The ordeal of Koty Williams | Alabama Reflector (2025)

• Criminal justice

The anatomy of a lawsuit brought by one inmate, and its aftermath.

He said a group of correctional officers beat him in a prison barbershop. The officers said it never happened.

But despite continued denials the officers used excessive force, the state agreed to pay $140,000 to a man formerly incarcerated at Bibb Correctional Facility in Brent who sued the officers after he suffered a broken hip in 2018. The officer identified as the primary aggressor in the complaint has been named in half a dozen excessive force lawsuits filed by incarcerated men in Alabama.

The lawsuit over the broken hip, filed by Koty Williams, is one of 30 civil rights complaints settled by Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) in 2023 involving payments to plaintiffs totaling $929,110. The vast majority of the lawsuits, 26 out of 30, were filed over claims of excessive force by officers inside Alabama’s overcrowded and violent prisons.

The findings are the result of an extensive examination of accounting data obtained from the Alabama Department of Finance detailing all payments made from the General Liability Trust Fund since 2020, as well as court records connected to trust fund transactions.

Williams, who was released from prison in 2023, said the settlement money he received represented the only shred of accountability he could obtain from the system.

But it did nothing, Williams said, to heal his emotional scars. The assault and injuries he suffered at the hands of officers, Williams said, left him feeling completely violated and led him to use opioids to manage the pain.

“They took something away from me, like my manhood,” said Williams, speaking by phone from a drug rehabilitation facility in California, where he had admitted himself after his release from ADOC. “It really messed me up.”

The Alabama Department of Corrections declined to comment on the case, or provide details on how Koty Williams sustained his injury, citing department policy. “The ADOC does not comment on pending litigation or confidential settlement negotiations and any resulting agreements,” wrote ADOC’s communications director Kelly Betts in an email response to a list of submitted questions. She added that settling a case is not an admission of wrongdoing.

His lawsuit was just one of hundreds against ADOC officers winding its way through the courts when it settled in 2023. But the details of Williams’ ordeal and ADOC’s response reflect the issues that led the U.S. Department of Justice to sue the state in 2020 over unconstitutional prison conditions: understaffing, inadequate supervision and the failure to hold officers accountable for abuse.

‘Please don’t hit me no more’

On the morning of Nov. 27, 2018, Williams was 25 years old, serving a sentence for second-degree assault and receiving stolen property, both drug-related convictions, according to state court records.

That morning, Williams said, he left his assigned dorm to go to another one, where he planned to register for a Christian-based reentry program called “Jumpstart.” While he was inside the dorm, ADOC’s “Correctional Emergency Response Team,” or CERT, rushed in, shouting for men to go to their assigned beds.

According to a deposition with ADOC attorneys, Williams said he quickly went to the only vacant bunk he saw, while the CERT members began a shakedown, searching the men, their bunks and their boxes of belongings. An officer patted Williams down, then sent him to the bathroom for a strip search.

While waiting to be strip-searched, Williams said he overheard officers in the dorm asking who slept on bed 2-B, the vacant bunk he’d gone to when the shakedown began. At first he didn’t answer, because he didn’t actually sleep there. But then Williams heard an officer calling his name.

“I’m right here,” he said, walking out of the bathroom.

According to the statement Williams later gave to an ADOC investigator, officers had found contraband items on the bunk, including two cell phones, a phone charger, and two syringes, along with Williams’ prison ID. CERT officers asked him about the items. Williams said they did not belong to him, that he didn’t do IV drugs and that 2-B wasn’t his assigned bed. According to a deposition Williams later gave to ADOC attorneys, a CERT officer, Sgt. Akeem Edmonds, told him to step out into the hall, then led him into the prison barbershop.

Williams said he was scared and did what he was told.

“These dudes are like people you see in weightlifting contests,” Williams said. “They’re huge.”

The primary assailant listed in Williams’ complaint was Edmonds, who said in a deposition that he is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and weighs 295 pounds. Williams is 6 feet tall and weighs 155 pounds.

Williams said at least four officers filed into the barbershop behind them. The barbershop, he said, is a confined space, “about 12 paces in there,” with a long wooden bench along one wall where men sit to wait for haircuts.

Williams said Sgt. Edmonds held up the syringe and asked him why he wasn’t owning up to it. Again, Williams denied it was his. Williams said Edmonds then punched him in the face and he fell to the ground.

In the deposition with ADOC attorneys, Williams said he remembered blood pouring out of his nose while several officers hit and kicked him as he lay on the ground. The officers, Williams said, shouted for him to get up, and Edmonds grabbed him by his waistband and the back of his shirt, and slammed his body down on the wooden bench. Williams said he knew then that he’d been badly injured.

“I told them, ‘Please don’t hit me no more,’” Williams recalled in his deposition. “’My leg is broke.’”

He was unable to stand. Williams said one officer suggested that he tell people he got hurt by falling out of his bunk.

“He said, ‘You’re going to have to quit jumping off them racks. It’s not good for you,’” Williams told ADOC attorneys. Then, he said, the group of officers left him bleeding on the floor of the barbershop.

Williams’ account of the assault in the Bibb barbershop has never been corroborated by an employee of ADOC, and an internal investigation failed to substantiate the claim. But the Department never challenged that Williams was injured, or explained how Williams sustained his injuries.

The officers named in Williams’ lawsuit all denied the beating occurred, both in statements to ADOC’s investigator and depositions with Hank Sherrod, Williams’ attorney.

Edmonds initially told the ADOC investigator that during the shakedown, he found two syringes and Williams dnied that they belonged to him. Edmonds said he noticed Williams was walking with a limp, so he asked Williams what happened, but Williams would only say he’d been “jumped,” and would not tell Edmonds who was involved. Edmonds said he called for a wheelchair and took Williams to the infirmary to be checked out.

In a later deposition, Edmonds didn’t mention finding the syringes, but relayed a similar account that he’d previously told ADOC’s investigator, that he noticed Williams was limping during the CERT shakedown, and Williams told Edmonds he’d been “jumped.”

Edmonds acknowledged that he took Williams outside the dorm into the hallway and later pushed him in a wheelchair to the infirmary to be checked out. But he denied ever beating Williams in the prison barbershop. And even though Edmonds recognized Williams’ injuries were serious enough to need a wheelchair, he said that he never filled out an internal “incident report” that’s required when an incarcerated person is injured.

“I probably reported it up the chain,” Edmonds told Williams’ attorney in a deposition. But the captain who supervised Edmonds said in a deposition that he didn’t file a report about Williams’ injury either.

Williams said Sgt. Edmonds did place him in a wheelchair and transported him to the prison infirmary, but only after Edmonds had assaulted him. Williams said he wasn’t limping before the assault and Edmonds didn’t pull him aside or suggest he get looked at in the infirmary.

When the infirmary nurse asked Williams what happened, he hesitated.

“I didn’t want to talk about it right then because the guy that done (it) – the reason why I was how I was is because (of) the man standing in the room with me,” Williams later told ADOC attorneys.

The nurse explained that Williams had to give her a reason he was there in order for her to order testing. Williams said he eventually told her that Sgt. Edmonds had beaten him in the barbershop. He also told her he was in severe pain and couldn’t walk.

According to Williams, the nurse ordered an X-ray, and after it was done, sent Williams back to his dorm. He said the nurse never offered him any medication for pain, and he spent the next 24 hours in agony.

“If it wouldn’t have been for other inmates, I wouldn’t have made it,” he said.

Williams said other men in the dorm helped him get in and out of bed, and gave him the only relief available, a dose of contraband fentanyl. He said this moment triggered years of self-medicating and addiction that he’s still working to recover from.

“I already had a past of using opiates,” Williams said. “After they broke my hip, I just went downhill.”

Williams said the evening following the assault, he was called back to the infirmary. By this time, the pain in his hip was so bad he had almost passed out. The same nurse who examined him a day earlier told Williams they were sending him to the hospital for surgery. The X-ray showed a fracture in his hip that needed immediate intervention.

The technical diagnosis was intertrochanteric fracture on left hip, a painful break in the bone located in the upper part of the thigh, just below the hip joint, according to Williams’ medical records. A person with this injury cannot stand or put weight on the injured side, and it can take months to heal, according to the Orthopaedic Trauma Association.

The surgeon who treated Williams at Brookwood Hospital said in a deposition that he didn’t recall having a specific conversation with Williams about how he got injured, other than being involved in an altercation. The surgeon assumed the fight was with other prisoners.

“I don’t try to ferret out exactly the mechanism of injury because it’s somewhat irrelevant at that point,” he said.

During surgery, the doctor inserted an implant, which acted like an internal splint, stabilizing and supporting the broken parts of Williams’ hip.

Williams was returned to Bibb Correctional Facility the following day and spent two weeks in the prison infirmary. It was during this first week back that another man incarcerated at the prison called Williams’ stepmother and told her he’d been injured. She then called ADOC, triggering an internal investigation.

An investigation and a missing video

Ten days after Williams was injured, an agent with ADOC’s Law Enforcement Services Division (LESD) came to Bibb Correctional Facility and interviewed him in the prison infirmary, according to a document obtained by the Reflector. Williams told the investigator about the incident and named the officers involved. He also encouraged the agent to talk to prisoners in the dorm to corroborate his removal from the dorm and his return in a wheelchair with serious injuries.

The agent later said in a deposition that he couldn’t verify when Williams was injured, and that he “had no witnesses.” He also said that he didn’t take photos of Williams’ injuries, or visit the prison barbershop where Williams said the attack took place.

Williams had suggested to the ADOC investigator that surveillance video would show officers removing him from the dorm and taking him into the prison barbershop on the day he was injured. This video, if recovered, could have been crucial in making or breaking the officers’ stories. If ADOC’s own investigation found evidence of a crime, in this case felony assault, the case would be turned over to the local district attorney for prosecution.

ADOC’s agent in charge of the internal investigation requested the video, but days later received an email from the prison’s warden informing him that no such video existed.

The captain in charge of maintaining video at Bibb and investigating use-of-force incidents said in a deposition that he checked the camera in the dorm’s cubicle but did not find any footage of officers taking Williams out of the dorm. There was a separate camera in the bay of the dorm which also could have captured Williams with officers from a different angle that the officer said he did not check.

“I should have, but I didn’t,” he said in his deposition.

The captain also said no officer or supervisor informed him of any incident. He only learned that Williams was injured, he said, when the prison sent Williams to the hospital for surgery. The captain said in his deposition that he called the shift office after Williams was hospitalized and asked if the injury involved officers. He was told no. He asked the lieutenant to “look into it,” but there was never any follow-up.

Williams’ attorney, Hank Sherrod, pressed the ADOC investigator about the scant internal investigation during the deposition, asking if the officer lifted “even your little pinky finger” to interview witnesses.

“No,” the investigator replied. “Because no video.”

But the investigator also could not recall a reason for why there was no video, only that Bibb Warden Deborah Toney informed him of this via email and that was the end of the conversation.

Williams viewed the ADOC investigation as part of a culture inside the department, in which protecting the institution is the priority. He felt that acutely when he tried to tell multiple officers, health care staff and an ADOC investigator about what happened to him.

“They all looked at me like I was lying,” he recalled. “I’m an inmate. My word ain’t s— to them.”

In its 2020 findings of excessive force in Alabama prisons, the DOJ wrote that inconsistent video collection and lackluster investigations contributed to ADOC’s culture of systemic excessive force. DOJ recommended the department install cameras in all areas where uses of force occur, implement video recording capacity and retain video for 30 days.

ADOC’s spokesperson Kelly Betts did not send a response to a question submitted via email asking if the department had followed these recommendations from the DOJ.

A half-dozen lawsuits

Williams isn’t the only incarcerated person to sue Edmonds for excessive force. According to federal court records, Edmonds was a named defendant in a half dozen lawsuits involving allegations of excessive force. Between 2018 and 2024, ADOC paid over $198,000 in settlements to end five lawsuits against Edmonds.

A review of Edmonds’ personnel file showed that former ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn attempted to demote Edmonds and then fire him. Both attempts were unsuccessful after Edmonds appealed his case to the state personnel board.

In 2020, ADOC conducted an internal investigation of a suspected excessive force incident and recommended that Edmonds be demoted.

“ADOC asserts that the employee used his duty belt to beat an inmate in the Classification area of the Bibb Correctional Facility, after it was determined the inmate had taken food from the staff refrigerator,” the disciplinary paperwork stated.

But Edmonds requested a review by the state personnel board, which held a hearing in May 2020.

The personnel director issued written findings that the evidence indicated Edmonds did not use excessive force, citing a lack of eyewitnesses who would testify that they saw Edmonds beat the man with his duty belt, and the reliance on a confidential informant who reported the assault. Although the man’s medical record indicated bruises and abrasions, the prison medical staff characterized the injuries as old or in “multiple stages of healing.”

The findings also cited an administrative employee of the prison who saw Edmonds holding a brown belt, and a psychological associate stating that she heard the incarcerated man say “I can’t get up sir. They’ve been beating on my chest for two days.”

The personnel director found Commissioner Dunn’s recommended demotion was unwarranted, and affirmed Edmonds’ status as a correctional sergeant.

A message seeking comment from Dunn was not returned.

In June 2021, Edmonds was arrested and charged with assault connected to the same incident. ADOC responded by placing Edmonds on mandatory leave and began the process of terminating him. But after a “pre-dismissal conference” in September, the state personnel hearing officer found Edmonds not guilty of excessive force.

In November 2021, Bibb County Assistant District Attorney R. Bryan Jones recommended dropping the assault charge due to lack of evidence, and a judge agreed. Edmonds was permitted to return to work at ADOC in January 2022.

Eight months later, ADOC promoted him to correctional lieutenant.

ADOC would not comment on this specific case, but confirmed that Edmonds still works for the department. The Attorney General’s Office has represented Edmonds in six excessive force lawsuits, but the office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Messages were left with an attorney for Edmonds, and with a family member of Edmonds, but there was no response.

Williams completed drug rehab and has returned to Alabama. He said he walks with a limp and experiences numbness in his leg that he attributes to his broken hip. He didn’t know about the other lawsuits against Edmonds and wondered why they didn’t result in more action by ADOC to prevent future assaults.

“How is he not fired?” he asked. “Did my case not prove enough?”

This reporting was made possible by support from theFund for Investigative Journalism.