PARAGOULD, Ark. – Greene County Sheriff Brad Snyder fired nine jail employees Wednesday after reviewing video from the Sept. 22 death of Atiyana Willis, an 18-year-old from Forrest City who had spent two weeks in the Greene County Detention Center on a $10,000 bond she never posted.
A day later, her foster parents sued Snyder in federal court, alleging jail staff watched Willis deteriorate, ignored her repeated requests for help and never called an ambulance until it was too late.
“Since that day, I’ve personally reviewed video and documentation from her time in our facility,” Snyder said in a video statement. “What I have found angers me greatly.”
“Every person in our custody deserves to be checked on, cared for, and treated with dignity. That’s the standard that I set here in this jail,” he said. “Based on my preliminary review, some of my employees did not meet that standard.”
Snyder told NEA Report that staff failed to assist Willis during the emergency even though the jail has medical personnel on site around the clock. Asked whether that meant the sheriff’s department was responsible for an inmate’s death, he said yes. “I won’t make excuses for that, and I won’t tolerate it either,” he said.
The nine who were fired were detention staff, not medical workers, Snyder said. The jail’s nurses are employed by Turn Key Health, a private contractor, and Snyder said the nurse on duty still works there. He ordered every remaining jail employee retrained on inmate checks and recognizing medical emergencies, and said more changes will follow if the investigations call for them. He has not accused anyone of a crime.
Arkansas State Police is investigating the death, and the sheriff’s office’s criminal investigation division is conducting a separate internal review. An autopsy at the Arkansas State Crime Lab is pending.
According to the sheriff’s office, Willis “experienced a medical emergency” at 11:16 a.m. Sept. 22. Medical staff and jailers performed CPR until Paragould fire and ambulance crews took over. She was taken to the Baptist Memorial Hospital emergency room in Paragould and pronounced dead at 12:01 p.m. The office has not said what the emergency was.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Jonesboro by Victor and Kimberly Britt, says Willis showed “observable signs of medical distress” and made “repeated requests for help,” and that staff who saw her condition worsen failed to get her a medical assessment, failed to relay her symptoms and failed to call EMS. It names Snyder in his individual and official capacities along with 10 unnamed jail employees and supervisors.
The complaint also attacks how the jail staffs its clinic, alleging licensed practical nurses were working beyond what their licenses allow and that Snyder never hired a registered nurse. “Had a Registered Nurse been employed, Willis would not have died,” it says. Turn Key is not a defendant.
The Britts, represented by Little Rock attorney Luther Sutter, are asking for compensatory damages, punitive damages against the individual defendants, attorney’s fees and a jury trial. No dollar figure is listed. The case is assigned to Chief U.S. District Judge D.P. Marshall Jr.
A St. Francis County circuit judge appointed the Britts, who are Willis’ foster parents, as co-special administrators of her estate Sept. 25. The order says their job is to “investigate, preserve, and, if appropriate, pursue any survival or wrongful-death claim” arising from her death in custody. Willis died without a will and is survived by her mother and four siblings, according to the order.
Court records lay out how Willis ended up in the Paragould jail.
On July 10, state police Trooper First Class Tyler Drum was parked behind Central Baptist Church off U.S. 49 south of Paragould, working on an unrelated report, when he saw a woman walk out of the woods into a field near a housing development. He recognized her from a Forrest City Police Department email about a stolen car that had been involved in a hit-and-run in Jonesboro. Willis led him to a red 2015 Ford Fiesta hidden behind an abandoned trailer off Greene County Road 920, and Drum booked her into the Greene County jail on a Class C felony charge of theft by receiving. A district judge set bond at $35,000 and ordered an ankle monitor.
She was out within days. On July 17, Jonesboro police cited her for obstructing governmental operations, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, and a district court docket entry notes she was uncooperative at her video arraignment. Three days later, the Jonesboro Police Department petitioned the Craighead County probate court to have her involuntarily committed as a mentally ill person. A judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation July 22 and signed a 45-day commitment order July 30. The city charges were dropped.
Prosecuting Attorney Sonia Hagood’s office filed the felony information in Greene County Circuit Court on Aug. 12. When Willis did not show up for her 9 a.m. arraignment Aug. 25, Circuit Judge Pam Honeycutt ordered a bench warrant for her arrest. That was 26 days into the 45-day commitment. Nothing in the court file says where she was.
She was arrested on the warrant Sept. 8, KAIT reported. At a first appearance Sept. 10, District Judge Curtis Hitt found her indigent, appointed a public defender and set a $10,000 bond. Among the handwritten conditions of release: “Provide proof of mental health treatment and compliance with course of treatment as prescribed.” Her arraignment was set for Oct. 29. Willis signed the form. She did not make bond.
The record of that hearing was electronically filed with the circuit clerk at 1:32 p.m. Sept. 22, about 90 minutes after she was pronounced dead.
Three days later, Hagood dismissed the theft charge. The order carries one handwritten line at the bottom: “Defendant passed away on September 22, 2026.”
Willis’ death is at least the third at the Greene County jail since Snyder took office in January 2023. An inmate was found unresponsive in an isolation cell in February 2024, and Jacob Lowell Smith, 32, a person of interest in a Fulton County double homicide, was found with a towel around his neck during a security check last November. The federal complaint points further back, to the deaths of Garrett Lee Evers in 2019 and Marshall Ray Price in 2022, as evidence the county knew its jail medical care was deficient.
Price, who was serving time on a kratom trafficking conviction, died Dec. 8, 2022, hours after a Turn Key nurse sent him back to his cell with a head wound and a blood pressure of 70 over 60, according to a federal judge’s ruling last year that allowed a deliberate-indifference claim against the nurse to go forward. Hagood declined to file charges in that death.
KAIT reported Thursday that relatives of other Greene County inmates, speaking anonymously, described inmates going weeks without medication, getting no time outdoors and being abused. Snyder did not respond to the station’s questions about those claims.
Snyder, a former Paragould police officer who started as a sheriff’s office dispatcher in 1997, won the Republican primary for a second term in March. In July, the office’s former finance director was arrested in a theft case.
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