A Mississippi man died strapped in a restraint chair after deputies arrested him while he was hallucinating. Almost a year later, his family are still waiting for answers.

• Cory Jackson died in solitary confinement in May 2021 while he was experiencing hallucinations.
• Police arrested Jackson for disorderly conduct as his family tried to take him to the hospital.

In May 2021, Cory Jackson died in Rankin County jail in Brandon, Mississippi, just hours after his sister and mother desperately tried to drive him to the local hospital.

Jackson, 42, was hallucinating and screaming that he saw snakes while stabbing the floorboard of the car with a letter opener, his sister Megan Jackson told Insider. As they pulled through the front gates of the neighborhood to leave, he jumped out of the car while a Rankin County sheriff's deputy happened to be driving by, she said.

"I jumped out and started screaming, 'Please don't hurt him. He's hallucinating. He needs medical assistance,'" Megan said.

Instead, Rankin County sheriff deputies charged Jackson with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and brandishing a deadly weapon in a threatening manner and took him to jail. He died hours later strapped to a restraint chair.

Megan told Insider that the deputies were "making things up to take him" when they arrested Jackson on the charges.

Mississippi law requires all police-involved deaths to be investigated by a separate law-enforcement agency that is appointed to the case by the state Attorney General Lynn Fitch. Typically, police-involved deaths in the state are investigated by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, a statewide police force that is housed within the Mississippi Department of Public Safety.

The MBI, which is investigating Jackson's death, told Insider that its investigation into the case was turned over to the Rankin County district attorney's office. The DA's office did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

Nearly a year later, Jackson's family are still waiting for answers from the Rankin County Sheriff's Office and the MBI about how Cory died.

Jackson's death is one of at least four in 2021 that came after interactions with Rankin County sheriff's deputies. Insider previously reported the deaths of Damien Cameron and Trevor McKinley. Cameron, a Black man, died while in the custody of the sheriff's department in July. Less than a month later, deputies shot and killed McKinley, Cameron's high-school classmate, inside his grandparents' home. In December 2021, while responding to a call of a drug overdose, deputies shot and killed Robert Rushton, who police said was armed with two knives. No charges have been brought in any of these cases, which remain under investigation.

'How can they refuse someone who needs medical attention?'

Jackson's family told Insider that investigating detectives have given them little information about how he died. Jail surveillance footage, incident reports, and other documents obtained by Insider through public-records requests shed light on what happened to Jackson.

According to Rankin County sheriff documents, a deputy arrested Jackson after he did not comply with a deputy's demands to drop the letter opener.

Two more deputies helped restrain Jackson and place him in the back of a patrol car. In the incident report, responding deputies described Jackson as screaming that "snakes were trying to get him" and thrashing around in the patrol vehicle, "kicking the doors, door glasses, and banging his head on the inside of the cage." The deputies called for medical support.

When Pafford EMS, a private ambulance company, arrived, a responding deputy reported that a crew member insisted that Jackson was "too violent for them to do anything" and advised "that he just needed to come off his high and that they would be fine to take him to jail."

Pafford did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

The deputy's narrative concludes that Jackson's sister said that "jail was where he needed to go" and thanked responding deputies for their assistance.

Megan Jackson denies that she agreed to allow deputies to take her brother to jail. "I was like, 'No, this is not normal for my brother. I know him, I know him on drugs, this is serious,'" Megan said. "How can they refuse someone who needs medical attention?"

According to Megan, she and her mother continued to beg the police to take Jackson to the hospital and offered to follow behind the patrol car on the way.

Eventually, Megan did thank the deputies for their help after they assured her that her brother would be fine. "They said, 'Don't worry, we'll release him in the morning after he has calmed down and you can come and pick him up,'" she recalled.

Jackson died approximately three hours later.

Surveillance footage shows Jackson's death in jail

The arresting deputy took Jackson to the Rankin County Adult Detention Center.

In the booking reports obtained by Insider, the arresting deputy wrote that "Jackson was having strong hallucinations, and was not capable of answering the coronavirus questions."

Rankin County Sheriff Adult Detention Center policies and protocols obtained by Insider through a public-records request prohibit admitting anyone in need of emergency medical or psychiatric attention. The policy says admissions officers must "refuse to accept the prisoner" and instead send them to an appropriate medical facility.

Despite his ongoing hallucinations and erratic behavior, jail officers admitted Jackson and immediately assigned him to solitary confinement for COVID-19 quarantine and suicide watch.

According to jail documents, Jackson would not comply with any orders and began to bang his head against the wall and floor. Officers stripped Jackson naked and placed him in a padded helmet.

In a jail surveillance video reviewed by Insider, two officers dragged Jackson by his arms naked across the cement jail floor and into a solitary confinement cell.

Video footage of Jackson inside the cell reviewed by Insider shows Jackson appearing to continue hallucinating. He swings his arms and legs wildly and at one point, crawls underneath the metal cot bolted to the wall at the back of the cell. When he emerged from beneath the cot, the padded helmet had slipped off his head and his temple was drenched in blood.

Jail surveillance footage shows that jail officers and nurses checked on Jackson in the isolation cell twice over a period of 13 minutes. Officers noted that he continued screaming to "get that snake off of me."

After about 15 minutes, three officers removed Jackson from the cell and wrestled him into a restraint chair. They buckled straps around his wrists, forearms, chest, waist, and ankles and chained the restraining chair to a column in the middle of the cell block surrounded by six other cells.

Over the next hour, jail officers continued to check on Jackson approximately every 15 minutes. Drenched in sweat and naked save for a padded helmet that repeatedly slips down over his nose and mouth, Jackson thrashed against the restraints in increasing distress before collapsing against the chair unresponsive just after 3 a.m.

Jail documents and the medical examiner's report reviewed by Insider show that officers attempted life-saving medical attention and took Jackson to Merit Health Rankin Hospital, but he was declared dead shortly after.

Megan Jackson told Insider that Cory began complaining of head and chest pain shortly before he started hallucinating.

Jackson's family maintains that he did not use drugs on the day he died, but a medical examiner's report attributes his death to a heart attack due to methamphetamine intoxication. His death was ruled an accident.

According to Mount Sinai, a hospital network based in New York City, symptoms of a meth overdose can include irregular heartbeat, chest pain, paranoia, and seizures, among other symptoms.

Jackson's family left with unanswered questions

It remains unclear why the Rankin County sheriff's deputy took Jackson to jail rather than transporting him to the hospital or why the jail admissions officer booked him at the jail rather than refusing his entry because of his psychiatric condition, as Rankin County sheriff's policy stipulates.

The Rankin County Sheriff's Department did not respond to Insider's requests for comment or questions about whether Jackson's admission to the jail was in accordance with its policy.

Lisa Al-Hakim, the director of operations for the People's Harm Reduction Alliance, a Washington State-based organization that provides harm reduction and health services to people who use drugs, told Insider that typically paramedics will transport combative patients who are drug users to a hospital.

"I don't know how many times I've seen paramedics get someone strapped to the gurney, take them to the hospital, and give them a benzo or a sedative to calm down," Al-Hakim said.

Al-Hakim said a combination of burnout and stigma surrounding drug use can affect the judgment of "people who are supposed to be there to help" and can sometimes lead to first responders dehumanizing someone that they see as a drug user.

"The thing with chalking everything up to people's drug use is that there could be other issues that they're having but no one looks further," Al-Hakim said. "They're like, 'Oh, this is drugs, they're not worth my time.'"

Al-Hakim said that Jackson would likely have been sedated once he arrived at the hospital, if deputies and paramedics had not refused to transport him there. According to Al-Hakim, it's her view that the paramedics violated the Hippocratic oath to "First, do no harm" when refusing to transport Jackson to the hospital.

"The fact that like they were like, 'No, we won't do that,' it's just awful," Al-Hakim said.

A peer-reviewed study by medical experts at the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs and UCLA School of Medicine concluded that the best immediate treatment for severe symptoms of agitated meth-induced psychosis is a combination of benzodiazepine sedatives and antipsychotic medications.

Jackson's mother, Joyce Redell, told Insider that an MBI investigator said they watched surveillance video of Cory inside the jail and "didn't see any wrongdoing" on the video, but they would not let her family see the video and never provided a reason why she couldn't see it.

Redell said that nearly a year later, the MBI has not made it clear to her family whether its investigation into Cory's death is closed.

Megan Jackson told Insider that her family wants to sue the sheriff's department, but hasn't found an attorney willing to take the case, because "unfortunately a lot of attorneys around here will not take on Rankin County."

"We just want them to know that he's a person too, that they can't get away with what they did to him," Megan told Insider. "He was mentally ill and I'm sure you can tell in that video that he wasn't right. He needed a hospital, and that's where me and my mother were taking him, and they took him away from us."