‘We thought he was safe.’ Coast prisoner dies after drugs smuggled into jail, sheriff says
The family of Hancock County jail inmate Sean Russell Overal thought he was safer in jail than on the streets because of a drug addiction that had plagued his life for years after his service in Iraq.
“I was always worried about him when he was on the streets,” his brother, Andrew Overal said Tuesday. “It’s bad over here. Being in the county jail, we thought he was safe. I mean, you are not supposed to have somebody overdose in the county jail. We had to find out from inmates who called us.”
But Sean Overal, 33, of Kiln, died of a drug overdose Tuesday at Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg.
He was one of three prisoners at the Hancock County jail to use the same batch of drugs, believed to be heroin, that another prisoner had smuggled into the jail by hiding it in his gastrointestinal tract, Hancock County Sheriff Ricky Adam said in a release Tuesday.
Jailers resuscitated two of the prisoners, the release said, but Overal went into cardiac arrest, was taken to Ochsner Medical Center in Hancock County and later transferred to Forrest General in Hattiesburg.
The name of the prisoner who smuggled the drugs into the jail has not been released.
Overal’s family found out about his overdose from calls from other inmates that he had overdosed in the jail.
“I mean no one even called us,” Andrew Overal said. “It was the inmates.”
Andrew Overal said other relatives went to the Hancock County jail Monday night to try to find out what was going on, but were told that someone would call them if something happened.
A call came just before 8 a.m. Tuesday when the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department reached out to a relative to tell them Sean Overal’s condition.
A chaplain at Forrest General Hospital called Overal’s father to tell him to come to the hospital along with any other relatives. When the family got there, an armed guard was sitting outside the hospital room.
“I couldn’t believe they had guard sitting there with a gun guarding him and my brother is in a coma,” Andrew Overal said. “They told us he was brain dead.”
“I just can’t get over it,” Overal said. “You know, he went to Iraq and he survived. He’s been trying to get help... and put himself through rehab a couple of times. It really hurts when somebody you care about dies and they are in a place where they are not supposed to be able to get drugs.”
Though Sean Overal is officially brain dead, his family said his organs are being donated so he won’t be taken off of life support until that process is completed.
“I’ll never get over this,” his brother said. “My bother loved his kids. He loved his dogs. He loved his family. I wish all his friends that were helping him get high enjoy losing him as much as we do because they weren’t his friends, and they weren’t his family.”
Andrew Overal early Tuesday evening was headed to Pearlington to share the news of his brother’s death with his two children.
“I’m waiting on my sister-in-law to go tell my brother’s kids that he is dead,” Andrew Overal said. “I don’t know how to do it.”
An investigation into the incident is ongoing.
This story was originally published November 17, 2020 at 2:58 PM.
