A 68-year-old Grandfather Died in ICE’s Custody. His Family Seeks Answers.
Abelardo Avellaneda-Delgado was healthy when he entered Lowndes County Jail. He died while en route to ICE’s Stewart Detention Center less than four weeks later, leaving his family in shock.
This story was originally published by Atlanta Community Press Collective. Subscribe to their newsletter to get ACPC’s accountability journalism delivered to your inbox.
When Junior Avellaneda finally got to see his father after weeks of thwarted attempts, the man Lowndes County Jail staff wheeled into the visitation area was a frail, barely responsive shell of himself.
Junior’s father, 68-year-old Abelardo “Lalo” Avellaneda-Delgado, would usually be up by 5 or 6 a.m. for his daily walk to the nearby gas station to get coffee and converse with family, friends, and neighbors in his tight-knit Statenville, Georgia community.
On April 9, Avellaneda-Delgado was arrested by the Echols County Sheriff’s Office for an alleged probation violation. He had been healthy and active at the time of his arrest, according to his family.
But on the morning of Sunday, May 4, Avellaneda-Delgado could not stand, speak, or even pick up the telephone to hear his son on the other side of the glass. “I’d never seen my dad like that,” Junior recalled. His father was unable to make eye contact or communicate at all during their brief visit.
“I couldn’t take my cell phone back there because of the rules,” Junior said. “If I could, I’d have taken a picture to show his condition.” Instead, Junior called his older sister, Nayely, as soon as he left the jail.
Nayely recalls answering the phone to her brother crying about their father’s condition. The next morning, Nayely drove to the jail in Valdosta and demanded to see her dad and to know her father’s medical status. Jail staff refused, claiming federal privacy laws prevented them from releasing medical information to anyone.
Around the time Nayely was in the jail’s lobby pushing for information about her dad’s condition, Lowndes County jail staff was handing him over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractors for transportation to the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. She left without seeing her father or even knowing his whereabouts.
Later that day, Nayely got a call from the Mexican Consulate in Atlanta. The caller gave her the news that left her in shock: “We are sorry to inform you that your dad passed away earlier today.”
Neither Nayely nor any member of her family has received any additional details about Avellaneda-Delgado’s death from federal or state officials in the month since they lost their beloved patriarch.
Medical experts question timeline of Avellaneda-Delgado’s death in transit
ICE publicly disclosed Avellaneda-Delgado’s death three days later. A May 8 press release said he became unresponsive during the ride to Stewart—a privately run immigration detention center owned by CoreCivic—at 12:35 p.m. and was pronounced dead by emergency responders at 1:25 p.m.
Officers with TransCor, CoreCivic’s secure transportation subsidiary, called 911 to report that one of their five detained passengers was unconscious and barely breathing.
“[H]e’s unresponsive. We can’t get him to say anything, he won’t open his eyes, he won’t look at us,” TransCor Captain Jamaya West told Webster County’s 911 operator in a recorded call obtained by the Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC) through Georgia’s Open Records Act.
When EMS units arrived at 12:49 p.m., first responders climbed into the white transport van to find Avellaneda-Delgado “sitting upright against a wall.” After moving him down to the middle of the floor to render care, they determined he was not breathing and had no pulse. His skin was “pink, cold, and dry,” and his pupils were dilated and nonreactive.
Paramedics from a second EMS unit found Avellaneda-Delgado’s “vitals were absent” and he was “stiff” according to records obtained from the Webster County Coroner’s office.
Readings taken using an automatic external defibrillator left paramedics with the conclusion that “there was nothing we could do for [him].”
The records do not explain how Avellaneda-Delgado could have gone from barely conscious and breathing, as TransCor personnel told EMS, to pulseless, breathless, stiff, and cold to the touch in only a matter of minutes.
“When the ambulance got there, he was dead,” Webster County Coroner Steven D. Hubbard told ACPC. “He was cold to the touch, so he had been dead. Unless they had the air conditioner cranked down to subzero in the back.”
Multiple physicians who reviewed records of the emergency medical response concurred with the coroner’s assessment.
Dr. Amy Zeidan, an emergency medicine physician in Atlanta, said the records reveal EMS found Avellaneda-Delgado dead when they arrived. His “cold, stiff” appearance likely rules out any possibility that he was breathing when TransCor made the 911 call, Zeidan said.
Forensic pathologist Dr. Kris Sperry confirmed that it takes approximately 30-45 minutes for a person’s body to become “cool to the touch” after they pass away—meaning the official account that claims Avellaneda-Delgado was still breathing at 12:38 p.m. when TransCor called 911 is likely inaccurate, according to Sperry.
Avellaneda-Delgado’s positioning—seated and upright in the back of the van at the time EMS found him—also rules out any possibility that Transcor personnel attempted CPR upon discovering him unresponsive, according to multiple physicians who reviewed the records.
Blood pressure warning signs missed
According to Webster County EMS records, Avellaneda-Delgado had a blood pressure reading of 226 / 57, which medical literature defines as a “hypertensive crisis” or “stroke-level” reading.
“Evidently that blood pressure was taken before he was released from Lowndes County,” said Hubbard. “And if that’s the case, he should have never ever got his ass on that van. He should’ve been on the way to the hospital.”
Accounts from both TransCor and the Lowndes County Jail do not mention the blood pressure reading, instead stating Avellaneda-Delgado was in stable condition at the time he was taken into ICE custody.
“The medical department down there cleared him for travel. He didn’t have any noticeable medical conditions,” TransCor Captain Jamaya West told the Webster County 911 operator during her call for help.
Lowndes County Jail Captain Jason Clifton echoed TransCor’s account of Avellaneda-Delgado’s stable and unremarkable medical condition at the time of his hand-off to ICE custody. However, Clifton confirmed the jail held Avellaneda-Delgado in its medical area prior to his release.
“Medical was keeping a check on him because he was an elderly gentleman,” Clifton said. But “nothing we have in our record shows that he was unstable when he left here. He left here stable and in as good a condition for a 69-year-old man [as] can be.”
Clifton denied receiving any communication from Lowndes County’s health contractor, Chattanooga-based Southern Health Partners, regarding Avellaneda-Delgado’s condition during the nearly four weeks he was detained at the Lowndes County Jail. He said Avellaneda-Delgado had no serious conditions, hospitalizations or other issues he was aware of as he scrolled through records of Avellaneda-Delgado’s care. In response to a records request filed by ACPC, an attorney for Lowndes County Sheriff Ashley Paulk said the jail would not release records reflecting the care Avellaneda-Delgado received there without a court order.
“We have nothing in his records to show any acute medical distress at any time,” Clifton said.
Avellaneda-Delgado‘s family awaits answers
“That is a lie,” Nayely said of Clifton’s statement. “If he was in good condition my brother would have never called me crying about how my father was and they would have allowed me to see him.”
She said her family wanted “camera footage, because that is not true.”
Neither ICE nor the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), which arrived on-scene shortly after EMS got there, has released an official cause of death.
Based on details of the autopsy, Webster County Coroner Hubbard suspects an aortic aneurysm may have claimed Avellaneda-Delgado’s life. Hubbard said toxicology results are pending and may take months to come back.
During Congressional testimony just a week after Avellaneda-Delgado’s death, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Congress nine people have died in his agency’s custody since Trump took office. “We do conduct a thorough investigation of all of those,” Lyons said. “We have nothing to hide. ICE will be fully transparent.”
Yet nearly a month after Avellaneda-Delgado’s death, neither the GBI nor ICE had requested a single record from Lowndes County, according to Captain Clifton.
“We are deeply saddened by and take very seriously the passing of any individual in our care,” CoreCivic Public Affairs Management Brian Todd said. “Our government partners at ICE were notified promptly, and they are conducting an ongoing investigation into the death with our full cooperation.”
Todd directed further questions to ICE, however, ICE did not respond to ACPC’s questions. The agency’s official Detainee Death Report provides no details regarding the cause of Avellaneda-Delgado’s death.
Avellaneda-Delgado’s family laid him to rest in Valdosta on May 17.
They say their fight for answers about his death will go on. “We want the truth,” his older son Sammy told ACPC.
Tributes posted by other loved ones reveal a whimsical, playful side to the grandfather of many–frequently pulling over on the side of the road for photo ops with his wife next to kitschy giant painted animals that line so many rural Georgia roads. Whether dancing at quinceañeras or holding babies at family gatherings, a sense of joy and gratitude shines through in many of the dozens of pictures and videos his family shared.
His children say they want him to be remembered as a hard-working family man who enjoyed engaging with his small south Georgia community. “He was around, always greeting people, always telling me I needed to show respect,” Junior remembers. “He was a good father.”