A seemingly healthy 29 year old man is booked at Dauphin County Prison. Two weeks later he is dead. Now, his family has to fight for answers.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What happened to Tyreek Riley?
Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Death County PA early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. The body of Tyreek Riley lies on a table inside a coroner's office. A breathing tube from the hospital still hangs from Tyreek's mouth. IV catheters protrude from his neck and right hand.
Tyreek was just 21 years old, a young black man whose death was unimaginable just two weeks earlier when he had been arrested and sent to the local jail. Now, it falls under the broad category of a death of questionable circumstances. So, in a sterile exam room in a generic office park, a few miles southeast of downtown Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the autopsy of Tyreek Riley begins.
A forensic pathologist in a surgical mask examines Tyreek's body. In some ways, he seems to have been perfectly healthy. The pathologist notes Tyreek still looks well-nourished and well-built. But Tyrek's body also shows signs of injury. The pathologist jots down what he sees. Contusion to the mid-forehead. Contusion to the tongue. Abrasions on the lips.
A quarter-inch cut encircling the right wrist. Cuts on the knuckles. Bruising on a forearm. Abrasions on the legs and feet. And a six-inch bruise on the right hip. The pathologist examines the internal organs too. He sees hemorrhaging in the lungs, oxygen deprivation in the brain. It would be up to the pathologist to stitch together these findings into an official report.
But another man would be responsible for actually deciding Tyreek's cause and manner of death. Graham Hetrick, the county coroner. Graham is there in the exam room during the autopsy, and he looms over the proceedings. In many ways, he looms over Harrisburg and all of Dauphin County. He has an unmistakable look, a neatly cropped white beard, tortoise shell spectacles, often a white lab coat.
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Chapter 2: Who is Graham Hetrick and what is his role?
He has his own TV show, a true crime reality series on ID Discovery, named for his catchphrase, I speak for the dead. And in real life, it was Graham Hetrick's job to solve the mystery of how Tyreek's time in jail led to his death. Graham had ruled on thousands of deaths before. His findings were rarely challenged, but this time would be different.
Graham's conclusions about why Tyreek died would unleash a furious response and expose a fact that local officials were trying hard to hide. Tyreek's death was part of a pattern. Something very bad was going on inside Dolphin County Prison.
This is serious. This is family, and I want to know what happened.
I knew I was going to die in there. I could feel it. And I was like, you got to get me out of here.
Dolphin County is the worst jail ever. How they treat us there, people would rather die. Shame!
responsible for the death of so many people inside of this building here.
Why you gotta die, die, die, die, die? Oh, so young.
From Wondery and PennLive, I'm Joshua Vaughn, and this is Death County, PA. I grew up in Waynesboro, a small town in central Pennsylvania. It's a great place to grow up. It was small and rural. You knew your neighbors. You got a lot of freedom as a kid. It was also homogenous, almost completely white, and it could feel a little stifling.
Waynesboro is about an hour from Harrisburg, the state capital. And when I was a kid, Harrisburg was the big city to me. It had a bad reputation, and sometimes for good reasons. The longtime mayor of Harrisburg ran the city like a petty dictatorship. People called him mayor for life.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances of Tyreek's arrest?
And soon they'd have plenty of evidence to support their suspicions that something violent had occurred. Because through their lawyer, they've been able to get photos from Tyreek's autopsy.
So I go and I see the pictures at my cousin Carmen's, which is Tyreek's mother. There's a few family members that came and gathered on the porch outside. And I was pulled to the side and they let me see them. And I was like, wow.
There were close-ups of cuts encircling Tyreek's wrist. A massive purple splotch covering his lower back. Deep wounds on his neck and upper back.
I was like, the body doesn't do this. You can see where the marks are on the back of his legs, the tightening of the handcuffs around the wrist. You know, you have beat marks all up and down the back. This is not from a fall. And I'm not a doctor. You don't need to be. This is bruising. This is like physical bruising.
To Lamont, it was clear. This had been a lot worse than the struggle his inside source had initially told him about.
I kept saying, man, they beat him. They killed him. That's all I kept saying.
Lamont figured those brutal autopsy photos of Tyreek would force something to happen. Someone would come forward with more answers, and the people involved would be held accountable. Families in Dauphin County are often kept in the loop after a suspicious death. Someone from the coroner's office might sit down with the parents to discuss preliminary autopsy findings.
But as the weeks went by, Tyreek's family wasn't hearing anything.
We just kept asking, you know, where's the reports? Where's the reports? And of course, it do take time for toxicology and stuff like that. But for this one, I was like, we done buried him already. If we did want to get a second opinion, that means we would have to exhume. So all of this, that's what was making my suspicions roll even more. I'm like, this is taking way too long.
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Chapter 4: How did Tyreek's family respond to his death?
Lamont tried to explain how he'd seen restraint chairs used as an inmate at DCP. But Graham interrupted him.
Say, I'm not here. I'm not here for a restraint procedure.
I'm not here for prison procedure.
And that could very well be, but I'm telling you, this death was not caused by any trauma.
He was telling us things like, you know, Tyreek was going to die anyway because his blood was doing this, that, and the third. And that's where I had an issue. It bothered me. And I looked around and was like, nobody's seeing this happening in real time.
Graham's conclusion was clear. Nothing that happened to Tyreek Riley at DCP played any role in his death. As the press conference was drawing to a close, a reporter asked Graham about his catchphrase, I speak for the dead, which he had turned into a kind of mission statement of his integrity and incorruptibility.
He said earlier, you speak for the dead. Talk to me a little bit about why. Is that an emotional thing for you, or is that purely just a job requirement?
That's a job requirement. We take care of the evidence on or about the body. And that's what we did with this case.
Looking back at it now, it looks like he was doing his TV show.
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