Prosecutors will bring no charges in the murder investigation of a Prince George’s County inmate who was found dead in his cell 48 hours after being accused of slaying a cop last year, county State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey said.
Ivey made that decision after a second county grand jury determined that there was insufficient evidence to return a murder indictment in the death of Ronnie White, who was charged with murder last June after police say he ran down a police officer with a stolen truck.
The case, including all the evidence gathered by the Maryland State Police is now being turned over to the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where a probe into whether someone deprived White of his rights by killing him will be conducted.
Ivey reserved the option to reopen the case if new information surfaces, but one official in his office said there was only a “2 percent” chance of local prosecutors bringing criminal charges.
State police detectives have determined the death was a suicide, Prince George’s chief of public safety, Vernon Herron, told The Examiner. “If there was a murder to uncover, the state police would have uncovered it,” Herron said Tuesday.
That contrasted with a finding in September by the Maryland medical examiner’s office, which ruled that White, 19, was murdered by way of strangulation in his private Prince George’s jail cell. White had been charged with killing Sgt. Richard Findley on June 27.
“There will be no murder charges filed unless I get more information,” Ivey said. “I’m not quibbling with the medical examiner’s ruling. … I just don’t have enough evidence to bring murder charges.”
The Maryland State Police, which has been conducting the homicide investigation, will be turning all of its evidence over to the FBI, a Justice Department official said. The agents will then review the details and push forward with their own investigation.
The controversial case has seen a number of dramatic twists.
Investigators originally thought jail guard Ramon Davis found White’s body slumped against his bed. But sources said another guard, Anthony McIntosh, stepped forward a week later saying he found White hanging from a bedsheet.
McIntosh told detectives he pulled the sheet from White’s neck and then in his panic didn’t call for help. The medical examiner found fibers from a bedsheet on White’s neck, sources said.
McIntosh has been on administrative leave since last summer and Davis has resigned, Herron said.
One law enforcement official said Tuesday it wasn’t surprising that the grand jury didn’t follow the medical examiner’s lead.
“There were no marks found on [White’s] body,” the source said. “This was a 19-year-old young man. He would have fought if someone was trying to hang him, unless he was drugged, and there was no evidence of that either.”
Zalee Harris, a longtime Prince George’s community activist, said she felt the failure to bring charges was “just business as usual. It’s OK for a black man to mysteriously die in jail and no one be held accountable.”
