- Kevante Washington was in the final months of an eight-year sentence he began in 2016 after being arrested for selling heroin as part of a regional drug distribution case.
- More recently, he was assigned to a work release facility in North Philadelphia where he stayed until he became concerned for his safety and was taken to Philadelphia’s Federal Detention Center.
- Weeks after his death, his family has few answers as to what happened and why Washington was so scared for his safety. His autopsy is pending and officials have said little else.
It has been three weeks since federal prison officials summoned Cynthia Santiago to the side of the battered and unconscious body of her son, Kevante Washington, at a hospital in Philadelphia.
Washington, a 31-year-old father of three who grew up in Wilmington, would never wake up and died the following day. Officials told the family he was hospitalized after an “altercation” while imprisoned at Philadelphia’s Federal Detention Center.
Since then, Santiago said she’s been able to ascertain little about her son’s death.
In a written statement that prison officials said was issued to local media the day Washington died, a spokesperson wrote that staff were alerted to a “perceived altercation” at around 3:40 p.m. May 10.
The statement said Washington was transported to the hospital, that another prisoner was “medically assessed” at the facility and that no other staff or inmates were injured.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was notified, the statement said. FBI officials in Philadelphia declined to comment.
Beyond those basic details, Paul Hardin, the prison’s spokesperson, declined further comment for this article.
“When I call and ask what happened, nobody knows anything,” Santiago said in an interview with Delaware Online/The News Journal.
Washington had been held at the federal prison in Center City for fewer than two weeks when he was killed, but Santiago’s attempts to try to help her son started weeks before that.
Transitioning to a new life
When he died, Washington was in the final months of an eight-year sentence he began in 2016 when he was arrested for selling heroin.
Federal prosecutors in Wilmington brought the case that included wiretapped phone calls and drug transactions caught on surveillance footage. He took a plea and court documents do not indicate that he cooperated with prosecutors’ case against his codefendants.
In a letter addressed to the judge that sentenced him, Washington wrote in 2018 that the drug business permeated his childhood in Wilmington’s Riverside neighborhood and that he began selling heroin as a child for lunch and snack money.
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By the time he wrote that letter, his father had been in prison since he was five, his elder brother had been shot dead in Wilmington and he had been shot. He wrote that he had enough of that life.
“I apologize to my community and those I contributed to hurting,” Washington wrote at the time.
Editor’s Note: Read Washington’s letter to his sentencing judge at the end of this article.
His family said Washington kept that mindset throughout his incarceration and in February, he qualified to leave federal prison and complete his sentence at a work release facility. His family said he was intent on starting his own business and being present in the lives of his three children.
“He was just so excited,” Santiago said. “We were all excited. He was transitioning, looking forward to getting a job and just being free.”
He was assigned to a work release facility in North Philadelphia operated by The Kintock Group, a private entity that contracts with the federal government to run halfway houses in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Both Washington and his family felt his assignment to the North Philadelphia facility set him up for failure. He and his family wanted him outside the city and closer to them, but were told they had no say in his placement.
“He was trying to do different,” said Tierra Battles, Washington’s elder sister. “He did not want to be in that area.”
However, he was settling in. He took transit to a local hotel to work multiple times a week while housed at the facility. His mother described him as “focused.”
He felt unsafe
But at some point, things began to shift.
A stranger called out his name on the street, his family said. Having been shot, he was always “very aware” of such things, his family said. It concerned him, and after that, he began to fear for his safety.
In a series of phone calls, he told his family that people at the facility were treating him differently and that he felt strange and feared he was being drugged. He stopped eating the food there and his family sent him money to eat from a vending machine.
He expressed those concerns to Kintock officials who isolated him to a different portion of the facility, according to information relayed by staff to his mother. Kintock officials did not reply to a request for comment for this article.
Santiago said he wanted to be transferred to a different work release or back to prison lockup in New Jersey.
“I know he felt very unsafe,” Santiago said. “He was adamant he didn’t want to stay there.”
Battles said Washington called 911 several times on his last full day in the facility. She said authorities didn’t respond there until the next day, when he was moved. Santiago would later learn he was transferred to FDC Philadelphia.
It would be days before they heard from him again.
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Santiago called the prison multiple times and eventually found out he was assigned to the secure housing unit of the prison. Typically, placement in the secured housing unit in a prison is either done as punishment or for a person’s protection. She thought prison officials were investigating why he felt threatened at the halfway house.
On May 8, Washington was able to call out to his family. He told them he had been in an altercation the day he arrived. He feared it was a setup and was concerned that he had been assigned a cellmate.
His family felt then and feel now that he should have been isolated because of his concerns for his safety. Washington’s father, Kevin Washington, was on the call and said that his son feared for his life.
“Call someone to get me moved. They are going to kill me,” Kevin recalled his son saying on the phone.
Santiago said she continued to call the prison multiple times each day seeking more information but didn’t receive any help.
“The whole thing is just bizarre,” Battles, Washington’s sister, said. “We don’t get how he can be so happy at one moment and things just go all the way down in a matter of two weeks.”
‘It wasn’t right’
Two days after Washington was able to speak to his family, Santiago received a call shortly after 10 p.m. from a prison official who told her there had been an “altercation” and that she should rush to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia as soon as possible.
When she arrived, Washington was unconscious, breathing through a ventilator and his body bore signs of trauma.
“He definitely had been assaulted,” Santiago said.
While she was there, he flatlined once and was revived. But the second time, doctors could not bring him back.
“They did everything humanly and medically possible to keep my son alive,” Santiago said.
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The pain of losing a brother and son is now compounded by the unknown.
In the weeks since, the family has learned nothing new about the circumstances of his death, his days at FDC Philadelphia or his transfer from Kintock. FBI investigators have told them nothing and Washington’s autopsy is still pending.
They also want to know what happened in the six hours that transpired between FDC Philadelphia staff responding to the altercation and telling Santiago to rush to the hospital.
“We want answers,” Battles said. “We want justice for what happened to him. Because how he died and how that happened, it wasn’t right.”
The prison spokesman said facility leadership does not comment on conditions of confinement or prison investigations.
Death, violence and neglect inside Philadelphia’s city-operated jail system have been well documented in local media, but it is not clear how often people die or are killed in FDC Philadelphia, a federal facility that houses nearly 1,000 prisoners.
Hardin, the prison’s spokesperson, said that information isn’t “publicly tracked or readily available” to his office.
Those that advocate for prisoners in that facility say there hasn’t been such a death made public in recent memory.
Washington’s family fears his death will be overlooked and forgotten. Santiago said her son had a bright future and that she wants people to know that a person’s death in prison is not trivial.
“These are people’s children. He was a father. He was a brother. He was a son. He was a nephew. He was a person. He was a friend,” Santiago said. “He is not some seven-digit number. He was a person above all.”
People incarcerated in FDC Philadelphia or other federal facilities are encouraged to contact Reporter Xerxes Wilson by searching his name or xwilson@delawareonline.com in the CorrLinks system. People incarcerated in Delaware prisons may reach the reporter through the GettingOut tablet system.
Contact Xerxes Wilson at (302) 324-2787 or xwilson@delawareonline.com. Follow @Ber_Xerxes on Twitter.
