Bev Bristow says she retired from teaching to help manage her late husband’s healthcare needs while he was incarcerated by the state.
Jimmy Bristow had been transferred between a local jail and at least four Virginia Department of Corrections facilities between 2021 and his death earlier this year. Bev maintained that a lack of adequate medical attention — including a monthslong delay in receiving cancer treatment — contributed to his demise.
Bristow said even before Jimmy was diagnosed with cancer, he developed another liver issue.
“Over 10 months, 11 months that he had that, they knew that he had cirrhosis and they had to have known how severe it was in March [2025] when he had an MRI,” said Bristow, who lives in Wake, Virginia. “It had to have shown up on the MRI, how severe the cirrhosis was, but there was never any mention to him about it.”
Medical problems mounted, and after Jimmy coughed up blood, covering his clothes and filling his shoes, Bristow said he was medevac'd to a hospital — one of many trips to receive outside care.
When her husband died in January at Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center in Midlothian, Bristow said Jimmy was shackled to a bed. And despite a 2024 law mandating the procedure for all carceral deaths, he wasn’t autopsied.
“They were kind of rushing me out of the room,” Bristow said about being with her husband when he died, “because a medical investigator was coming in from DOC. It took us three days to get permission for them to release his body.”
Incarcerated people are “generally restrained” while being treated at hospitals to guarantee safety, VADOC communications lead Kyle Gibson wrote in an email. He added that people serving a prison sentence in Virginia “receive quality routine and urgent health care while” in custody.
Medical documents Bristow provided support the timeline she described, but she still doesn’t have information that would have been collected during her husband’s autopsy — information that could show whether Jimmy’s medical care hastened his death.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia has previously said it doesn’t conduct all state-mandated autopsies since a 2024 law began requiring the procedure. Statements from the office, a part of the commonwealth’s health department, have referred to the legislation as an unfunded mandate and indicated a need of about $287,000 to fulfill the requirement.
Following Radio IQ reporting on inconsistencies in carceral deaths data among state agencies, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. William Gormley wrote in an email obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request that his department is now changing how it shares the information.
A range of modifications to OCME data collection and analysis are laid out in a draft copy of a new agreement covering the medical examiner, VADOC, the Department of Criminal Justice Services and the Virginia Board of Local and Regional Jails.
The 17-page draft memorandum of understanding, obtained through a records request, expands the 2020 agreement — which only included the medical examiner’s officer and DCJS. Now, instead of one department simply sending information to DCJS, the agreement directs each office to create a “secure exchange, verification, and reconciliation of deaths-in-custody data.”
It also includes a directive to notify DCJS of “discrepancies, corrections, or updates affecting previously submitted records.”
A health department spokesperson wrote in an email that the updated process would “strengthen data quality and help ensure that both DCJS and OCME maintain the most accurate and consistent records possible.”
The medical examiner’s office also conducted a “matched review of 2025 DOC cases” and found 7 instances when an in-custody death wasn’t properly recorded. Emails stipulated that one occurred at a hospital and wouldn’t be recorded as a carceral death.
Del. Mike Cherry, a Republican representing Colonial Heights, introduced the House bill requiring autopsies after the deaths. While discussing the procedure’s completion rate — less than 60% since the measure was put in place — he said it’s possible information is being lost in the process.
“If they're just doing an external examination or they're just doing something else, they're not meeting the legislative intent of the bill,” Cherry said, distinguishing between autopsies and the less extensive procedure. “If they're not, we're going to need to go back and revisit the [legislation’s] language to make sure that they're in compliance with the intent — which is that everyone gets an autopsy.”
Decisions around when the procedures are conducted and how OCME plans to comply with state code have remained opaque.
In other internal emails, Gormley directed his staff not to interact with media on the autopsy gap, and VDH has not made him available for an interview.
“He continued to talk about autopsies that should have been performed,” Gormley wrote about being independently reached by phone to discuss the mandate. “I disconnected.”
Talking points on the requirement were created by VDH staff and members of Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s office ahead of a late June press event, according to the emails; they were fully redacted by the health department. Another 10 pages of messages between VDH staff and the governor’s office was also withheld.
Jack Bledsoe, a Spanberger press secretary, declined to respond to multiple emails on the subject, and hasn’t replied to correspondence since discussing the June press event, when the governor announced convening a panel to work toward prison reforms.
Rosie Hobron, a statewide forensic epidemiologist who works in the medical examiner’s office, wasn’t surprised by disparate carceral deaths data being reported across state government.
“Our numbers have never lined up with other agencies for other different things, and it always comes back to this methodology and definitions kind of piece,” Hobron said, using overdose deaths as an example. “I would assume that this is probably something very similar to that. And it just sounds like a manual review of all cases would probably be the one thing that needs to be done to figure [this] out.”
That would be a major undertaking and still wouldn’t give Bev Bristow more insight into whether her husband’s medical care played into his death.
“I want to see them held accountable,” Bristow said. “I want people to wake up. And I don't care what their crime is — they're still human beings. And they still have a family that loves them and cares for them.”
Read more at Red Onion Resources.
Disclosure: Independent reporter Dave Cantor is suing the Virginia Department of Corrections to gain access to documentation of the agency’s use of tasers at Red Onion State Prison.