North Carolina prison will get security cameras after Gaston County man’s killing

Ryan Oehrli
·2 min read

Tyrrell Prison Work Farm in eastern North Carolina will be equipped with security cameras after a June assault that proved fatal.

Michael Franklin Crumbley of Gaston County died days after he was attacked by other prisoners in an open dormitory area of the minimum-security prison, The Charlotte Observer reported last year.

Crumbley was 58. A recently-released medical examiner’s report said that his death was a homicide.

No security cameras caught the assault. And no guards saw it, complicating the investigation, an investigator with the Tyrrell County Sheriff’s Office previously said.

“Many of our small, minimum-security units like Tyrrell don’t have security cameras,” said Keith Acree, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction. “We’re working to change that.”

The cameras have been paid for and will be installed at Tyrrell this autumn, Acree said. Tyrrell was already scheduled to get cameras, he said, but the plans were expedited after the assault.

“We have four small teams that can handle these installations, but they also handle routine maintenance on other electronic systems across the prison system,” he said of the wait. “The timeline is based on their estimated availability to get the work done.”

Michael Crumbley died after an assault at Tyrrell Prison Work Farm. No cameras captured what happened.
Michael Crumbley died after an assault at Tyrrell Prison Work Farm. No cameras captured what happened.

Eleven small, minimum-custody prisons don’t have cameras or have cameras that are so old “they’re not useful anymore,” and are due for an upgrade, Acree said. So are five minimum-custody units in larger prisons.

Tyrrell — like many prisons in North Carolina and across the country — is also short on staff. It has a uniquely difficult time finding people to work given the county’s small size, Acree said. The prison has a vacancy rate of 43% for all its positions, he said.

Across North Carolina prisons, prisoner-on-prisoner assaults requiring medical attention went down every year since 2019 — except in 2023, according to data that Department of Adult Correction Secretary Todd Ishee presented to the General Assembly last week.

  • There were 1,037 such assaults in 2019.

  • In 2020, 893.

  • In 2021, 762.

  • In 2022, 678.

  • In 2023, 718.

The State Bureau of Investigation and the Tyrrell County Sheriff’s Office are still investigating Crumbley’s death.

“The Department of Adult Correction has fully cooperated with those investigations and launched an internal investigation,” according to a department news release.