‘Tortured’ Chesterfield County inmate’s death ruled homicide

It took 49 days for a pathologist to finalize the autopsy report for Gary “Bubba” Blair, an inmate inside the Chesterfield County Detention Center. Jailers found his lifeless body on the floor of his feces-filled jail cell on July 24.

Queen City News launched our own investigation into the death after sources began revealing the condition of Blair’s jail cell: the floor and walls covered in inches-deep feces, the water to his sink was shut off, and Blair had lost more than 100 pounds.

Inmates we spoke with who were locked in the pod with Bubba Blair described his treatment by jail staff as “torture.” Those inmates said they watched Blair drink water from his jail toilet and he would hand other inmates a small potato chip bag to fill with water for him while those inmates were let out of their cells a few hours each day.

Blair was not allowed out of his cell, the inmates told Queen City News Chief Investigative Reporter Jody Barr.

The inmates would fill Blair’s small chip bag through a small opening in the food tray slot in his jail door. Most of the water would spill before they got the bag to him, the inmates said.

As it typically does, toxicology testing takes weeks, and the autopsy report usually can’t be finalized without it. That happened in this case.

Sources within SLED confirmed law enforcement received Blair’s autopsy report on Sept. 11. Chesterfield County Coroner Kip Kiser refused to confirm when he received the report when Barr contacted the coroner on Sept. 14.

Kiser, who is a constitutional officer with sole authority to determine manner of death, would not answer any questions about the status of Blair’s autopsy or whether he received a copy or when he might have received it. Kiser instead referred QCN to SLED for an update. SLED has no authority to determine the manner of death, and the state’s criminal investigation is to merely determine whether a crime was committed and who had a hand in committing it.

Blair’s family found out the autopsy was finalized on Sunday, Sept. 13, from their civil attorney.

The autopsy listed Blair’s cause of death as “profound dehydration…due to deprivation of water,” and the pathologist listed the manner of death as ‘homicide,’ according to the Blair family’s civil attorney, James “Boo” Moore, III.

The homicide finding means “…one person causes the death of another, either through an action or inaction,” according to a definition published by Cornell Law School. The person or people who caused Blair’s death is the subject of an open and ongoing S.C. Law Enforcement Division investigation.

The autopsy report also found Blair suffered from what was essentially a bed sore on his heel, “acute bronchial pneumonia,” and “…profound weight loss,” as well as evidence he ingested toilet water. All were listed as contributing factors in Blair’s death.

In letters Blair wrote to his family and a circuit court judge in April and May, he was asking for help because of the treatment jailers were subjecting him to at the time. Part of his concern was that he would starve to death over the lack of food, and he had no water to drink.

When Blair was booked into jail, his family said he weighed nearly 300 pounds. When his sister and aunt went to the funeral home to see his body in July following the autopsy, his family said they didn’t recognize Blair, estimating he’d lost more than 100 pounds.

The pathologist noted Bubba Blair’s weight to be 185 pounds at the time of his autopsy.

Barr interviewed Bubba Blair’s aunt, Vivian Cassidy, a few hours after the family learned the autopsy was finished on Sunday.

“Bubba got the death sentence; that’s how I feel. For wearing a shirt,” Cassidy told Barr.

The Blair family, along with Boo Moore, met with SLED agents and the coroner behind closed doors on Tuesday. Kiser blocked Barr from attending the meeting, although the Blair family asked to allow QCN inside.

The reason, according to the Blair family, was that SLED didn’t want details of their investigation to be made public. The coroner’s office went as far as telling the family to turn their phones off during the meeting.

The family honored investigators’ wishes and did not disclose the details of what SLED agents have uncovered so far after the meeting.

“I was very surprised by what that autopsy showed. The autopsy showed that Mr. Blair died from profound dehydration due to deprivation of water, period. He died from dehydration,” Moore told Barr after the coroner and SLED meeting.

“There were a number of other findings that were within the autopsy report that were consistent with what the family has been told about witnesses that have come forward by the reporting that you have done, that he was not drinking, that there was massive weight loss and that he had to decubitus ulcers, or pressure ulcers on his heels, which are consistent with laying on the floor, probably for days at a time,” Moore said.

That finding is also consistent with what inmates also told Barr in our news investigation in August.

“What was most important and most critical about the autopsy report was the manner of death. And the manner of death was determined to be homicide, which within detention centers, oftentimes you see accident or natural causes or undetermined manner of death. But the pathologist office here, they called it what it was: is homicide. And so what we understand now is that the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is going to be investigating the death of Gary Blair, not just to see what happened, but investigating it as a homicide, which is critically important to this family,” Moore said.

Chesterfield County Sheriff Cambo Streater is lobbying for a new $50 million detention center and told a news outlet two weeks ago that the old, dilapidated jail was partly to blame for what happened to Bubba Blair.

“One thing that we’ve we’ve heard is that there has been some some blame on Gary’s death based on the facility, the building, it needs to be replaced. It needs to be repaired. The bottom line is a building didn’t do this to Gary,” Moore told QCN, “People did this. People who walked by him and knew that he was suffering did nothing.”

Moore, a Georgetown, S.C. civil attorney, has successfully sued county detention center healthcare providers and governmental entities over South Carolina jail deaths and people injured in. Moore recently won a $10 million verdict over a jail medical negligence case out of Williamsburg County, S.C.

Moore asked that anyone with information about Blair’s time in the Chesterfield County jail or with their own stories of similar treatment there to contact his law firm in Georgetown.

In February, Chesterfield County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Blair on a charge of impersonating a law enforcement officer after he showed up to his sister’s home wearing a CCSO golf shirt, a security officer badge, handcuffs, and pepper spray.

Blair spent 181 days in the county jail waiting for the S.C. Office of Mental Health to place him into a treatment program to restore his competency to stand trial on the charge. A judge ordered OMH to place Blair into restoration treatment on June 3, but the agency never followed through on the judge’s order.

The OMH’s spokeswoman, Beth Moore, told QCN the state’s mental health agency has a nine-month backlog to get people like Blair the help they need. That means instead of being treated, Blair remained in the county jail and was unable to be bonded out.

The backlog is essentially a nine-month jail sentence imposition because people in Blair’s situation cannot be bonded out of jail until the mental health treatment is complete.

Blair wrote a letter to his father in April, describing the conditions he was living in inside his cell in the jail’s E Pod. Blair was alone in the protective custody pod.

“I’ve lost about 90 pounds so far. I’m starving to death in here; only two meals a day, that’s it. Breakfast and lunch; you starve, and I also have to drink from my toilet and no mattress to sleep on, only a hard ground,” Blair wrote in the handwritten letter dated April 22, 2026.

“I’ve been abused by staff and assaulted by everyone on the unit; I had to go 28 days without a shower, except 1+2 in 30 days. No help for a white man,” he wrote.

Blair also laid out a similar story in a May 13, 2026, letter intended for S.C. Circuit Court Judge Brian Gibbons, but the address Blair wrote on the envelope was not a valid address, so the letter was returned to the return address listed on the upper left of the envelope, which was his father’s home where Blair lived.

“I went 14 days without a bath, then 14 more days without a bath or shower. I was raw between the legs and ass,” Blair wrote in Judge Gibbons letter

“I weighed 292; 9 days later I weighed 270. Rapid weight loss is very unhealthy, not to mention spider bites. Drinking water from [the] toilet bowl since I came to E block, plus my toilet wasn’t flushed for 7 days straight, then 7 more days straight. Finally cut it on and cleaned it for drinking water. The staff is very nasty to white inmates thanks to Troy (Ellerbe) and James Dixon,” Blair wrote.

Ellerbe was appointed jail administrator by current sheriff, Cambo Streater, in 2023. Streater fired Ellerbe five days after Blair’s death, but will not explain the reason he fired Ellerbe or precisely how Ellerbe’s termination related to Blair’s death.

The day jailers found Blair’s body, SLED went to the jail to open an investigation into the death. SLED has since conducted multiple interviews with jailers, Ellerbe, Blair’s family, and inmates who were housed in the E Pod during the time Blair was there.

Not all jailers agreed to be interviewed by SLED, according to sources we’ve spoken with on background.

Exactly when Blair died is also unsolved. On the death certificate, the coroner listed Blair’s time of death as some time between 7:00 a.m. and 11 a.m. That four-hour window leaves unanswered questions over how often jailers were checking on Blair and whether he actually died between those hours, as the time of death is an estimate by the coroner’s office.

Although South Carolina coroners receive some state-mandated training, they are not required to possess the same training and credentials as medical doctors.

Sheriff Cambo Streater has also refused to interview with QCN about the condition found inside Blair’s cell. The sheriff has not told the public about the circumstances around Blair’s death, what he saw inside the jail after Blair died, or why the water was turned off to Blair and the other inmates’ cells we spoke with as part of our news investigation.

When Barr found Streater in the parking lot of the sheriff’s office last week, the sheriff would only say that everything related to Blair’s death nearly two months ago was under investigation. The sheriff also apologized to Blair’s family for what happened to him.

Blair’s family told Barr they have not received a call or a visit from the sheriff since Blair’s death on July 24.

“Somebody needs to pay. And it might be a lot of somebodies because there was a lot of people that knew, had to know,” Cassidy said.

The SLED investigation is still open and active at the time of publication of this report.

Chesterfield County has a population as of 2020 that was 61% white and 30% black, with Hispanics at 5%. The county was carried by Trump in 2024 by 29 percentage points. The county council has a white majority, and the sheriff is white. However, the director of the detention center is black.

So there could be some anti-white racism. It was segregationist country in the past; the county was carried by Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968. There was almost no black suffrage until the Voting Rights Act was passed; until 1948, Democratic candidates, even Alfred Smith in 1928, received 99% of the vote in an overwhelmingly Protestant county. Black grudges against slavery and segregation persist into this day. The white, Republican politicians who run Chesterfield County recognize that antagonizing the large black minority would drag up the old stereotypes that would be exploited in the black media world and the legacy media. So it is quite possible they would allow a poor and possibly handicapped white be abused to death.

As much as we rightly fear centralized power in Washington, we must recognize that the Boss Hogg mentality prevails in many rural counties, and not just in the South.

I suspect the black jail director will sue, be found not guilty, given back pay, restitution and reinstated.

The incident has already been memory-holed.

Many J-6ers report same mistreatment by black guards in DC federal prisons.

What a horrific tale of abuse! No water and he died of thirst!!

That's a long article. Here's a summary:

Gary “Bubba” Blair, a white inmate at the Chesterfield County Detention Center in South Carolina, was found dead July 24, 2026, in a feces-filled cell with the water shut off. An autopsy ruled the death a homicide from profound dehydration due to water deprivation. He had lost more than 100 pounds and drank toilet water; other inmates called his treatment “torture.”
In letters, Blair alleged staff were “nasty to white inmates,” that there was “no help for a white man,” and blamed jail administrator Troy Ellerbe and James Dixon. Blair had been held since February on an impersonating-an-officer charge while awaiting delayed mental-health placement. Ellerbe was fired days after the death.
The two names Blair cited: James “JD” Dixon is the former Chesterfield County sheriff and the county’s first African-American sheriff Troy Ellerbe was the jail administrator fired five days after Blair’s death; public bios do not state his race. Here is his photo from the Chesterfield Country Sheriff Office:

Sounds like lots of virulent racism.

“That is probably the saddest story I have read all this year.”

It is bad, but there is lots of recent competition for saddest:
* Chesterfield County, SC murdering inmates by dehydration
* Massachusetts mother murdering her three children
* Alabama mother murdering her newborn

The man was found ankle deep in crap ,yet he had a working toilet.. my money is on he was extremely combative, mentally deranged, and needed a mental hospital and some relatives with hearts instead of lumps of rock.

where was his family for 6 months? Did no one check on him? The entire jail needs to be put on leave. Right up to the janitor.

what kind of place leaves someone in a cell like that?? No one who works there should be free to walk around right now. Shut the place down!

The toilet was not working much of the time. When there was water to the toilet, he may not have desired to foul his only source of drinking water.

Yes, lets hear all of the story. The reason he was held was lack of a mental evaluation for nine months.

In Jail, on an “impersonating an officer charge” by a family member, without any violence mentioned.

He was able to get some information out to relatives. If you have ever tried to contact someone in Jail, it is not easy. It takes a lot of time. Contact is rigorously rationed. It has become a rule: no personal visits, only contact over the net, and that has to be paid for.

Such has been my experience. If no one is puting money in your account, you have virtually no phone privileges.

Those “in the know” say time in jail is much “harder time” than in prison.

Arrested on a charge of impersonating a law enforcement officer after he showed up to his sister's home wearing a CCSO golf shirt, a security officer badge, handcuffs, and pepper spray.

If that statement is accurate it seems to me the charge is bogus unless a "security officer" is someone considered law enforcement in the eyes of the law (and I would not assume every mall security type is so designated). The other items are irrelevant.

This whole case stinks as badly as that jail cell.

Ive never been in jail or even arrested. If my son was arrested I would have a lawyer filing petitions left and right. I realize his family may have been broke. But to not contact thier son in 6 months? Even if it is " Hard to do".

6 months and no one looked in on him that cared?there has to be a lot of back story. More than likely A lot of history with this guy and the cops. And a family who was glad to have him out of thier lives for a while.

Im sure the lawsuit will get a lawyer involved cheap..

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