The Torture-Murder of Othel Moore Jr. and Missouri’s Concentration Camp Prisons

Four Missouri prison cops were charged Friday with murder, and a fifth with involuntary manslaughter, in the December execution of Othel Moore Jr., a 38-year-old brother at Jefferson City Correctional Center. 

The prison cops restrained Othel with a full-body torture contraption, covered him with a hood and a mask, and repeatedly attacked him with chemical weapons. Witnesses reported Moore pleading for his life. 

An Eyewitness Describes the Gang-Style Torture Execution, Causing Surge of Terror Throughout MO Prisons

“I never watched anybody die before,” Jordan Seller, a former prisoner at the facility who was an eyewitness to Moore’s murder told CNN. 

The nightmarish horror began with what was supposed to be a routine cell search on the maximum-security block. “They come in like a hundred deep, and that’s barely an exaggeration,” Seller recounted. “They try to pull everybody out as fast as they can, search the cells as fast as they can, and get out.”

Seller and his cellmate had already been pulled out and put back in their cell when they saw the commotion around Moore’s cell. “The cell was surrounded by COs,” he said. Moore was begging for his life, saying he had a medical lay-in and needed two pairs of handcuffs to ease the tension on his shoulders.

An attorney for Moore’s family, Andrew Stroth, has said Moore had blood coming out of his ears and nose. 

“Immediately he’s jumping, hopping, and you can hear him screaming, ‘Help! I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, take it off. I can’t breathe. I’m allergic to mace. I need help.’ And then it gets worse and worse,” Seller described. “He’s jumping up and down, shaking. Slowly, his screams are getting weaker and weaker. I believe I watched him die before they even took him out of the wing.”

“From our perspective, it’s George Floyd 3.0, in prison,” the civil rights attorney representing the Moore family told KOMU 8 on Friday. “We’re demanding release of all the video.”

What is CERT? The State-Sanctioned Gang That Carried Out the Torture Killing

The officers who killed Othel Moore Jr. were part of a so-called “Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT),” which I will instead refer to as a Prison Terror Squad (PTS). PTS are tactically trained prison cops that operate like a prison-specific SWAT team. 

During mass searches, they swarm in overwhelming numbers, often hundreds deep, descending upon unarmed and helpless prisoners in the dead of night. They claim to maintain order; but their true purpose is to instill terror, inflict asymmetrical violence, and assert domination. 

CERT’s presence implies violence, creating a culture of constant terror within the prison system.

Prison or Concentration Facility? MO State-Sanctioned Killings Reach Unprecedented Rates

In 2024, the Missouri so-called Department of Corrections saw a sharp increase to a staggering 13 deaths per month, an increase from the last several years’ average of 11 per month.

These executions must be understood as acts of terror intended to strike sustained fear, domination, and control over the general populace of incarcerated comrades. The number of brothers who died while in custody last year was over 150—that’s about five times the number of United States soldiers killed in 2022.

Abolition Now: The Only Just Response

Any institution that regularly allows, enables, and even incentivizes such brutish, horrifying violence against humans—trapping them in cages, herding them, shocking them with shock gloves, spraying them with chemical weapons, asphyxiating and strangling them, depriving them of essential medical needs, infringing on their human rights, keeping them in sweltering heat over 100 degrees in the height of summer, beating and torturing—are not rehabilitation centers; they are concentration facilities.

It is incumbent upon all of us to see the horror of what happened to Othel not as a happenstance or aberration but, as the Missouri Justice Coalition described, “usual and commonplace” for MO prisons to act in this way.

This is not reformable. We must stand in solidarity with our comrades on the inside and demand abolition now!

The department’s own investigation and the firing of ten individuals involved in the incident are mere smokescreens to cover the fact these facilities are far closer to concentration camps than they are rehabilitative institutions.