During November 2025, a transgender prisoner, Michael Hailey née Marcotte aka Lilith, was the victim of yet another official lynching in Virginia’s remote prisons.

The murder was covered up until members of UPROAR (Uniting Prisoners’ Relatives Organizing Against Repression) pieced the case together through communications with numerous prisoner witnesses, who’d contacted the group via its hotline, and protested it. UPROAR, a prisoner support group composed primarily of prisoners’ loved ones and former prisoners, maintains a hotline that incarcerated people across the state can call with complaints of mistreatment, whether as victims or witnesses.

Lilith died at Red Onion State Prison after being shot by guards with potentially lethal shotgun rounds, tear gassed, tased, strapped by her extremities to a metal bedframe with a strap across her chest, and an over 300 pound unit manager Larry Collins sat on her chest. The cause of death, which coroners ruled a homicide, was determined to be asphyxiation from chest compression.

Since opening in 1998, Red Onion has been hounded with reports and complaints for an extreme culture of bigotry and abuse practiced by a staff drawn from segregated rural white communities. The prison came under international media scrutiny and public protest after I broke the story during latter 2024 that numerous prisoners had set themselves on fire in desperate response to the prison’s inhumane and abusive conditions. The abuse and corruption were underscored by Chadwick Dotson, who was then director of the Va prison system, falsely claiming in the Richmond Times Dispatch newspaper that the self-immolations never happened, which was later revealed to be a lie by internal email exchanges between Red Onion administrators discussing multiple prisoner self-immolations during 2024 and how they might be stopped. The emails contradicting Dotson were recovered and reported by The Appeal newspaper. (1)

UPROAR presented the evidence of Lilith’s murder to her surviving father and brother, Michael and Nicholas Marcotte, in pursuit of protesting her abuse. The family presented these facts to the Krudys law firm in Richmond, Va for potential litigation. As a co-founding member of UPROAR and opponent of settling cases of official abuses, I cautioned the family that the likely outcome of litigation by the Krudys law firm would be a settlement compelling them to accept a payoff at taxpayer expense in exchange for their agreement to drop the lawsuit and completely absolve Lilith’s killers of any wrongdoing; thus enabling continued abuses of prisoners by furthering the culture of officials covering up abuses and protecting abusers and the system from accountability. (2) Which is exactly what occurred.

The Krudys law firm promptly filed suit in the Chesterfield County Circuit Court seeking only a settlement, which assistant Attorney General Dorothy Patricia Wallace immediately agreed to.

The settlement netted the law firm nearly $1 million for work it took no part in of gathering and piecing together the facts of Lilith’s murder. The brother and father were awarded around the same sum each. (3) In an empty nod to UPROAR, the law firm’s lead attorney Mark Krudys, privately admitted that it was the information we gathered that made the case a “slam dunk” for litigation; while the climate of abuse and corruption in these prisons remains intact.

The only good results gained by prisoners from Lilith’s murder by government officials, was Va governor Abigail Spanberger’s banning the use of chest straps when restraining Va prisoners to bedframes.

In essence, Lilith was lynched by bigoted guards in a prison KNOWN FOR DECADES for such abuses, who were protected from accountability by government attorneys and lawyers at taxpayer expense, who paid the family off (as though the value of her life and accountability could be reduced to money) – again with taxpayer money – to agree to allow the state to hide what was done to their loved one.

As a further indictment of Amerika’s murderous and anti-human (in)justice system operating under the profit-driven values of capitalism, Lilith’s murder and cover-up followed the exact same script of the lynching of a Black prisoner Aubrey McKay at Wallens Ridge State Prison that happened just four months before Lilith died. Wallens Ridge is a Va prison located just a few miles from Red Onion and shares Red Onion’s notoriety for bigotry and abuse. McKay, who was beaten to death by a mob not white guards, suffered a crushed throat and, as was found in Lilith’s case, the cause of death was suffocation, a hallmark injury inflicted during lynchings by mobs of racist Southern whites. McKay’s murder was similarly swept under the rug until outside individuals and groups including UPROAR protested his death, bringing media and pubic attention to the case, which was then litigated, settled, and covered up at taxpayer expense by attorney Benjamin Crump, much like Lilith’s case. (4)

We must continue to advance the Stolen Lives Movement, and fight to close down these remote, unneeded, expensive human warehouses of racism and abuse located in Va’s western region – namely prisons like Red Onion, Wallens Ridge, River North and others – that deliberately concentrate populations of Black and Brown people in prisons staffed almost exclusively by whites drawn from racially hostile rural segregated communities, with the known result of violent bigoted abuse and murders of these defenseless prisoners.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

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