An Atlanta family is extremely concerned about the safety of their loved one. They say he was stabbed at least four times in the head at the Fulton County Jail on Nov. 15. After the attack, he was transported to Grady Memorial Hospital.
Fulton County Jail inmate attacked
FOX 5 talked to the inmate directly Thursday afternoon during a cellphone call from the Fulton County Jail. FOX 5 is not revealing his name in an effort to protect his identity.
The detainee said he was trying to use the internet to watch a loved one’s candlelight vigil when two inmates attacked him. He also said the guard did not help him when the attack occurred.
“I was trying to watch the candlelight vigil on Instagram through someone else’s page. I do not have an Instagram page, and it started from there. I didn’t do nothing. One guy pushed me on the table, and the other guy just started stabbing me like four or five times in the head. As soon as it happened, the officer appeared on the door, but he never came inside. I said, ‘You standing right here with a Taser and some mace, and you haven’t done anything,'” the inmate explained.
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office said it investigated the stabbing and charged two inmates with the crime.
Family members said they don’t believe their loved one is safe in the jail. They point out that an inmate is innocent until proven guilty, and they say this type of violence before a day in court is unacceptable.
“The was homemade and longer than my hand. It was a piece of something. I don’t know what it was,” he concluded.
Fulton County Jail woes
The Rice Street jail has been under intense scrutiny since a Department of Justice civil rights investigation found severe constitutional violations, including inhumane conditions, inadequate medical care and excessive violence. A federal consent decree now places the jail under long-term oversight, after DOJ findings that there were more than 1,000 inmate assaults and 314 stabbings in 2023 alone, many tied to poor supervision and crumbling infrastructure that allowed detainees to carve through walls and attack others.
FOX 5 has documented how the jail, built in 1989 to hold just over 1,100 people, routinely houses more than 3,000 detainees, with some sleeping in plastic “boats” on the floor and others packed into intake cells holding 30 to 40 people with a single toilet. A court-appointed monitor’s report found vacancy rates above 50 percent on many shifts, housing floors staffed by a single deputy overseeing about 200 detainees, more than 700 beds taken offline because of broken infrastructure and more than 1,100 outstanding maintenance work orders for broken doors, locks, plumbing and electrical problems.
In that environment, violence inside the jail has continued to make headlines. In April, the family of 37-year-old Leonard Fortner filed a lawsuit after he was stabbed more than 20 times and killed, allegedly with a weapon fashioned from the jail’s crumbling walls. This fall, FOX 5 reported on a 20-year-old woman who was injured in an apparent stabbing while the jail was already under federal oversight, two inmates were hospitalized after back-to-back stabbings within 48 hours and a detention officer was stabbed by an inmate while a federal monitoring team was in town. Other families have come forward with allegations of assaults, extortion at knifepoint and bed bug-infested cells, pointing to a pattern of overcrowding and chronic understaffing they say leaves detainees vulnerable long before they ever see a courtroom. Homemade shanks tend to be the weapons of choice.
The Fulton County Jail is overcrowded. It was built for 1,125 detainees. It currently houses between 2,000 and 3,000 inmates.
This family is just praying that their loved one bonds out of jail before he is attacked again.
