, and that’s what’s contributing to all of these dead,” he said. “And the deaths aren’t even the whole story. There are people who are beaten nearly to death in these prisons.”
“We’ve got a real problem with transparency,” Grisham added.
Despite Waybourn’s proposals for improving jail conditions, Grisham said he believes the sheriff should resign.
“You’ve killed enough people under your care. It’s time to resign. And if not, you should be fired,” he said.
The jail deaths became an issue raised by Waybourn’s Democrat challenger in November, but Waybourn won re-election with 54 percent of the vote.
Waybourn’s Friday press statement, which did not identify Yancy by name, said all in-custody deaths are reviewed and investigated by Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office jail staff, the TCSO Criminal Investigations Division, an outside law enforcement agency, JPS Medical Staff, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office and the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
Activists, including Grisham, are planning to call attention to Yancy’s death and others during the next Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting on January 14.
Tarrant County residents can also contact commissioners and the sheriff’s office directly.
“It shouldn’t be about crime; it should be about justice,” said Grisham.
According to the Texas Jail Project, 153 inmate deaths were reported statewide in 2023 while in the custody of a county jail. So far, in 2024, county jails have reported 113 in-custody deaths, including at least 13 suicides. The organization notes that a majority of the inmates who died in custody were “pretrial, legally innocent.”
