ROCKINGHAM COUNTY, N.C. — The mother of a Rockingham County inmate who died by suicide Tuesday wants to know more about his death and thinks something needs to change.
"My son wasn’t a murderer," said Melissa Efird, the mother of Kyle Kepley. "He wasn’t a drug dealer. He was troubled and had made mistakes, as we all do, but the system failed him,"
Efird said Kepley was the inmate who died by suicide Tuesday at the Rockingham County Jail.
"Mental illness is a pandemic, it’s a crisis and it’s been going on for a while," Efird said. "My son's suicide wasn’t the first one. If it was indeed a suicide, and one is too many."
Kepley's death was the fourth suicide at the prison in fourteen months. Three other inmates died by suicide in February 2021, the first at the jail in about a decade.
"We are doing our job to the best of our ability to protect our inmate population because I keep in mind that everybody there is somebody’s family member," said Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page in an interview with News 2 Wednesday.
Page said since the three suicides in 2021, they have implemented an electronic checking system for inmates.
Efird said her son faced addiction and mental illness. He went to rehab but struggled to get proper help.
"When I was trying to get Kyle some help during these last two weeks, I was told that the only way to do that would be to go to the magistrate and have him committed, which would mean involving the police, which was the last thing I wanted to do because I don’t have a lot of faith in our judicial system," Efird said.
Compassion, Efird said, is something missing from the criminal justice system and the treatment of inmates.
"I just want people to know that inmates are human, good people, not all bad and they have rights and they deserve justice just like the rest of society does," Efird said. "They are not lesser than anyone else."
According to Page, the jail does mental health checks but they can still be a challenge.
"When you screen (inmates), whether for medical or mental health issues or addiction issues, sometimes they don’t tell you (about mental health issues)," Page said. "You only know what you know. You can’t read people's minds. I don’t have a crystal ball to know who’s coming to my jail and what their issues are. All we can do is ask."
Efird said the Rockingham County Sheriff's Office knew about her son's issues due to several interactions with them. She said her son went to the hospital last week and she spoke with deputies from the department about his various issues, including that he was hearing voices.
She said something needs to change in the overall jail system and the way addiction and mental illness are treated in jails. Page said addiction is becoming an increasing problem in their facilities and they are working on ways to address it properly.
"You can’t arrest away addiction," Page said. "You’ve got to treat it. It’s a health issue. It’s a disease and we’ve got to make sure whether a person has alcohol issues, drug issues, or mental health issues, we’ve got to make sure we are treating those persons."
Page said they are discussing medication-assisted treatment in jails and the county could potentially establish a recovery court that would divert people struggling with addiction away from jail.
Efird would like to know more about her son's death. She said she was not able to see his body and was only told he died by suicide early Tuesday.
"I feel like I’ve been given the runaround from the day it happened," Efird said.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is leading the investigation into his death.