Hinds detainees in Delta prison injured during attacks they say are gang connected

A 24-year-old Hinds County detainee reported being stabbed at Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in the Delta. The Hinds County sheriff said he didn’t know about it, and a spokesperson for the company operating the private facility where the man is housed said it didn’t happen. 

Emmanuel Gonzalez-Rubio and his mother found the response baffling, saying he was left with cuts and scratches and that he had spoken with various people, including medical staff and guards about the injuries. They asked for him to be moved. Prison officials refused. 

A month later, Gonzalez-Rubio said he was attacked again. This time, so was his cellmate.

Both men were moved away from the alleged perpetrators. But the men and their family members say they expect to be returned to their zone where they’ll remain at risk. 

“All of that could have been prevented, though, if they had just listened,” Gonzalez-Rubio told Mississippi Today. 

Gonzalez-Rubio has been at Tallahatchie Correctional since 2024. It will be a year next week for his cellmate, Jonathan Sanchez, 21. Since 2023, Hinds County has contracted to send up to 250 people to the facility in Tutwiler because of crowding in the county’s jail in Raymond. The two facilities are about 145 miles apart.

CoreCivic also contracts with other counties to house pretrial detainees and with states to hold people who have already been convicted. Family members and elected officials have raised concerns about violence that in recent years has left several people dead.

About two weeks ago, Gonzalez-Rubio and Sanchez say they were in their cell at night when multiple men entered and stabbed them. Sanchez said he received injuries on his hands and arms, and Gonzalez-Rubio said he was attacked but not injured. 

Bayola Gonzalez-Rubio said her son Emmanuel called afterward and told her what happened. She said he wondered how he was supposed to fight off at least 10 people who had knives. 

Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, confirmed that two Hinds County detainees reported being assaulted by other detainees during the same time frame. He said because they did not know who their assailants were, Tallahatchie Correctional staff are working to identify all who were involved. 

“We have shared the concerns expressed by the family members you provided in your inquiry with our facility leadership team,” Gustin said in a Thursday statement. “The safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority.”

After the attack, Gonzalez-Rubio and Sanchez remained in their cell until the morning, when Sanchez said he was able to show the guards his injuries. He said the guards took them to a medical unit, where staff cleaned and bandaged his wounds. 

Since the stabbing, prison officials moved them into a lockdown cell for 24 hours a day. Gonzalez-Rubio described it as being in “the hole,” which commonly refers to restrictive or segregated housing. 

Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesman, said restrictive housing can be used for a number of reasons, including protective custody, medical purposes, mental health observation and administrative or investigative reasons. He added that inmates and detainees themselves can request protective custody. 

But the men were told they can’t stay there.

“It’s like they are leaving us for dead,” Sanchez told Mississippi Today. 

Gonzalez-Rubio said that for months, he and his cellmate have told prison staff they couldn’t be in the same zone as the people who were responsible for the first stabbing. But he said it seems like staff don’t want to listen or that they believe they are lying. 

Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones said he had not heard about the stabbing and declined to comment on nonfatal incidents at Tallahatchie Correctional involving Hinds detainees. 

“Unless there is a death that is being conducted as a murder investigation as a threat to public safety, I don’t have a comment about the jail at this time,” Jones said Tuesday. 

Other Hinds County detainees have died in the facility, but their deaths were believed to be drug-related. Ulysses Nelson III and Christian Dyre, both 24, died within days of each other in 2025.

On Thursday, Gustin said Hinds County had been informed about the stabbing.

The attack Gonzalez-Rubio and Sanchez described shares similarities to the April stabbing of Gonzalez-Rubio. 

Gonzalez-Rubio remembers the night of April 11 when about three people jumped him, stabbing him in the hand and arm. He said he also had scratches from trying to defend himself. 

Two days earlier, Gonzalez-Rubio heard through the prison that a man from the U.S. Virgin Islands was stabbed to death in another area of Tallahatchie Correctional.

Bayola Gonzalez-Rubio said she called the manager of her son’s unit to request that he be moved because she feared for his safety, but that didn’t happen. 

Within days of the stabbing, her son told her that prison staff didn’t believe he was stabbed. His mother said she called the prison and they told her they didn’t know about a stabbing. 

Jones, the Hinds County sheriff, said in April that he wasn’t made aware of a stabbing involving Gonzalez-Rubio and any information “would have to be funneled from CoreCivic.” 

When reached for comment, a CoreCivic spokesperson wrote in an email: “It is important to know that the information you received regarding the Hinds County inmate is completely false. The individual in question was neither stabbed nor injured in any way.” 

During both incidents, the men were in a lockdown zone meant for disciplinary cases, and they said weeks earlier other people were moved into the area. 

In both stabbing incidents, the detainees said they don’t know who stabbed them, but they believe they are also Hinds County detainees. They said they also believe it’s a similar group of people responsible for both stabbings because there are members of opposing gangs in the same zone. The men have said they are not gang members. 

“We told the guards these are their ways,” Sanchez said. 

A spokesperson from CoreCivic did not respond to questions about the presence of gangs in the zone for Hinds County detainees or elsewhere throughout the prison.  

Gonzalez-Rubio and Sanchez said they have requested to be moved to a different area of the prison away from the people who allegedly stabbed them. If they could go back to the Hinds County Detention Center, where both of them were housed initially, they said they would. 

From other states, the men’s family members have maintained contact with them, but they said it has been a challenge to receive information from prison staff. Gonzalez-Rubio is from Louisiana, and Sanchez is from Texas. 

Gonzalez-Rubio is set to go to trial in July for charges including aggravated assault, armed robbery and burglary. Sanchez is awaiting indictment for a drug possession charge. 

When Sanchez was wounded by another detainee in the Hinds County Detention Center last year, his wife Lily Cross remembers losing contact with him and assuming the worst. She called the jail and hospitals trying to find him. She dropped the effort when Sanchez called her and told her what happened.

“It’s just been the same thing over and over again,” Cross said about a lack of information from staff at whatever facility Sanchez is housed.