South Carolina Inmate Dies In Feces Covered Cell, Drank From His Toilet Because Staff Refused Him Water, Beaten And Abused

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, S.C. — A South Carolina jail inmate who drank from his toilet after the water to his sink was shut off died of profound dehydration, and a pathologist has now ruled his death a homicide.

Gary Donald “Bubba” Blair, 43, was found lifeless on the floor of his cell in E Pod at the Chesterfield County Detention Center on July 24. Jailers discovered him in a cell whose floor and walls were covered in inches-deep feces. He had no mattress. The water to his sink had been cut off. Other inmates said they watched him drink from the toilet and tried to pass him water in a potato chip bag through the food slot. Most of it spilled before it reached him.

The autopsy listed the cause of death as “profound dehydration due to deprivation of water.” Contributing factors included acute bronchial pneumonia, a pressure sore on his heel consistent with lying on concrete for days, massive weight loss, and physical evidence that he had been ingesting toilet water. The manner of death was homicide — meaning another person’s act or failure to act caused it. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is investigating.

Blair weighed nearly 300 pounds when he was booked in February. The pathologist recorded 185 pounds at autopsy. His sister and aunt said they did not recognize his body at the funeral home.

He was not a career violent offender. Deputies arrested him on February 22 after he showed up at his sister’s house wearing a Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office golf shirt, a security badge, handcuffs, and pepper spray. He was charged with impersonating a police officer. A judge later found him mentally incompetent to stand trial and, on June 3, ordered the South Carolina Office of Mental Health to place him in restoration treatment. The agency never did. Officials cited a nine-month backlog. Blair sat in the county jail for 181 days. He died 51 days after the judge’s order.

In an April 22 letter to his father, Blair wrote: “I’ve lost about 90 pounds so far. I’m starving to death in here; only two meals a day, that’s it… you starve, and I also have to drink from my toilet and no mattress to sleep on, only a hard ground.” He said he had gone weeks without a shower and added, “No help for a white man.”

In May he tried to write Circuit Court Judge Brian Gibbons. The letter had a bad address and was returned. In it he described drinking from a toilet that had not been flushed for days, rapid weight loss, and alleged that “the staff is very nasty to white inmates thanks to Troy (Ellerbe) and James Dixon.”

Fellow inmates later told investigators the same story. Brian Smith, housed next to Blair in mid-July, said Blair’s cell “looked like a horse stall,” that staff never brought him water while Smith was there, and that sandwiches were thrown onto the filthy floor. Smith filled a small chip bag at the shower and slid what little water he could through the slot.

Sheriff Cambo Streater fired jail administrator Troy Ellerbe five days after Blair died and has not publicly explained why. Streater has also argued that the aging jail building itself contributed to the tragedy. Family attorney James “Boo” Moore rejected that. “A building didn’t do this to Gary,” he said. “People did this. People who walked by him and knew that he was suffering did nothing.”

Blair’s family described a man who sang to nursing-home residents, cared for his elderly father, doted on two nephews, and loved a dog named Scrubby. His aunt, Vivian Cassidy, put it bluntly after the autopsy came back: “Bubba got the death sentence. That’s how I feel. For wearing a shirt.”

SLED’s criminal investigation remains open. The coroner’s time-of-death window, 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., still leaves unanswered how often anyone checked on a man who, according to inmates and his own letters, had already been begging for water for weeks.