Mother sues private Northeast Ohio prison over son’s fentanyl overdose death

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The mother of a man who died of a fentanyl overdose in a private prison in Northeast Ohio has sued over her son’s 2023 death.

Bonnie Billings of Canton accused officials at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center of negligence and failing to provide a safe environment after Montel A. William’s death.

She named the prison’s warden and its parent company, CoreCivic, as defendants in the lawsuit filed earlier this month in federal court in Youngstown.

CoreCivic spokesman Brian Todd said the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation. He said that safety is a top-priority for the company and that it has a zero-tolerance policy against drugs or other contraband getting into the prison.

“Contraband is a nationwide challenge for all corrections systems, both public and private,” Todd said in a statement. “We work as one team with our government partners, and local, state and federal law enforcement agencies on investigative and intervention efforts to remove, detect and prevent the introduction of contraband at all of our facilities, including NEOCC.”

The prison typically holds some 1,500 federal pretrial detainees and inmates serving state prison sentences.

The lawsuit said someone smuggled drugs into the prison and that Williams, 30, died from either purposefully or unintentionally ingesting the drug Oct. 31, 2023.

It said the death happened because of the prison’s “lax care policies and failure to exercise due care.”

Williams was serving a four-year, six-month sentence on a felonious assault conviction in Stark County at the time he died.

It’s the latest in a string of lawsuits against the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center. The lawsuits include accusations by employees who were attacked by inmates and that prison employees failed to get medical help for a man who was stabbed several times.

Federal prosecutors in recent years have also charged two guards, a nurse and members of a violent street gang with smuggling items, including drugs, inside the lockup.

Adam Ferrise covers federal courts at cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. You can find his work here.