'Dismayed': Rockingham County loses insurance coverage for beleaguered jail (2024)

WENTWORTH — The rural county with a detention facility that’s seen 11 deaths — five of which were suicides — since 2021, and felt the weight of a federal wrongful death lawsuit, has lost liability insurance coverage and has 25 days to find a new carrier.

Travelers Companies, one of the world’s largest providers of private insurance, will terminate the jail’s coverage on July 1, according to Chris Elliott, who, as safety and risk manager, is in charge of purchasing insurance for all of Rockingham County government.

“The insurance company didn’t want to find out about these cases in the news. They wanted to hear about them from the county,’’ Elliott said.

During multiple inspections between 2021 and 2024, state jail regulators from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services found that detention staff failed to adequately observe all 11 inmates who died during that timeframe at the jail.

If the county can’t find coverage for the detention center, it will have to resort to self-insurance — essentially bearing the risk — and in so doing ante up taxpayer dollars that could otherwise go to other institutions and services, Elliott said.

“The taxpayers will be the ones who bear the brunt of the cost,’’ he said.

County commissioners, who were notified on May 17 of the risk of losing insurance by Elliott, did not respond to requests for comment. Instead, they referred questions to County Manager Lance Metzler, who directed questions to Elliott.

Longtime Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, who has overseen the jail since 1998, also has been beset with personnel problems at the facility in recent months.

In February, Page terminated Capt. Shane Bullins, 53, of Stoneville, who headed the jail. Bullins was charged by the State Bureau of Investigation with multiple sexual battery and assault offenses, including two misdemeanor counts of sexual battery and four misdemeanor counts of assault on a female, according to authorities.

Bullins and Page are among nine defendants named in the federal lawsuit brought by the mother of Kyle Kepley, 35, of Reidsville, who died by suicide in his cell on May 3, 2022. The suit alleges many deficiencies by jail staff, including failure by them to place Kepley on a special suicide watch after he expressed a wish to die and showed psychotic symptoms.

On May 21, another jail officer, Neletta Shamell Davis-Barnette, 41, of Reidsville was arrested and brought before a magistrate on charges she supplied contraband to an inmate. Released on an unsecured bond, Davis-Barnette had been under investigation by the SBI since January, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office.

Page, whose term as sheriff ends in 2026 and who lost the recent Republican primary for lieutenant governor, referred all questions about the jail insurance to Elliott.

Poor communication about problems by the sheriff’s office to Elliott’s office and commissioners made the county vulnerable to the jail policy being cancelled, Elliott explained.

“I think somewhere in between the lines of handling the (jail deaths and personnel) situations and communicating to the state, something went wrong. But I can tell you that everybody’s now onboard to assure this never happens again.’’

Elliott, who has worked in his field for 24 years, said the cancellation troubled him.

“I was dismayed,’’ he admitted. “I’ve never faced a situation like this before and it really surprised me.’’

While the exact cost of new insurance for the jail was not available, a source with knowledge of the county budget said the increase would be considerable. The county of roughly 91,000 paid $400,000 in premiums to Travelers this year for a so-called “package” commercial liability policy that covers all county employment liability and law enforcement liability, which includes the jail.

It is difficult to tease out the exact cost of liability insurance for the jail because of the package nature of the policy, according to the source and Charlie Eaton, director of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners Risk Group, which offers a self-insurance program designed for county governments.

If Rockingham County cannot find a private insurer to sell them coverage by July 1, a North Carolina Association of County Commissioners policy would be an option, Eaton speculated.

The North Carolina Association of County Commissioners already provides insurance to 70 of the state’s 100 counties through two different lines of coverage, one of which is designed for property and liability exposure.

In an era when law enforcement is under heightened public scrutiny nationwide, private insurance carriers are much more selective about who they will cover, Eaton said.

“In the last two years, in the commercial insurance arena, public entities such as counties ... have seen insurance carriers limit or withdraw coverage. It’s a hardened market for public entities’’ and “law enforcement .... over the last couple of years have had difficulty in obtaining coverage at the level they once could.

“We understand (Rockingham County’s) situation.”