Crime & Justice · The Record
Jail death account rests on a deputy's rounds; Virginia board reports 27 supervision citations in three years
The Newport News Sheriff's Office account, as carried by the newspaper that reported it, says a deputy on rounds found the man. Virginia's binding rule sets a different and checkable test: housing areas inspected at least twice an hour at random intervals, with the inspections written down.
The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press reported that the Newport News Sheriff's Office said in a news release that a man in its custody had died by suicide at the Newport News City Jail, and that an investigation had begun.
Summarizing that release, the newspaper wrote: "A deputy was making rounds and found 21-year-old Jaqaris Andrew Jemison, of Newport News, unresponsive and immediately called for help, according to the release." Those are the newspaper's words describing the release, not a marked quotation from the release itself; Daily Pol has not obtained the release.
The same report says deputies and medical staff gave CPR and other measures until paramedics reached them, and that Jemison was taken to a hospital, where he died. It says the Sheriff's Office and the Newport News Police Department were both investigating, as standard procedure. On cause, the newspaper wrote: "The medical examiner will determine the cause of death, though the sheriff's office notes no foul play is suspected."
A note on dating, because it bounds everything below. The account Daily Pol reviewed places the death on a Tuesday and carries no month and no year. This article therefore does not state when the death occurred, and does not place it inside any particular state review year.
The record the account can be tested against
Virginia does not leave supervision to description. Section 6VAC15-40-1045 of the Virginia Administrative Code says: "All inmate housing areas shall be inspected a minimum of twice per hour at random intervals between inspections." The same section adds: "All inspections and unusual incidents shall be documented."
A separate section, 6VAC15-40-450, requires that "There shall be a written suicide prevention and intervention plan." That section also requires the plan to be reviewed every 12 months by staff who have contact with inmates, and requires those reviews to be written down.
Oversight of deaths sits with the Virginia State Board of Local and Regional Jails, which styles itself the Virginia Board of Local and Regional Jails on its own website - one body, two spellings of the same name. The website states: "The Board is responsible for the review of inmate deaths that occur in any local or regional jail." The Board's annual report of jail death reviews for calendar year 2025 grounds that work in Code of Virginia section 53.1-69.1, which lets the Board examine the circumstances of a death, identify any act or omission by a facility or its staff that contributed to it, and decide whether the facility followed the Board's regulations.
That report says the Board was told of 58 deaths in CY2025, which it describes as a 20.8% increase from CY2024, when the figure was 48. It says 93% of the CY2025 deaths happened in custody and so fell to the Board to review. Its review committee, the report says, met six times and reviewed 43 deaths.
On supervision, the report counts 27 citations over a three-year period, and on that basis urges facilities to make ongoing improvement of supervision practice a priority. Among its recommendations, it asks facilities to meet the rule on "twice-per-hour, irregular checks and accurate documentation", to audit that work, to retrain staff on what observation and record-keeping require, and to keep sight lines into housing areas clear.
One other standard is ranked in the report's own words. It calls it "The second most-cited standard (13) over a three-year period", and says it was cited often in cases where symptoms went unrecognized or where care was not escalated.
The report also records that deaths by suicide fell across the period it covers, from 18, or 35.3% of deaths, in CY2023 to 10, or 17.2%, in CY2025.
Analysis
What follows is this newsroom's reading of the documents above, not a finding by any authority.
First, a ranking the report does not state. Twenty-seven is larger than 13, and 13 is the number the report attaches to the standard it calls second most-cited. It is tempting to conclude that supervision is therefore the standard most often cited in the Board's death reviews, and the arithmetic points that way, but the report never says it. The comparison is ours. What the Board does say in its own voice is that inmate supervision belongs among the areas it identifies for ongoing improvement, alongside prompt identification of medical and mental health problems, suicide prevention, and substance-use risk. Note also the mechanism: these citations come out of the Board's reviews of deaths, not out of routine facility inspections.
Second, the gap between an account and a record. "Making rounds" describes an activity. The regulation describes an artifact. It requires a minimum frequency, requires the intervals between checks to be random, and requires the checks to be written down. Whatever those documents show, they exist by rule: the housing-unit inspection log for the hours in question, the facility's written suicide prevention and intervention plan, and the documentation of that plan's annual review by staff who work with inmates. Those three items, not a press summary, are what would settle whether supervision met the standard in any given case.
Third, how long correction takes. The report notes that during CY2025 a single facility, which it does not name, was released from a compliance plan imposed over supervision violations found when it reviewed deaths that occurred in CY2021 and CY2022. That is three to four years between a death and the closing out of the corrective step attached to it. The report also lists consequences that have followed supervision failures elsewhere in the system: officers and deputies dismissed, written reprimands and unpaid suspensions, and in at least one case an automated rounds system installed.
Prediction, checkable: the Board's next annual report of jail death reviews, covering CY2026, will again name inmate supervision among the key areas it identifies for ongoing improvement. That can be checked against the published report by July 31, 2027.
What this article does not establish
- It does not establish a date for this death, and so does not assert that the death falls within the CY2025 review period.
- The Board's report does not name Jaqaris Andrew Jemison, does not say which facility received which citation, and does not connect any of its supervision citations to the Newport News City Jail. Nothing here should be read as the Board having cited that jail over this death.
- Daily Pol has obtained no court filing in this matter and makes no claim about any civil case. No allegation against any person is repeated here, because none has been read against a primary document.
- No cause-of-death determination by a medical examiner has been obtained.
Right of reply
As of August 11, 2026, Daily Pol has not documented a request for comment to the Newport News Sheriff's Office, or to counsel for Jemison's family. Both are owed one, and this article records that both requests are outstanding rather than implying either party declined to speak.
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Editor's standing note, not a fact drawn from the sources above: Daily Pol appends crisis-line information to any article touching a death by suicide. In the United States, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.