At least 2,444 people have died in custody in Missouri

How deaths in custody are reported in Missouri

Missouri has no law on reporting deaths in custody; the state says so in its own plan for the federal Death in Custody Reporting Act. The same plan counts 20 prisons run by the Missouri Department of Corrections, 413 local jails and lockups for adults, 18 locally run juvenile detention centers and the facilities of the Division of Youth Services.¹

For the federal law, the Missouri Department of Public Safety has collected reports on deaths in custody since October 1, 2019, and sends them to the U.S. Department of Justice each quarter. It says it "does not review, compile, evaluate or analyze the submitted reports."² Agencies send a template form by email or fax, and staff enter the reports by hand; the state's plan notes that local agencies are not required by statute to report.¹

The Department of Corrections reports deaths one at a time as they occur and, until 2025, had never published a yearly count.³⁴ Its communications director told The Marshall Project - St. Louis in 2025 that at no point in the year is the department required to give a total to any outside agency.⁴ Only in early 2024 did the department begin pulling every death from its offender management system into a single document, updated weekly.⁴ After reporters asked about gaps in the records it had released, its research staff produced the first full count: 844 people died in Missouri prisons from 2018 through 2024.⁴ That report gives each person's name, prison, date of death and a manner of death, but no age, race, gender or cause of death.⁴⁵

County and city jails are run by sheriffs and local governments, and no state agency publishes their deaths. The St. Louis Division of Corrections posts monthly reports that include deaths at the City Justice Center.⁶ In Kansas City, the Jackson County Sheriff's Office reported six deaths in its jail facilities from 2020 to 2024 when asked by St. Louis Public Radio.⁶ St. Louis County reported one death in its jail in 2020, none in 2021 and two each in 2022 and 2023; its medical examiner counted at least 33 more people who had died since 2020 in police holding cells, police shootings, chases and arrests across the county.⁷

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds people in Missouri county jails under agreements and publishes its own report on each death in its custody.⁸ Brayan Rayo-Garzon died on April 8, 2025, while held for ICE at the Phelps County Jail in Rolla,⁹ and Leo Cruz Silva died on October 4, 2025, while held at the Ste. Genevieve County Jail.¹⁰ ICE's list for 2003 to 2017 includes Angel Polanco-Molina, held at the federal medical center in Springfield, who died on March 30, 2006, at a hospital in Joplin.¹¹

What has changed

1. 1906In April, a mob in Springfield broke into the city jail, took Horace B. Duncan and Fred Coker to the town square and hanged them, then returned to the jail for William Allen and lynched him too. Thousands watched.¹²
2. Since 1976Missouri has carried out 102 executions since 1976, and 285 before that, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.¹³
3. 2015The legislature abolished the Joint Committee on Corrections, its prison oversight committee, in a bill that eliminated several joint committees.¹⁴
4. 2019On October 1, the Department of Public Safety began collecting death-in-custody reports from Missouri agencies for the federal government.²
5. 2022St. Louis stopped holding people at its Medium Security Institution, known as the Workhouse, in June.⁶
6. 2023Othel Moore Jr., 38, died on December 8 at Jefferson City Correctional Center. He had been pepper-sprayed twice during a contraband search and then held in a hood, leg wrap and restraint chair; the autopsy gave the cause of death as positional asphyxia. In June 2024 the Cole County prosecutor charged five former corrections officers over his death.¹⁵
7. 2024St. Louis Public Radio found that 18 people had died at the St. Louis City Justice Center since 2020, more than the city's public safety director had said and more than its online monthly reports showed.⁶
8. 2025In January, three lawmakers filed bills to create a Corrections Oversight Committee for the prisons, which would work with an independent corrections ombudsman.¹⁴
9. 2025In November, The Marshall Project - St. Louis published the department's first comprehensive count of prison deaths, 844 from 2018 through 2024.⁴ The department's report lists 139 deaths in 2024 and includes the 14 people executed from October 2019 through October 2025.⁵
10. 2026Dametria McDile died in the custody of the St. Louis City Justice Center. The St. Louis City NAACP said video and audio from the jail showed her telling staff she could not breathe. In September the NAACP published a report on gaps in how deaths at the jail are investigated. St. Louis Public Radio counted at least 22 deaths in custody at the jail since 2020.¹⁶

How far the official numbers can be trusted

Before 2025 there was no reliable yearly count of prison deaths. The department answered records requests with partial counts pieced together by hand from several sources, so published figures for the same year disagreed: 125, 134 or 137 deaths in 2023.⁴ Checking coroner records and an outside group's monthly death records against the department's logs for 2018 to 2024, a reporter found 17 people missing from them.³ The department said it had not tallied deaths at all until 2024.³

Even the new report leaves gaps. Of the 943 deaths it lists from January 2018 to October 2025, 158 carry an unknown cause, and it gives no cause of death for anyone.⁵ Its yearly totals differ slightly from what the state reported to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics: 107 against 106 for 2018, and 88 against 84 for 2019.⁵¹⁷

Jail counts are weaker still. St. Louis's monthly reports showed two deaths at the City Justice Center in 2020, half the number that occurred, and the city said its reports are updated only after the medical examiner clears a death.⁶⁷ No state agency checks the death reports jails send for the federal government.²