HINESVILLE, Ga. (WSAV) — The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) released a report Oct. 1 that found conditions in Georgia prisons unconstitutional, and on Thursday, one local family from Hinesville shared their concerns about the system with News 3.
“This is the last letter I got from when he was in Uvalda, and this was May 21, 2024, and it reads, ‘dear mom, how are you doing?’ Well, I’m trying to hang in there,” Nellie Lee Pippin, Robert Jermaine Kelly’s mother, said.
Jermaine Kelly’s mother and sister said that he has been incarcerated since he was 18 and bounced around between several different prisons in Georgia before being sent to Dooley State Prison.
They said, during his time behind bars, he suffered a stroke, rendering him partly unable to walk.
“They weren’t tending to his health needs, his dietician needs. They weren’t going to what the doctor had prescribed him,” Melissa Kelly-Sell, Kelly’s sister, said.
We spoke with Kelly’s sister over the phone while at his mother’s home.
She describes what she said was an attack on her brother by another inmate in May at Dooley state.
“He went to sleep, and then that inmate attacked him while he was sleeping. When he woke up from the pain, he finally noticed that the guy was attacking him,”
Kelly-Sell said.
According to Kelly’s sister, the situation grew worse once he was able to fight off the attacker.
“He was calling one of the guards for help, and they didn’t pay attention to him until he was really like almost out of it, and then they finally came in and found my brother laying there all beat up. His head was bashed in and everything,” she said.
Kelly’s family said that he was eventually brought to a hospital that could treat him but said the prison staff didn’t heed the doctor’s orders.
“The doctor had explained to them that he needs to stay there overnight so they can watch him because he was severely beaten, but the guards did not listen to him,” Kelly-Sell said. “The doctor patched him up, and they took him back into his prison cell. When they brought him back, they didn’t even take him all the way back to his cell. They just pushed him into the open area, common area and left him there in a wheelchair. He couldn’t see. He was all bloodied up.”
Kelly’s sister shared with News 3 a report she said he filed with the prison detailing this incident and several other documents from his time at Dooley State.
His mother also shared more from the last letter she received from him, her son describing what he said were his living conditions.
“These gangs out of control,” she read aloud from the letter. “I told the officer about it. They did nothing about it. I told the warden. He did nothing.”
News 3 reached out to the Georgia Department of Corrections to get the medical records for Robert Jermaine Kelly, but we were redirected to complete a multi-step process via an online portal, a process that can take days, if not weeks.