On Sunday (September 11), Oklahoma inmate John Basco was found dead in his cell. Basco is one of four inmates who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last year, claiming that jail guards tortured them by continuously playing the children’s nursery song “Baby Shark.”
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Oklahoma Inmate Found Dead After Filing Lawsuit Over Guards Torturing Inmates With “Baby Shark”
Around 3:50 a.m. last Sunday, a detention officer at the Oklahoma County Detention Center was performing site checks and found Basco unresponsive in his cell.
Medical personnel were called and tried to save him, but the 48-year-old inmate was pronounced dead sometime after 4 a.m. Basco’s death is being labeled as “mysterious” as his cause of death has not yet been publicly revealed. His family has since been noticed of his passing, however.
Furthermore, Basco is the 14th inmate that has died at the jail this year, and died less than a month after another inmate took their own life on August 19. In July, three more inmates died.
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As mentioned, Basco previously filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2021 against Oklahoma County Sheriff Tommie Johnson III, the Board of County Commissioners, the jail trust, and two former jail officers.
Basco, along with other inmates, alleged that jail officers used excessive force and discipline tactics, describing them as “torture events.” Basco and inmate Daniel Hedrick claimed that they were forced to stand in a stress position as they listened to “Baby Shark” several times in late 2019.
In November 2019, another inmate, Joseph Mitchell, was pulled from his cell, handcuffed, and forced into a room to stand in a “stress position” for three to four hours while officers played “Baby Shark” on repeat so loud “that it was reverberating down the hallways.”
Another inmate, Ja’Lee Foreman Jr, claims he was not forced to listen to the nursery song, but instead, he was put into a “stress position” and later was kneed in the back, then slammed into a wall by one of the jail guards. Another then proceeded to spit on him.
The lawsuit notes that at the time of the alleged offenses, the inmates were pretrial detainees, and had not posed as a threat to the officers.
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Following the claims, in October 2020, Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater charged two former jail officers and their supervisor with misdemeanor cruelty.
Prater stated that the practice of playing “Baby Shark” as a form of punishment was “cruel and inhumane” and that it put “undue emotional stress on the inmates who were most likely already suffering.” After being charged, the jail officers resigned and their supervisor retired.
Meanwhile, the civil rights lawsuit is still pending. In July, a U.S. district judge stayed an additional federal lawsuit from the inmates until the criminal case against the jail officers is closed. Their next hearing is set for September 22.
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