Brandon Lavon Patton
A tribute to Brandon, obtained from a loved one’s Facebook post.
Brandon Lavon Patton was born on September 20th, 1991 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, but most recently lived in Minot, North Dakota. According to his Facebook page, Brandon attended Cedar Shoals High School in Athens, Georgia and liked listening to Future and watching The Boondocks and Floyd Mayweather. He also enjoyed going out and spending time with his friends. Brandon was a father to two children, a brother to his twin and two sisters, and a son to his parents. At the time of his passing on October 8th, 2020, Brandon was just 29 years old.
In a statement submitted to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Brandon’s family wrote: “We are devastated by the untimely and unnecessary death of our father, brother, son, and friend.” Family member Dorothy Taylor paid tribute to Brandon on Facebook. Among the loving and supportive comments beneath her post was a reply from a friend, Armond Jean Hall: “fly high cuz.”
Brandon passed away from COVID-19 while awaiting sentencing at Nevada Southern Detention Center, a federal prison thousands of miles away from where he grew up. Because Brandon had underlying health conditions which made him especially vulnerable to the virus, he and his lawyer filed two separate motions for compassionate release. A judge denied both. Six weeks after Brandon’s second motion for release was denied, Brandon became the first known person incarcerated in Nevada to die of the coronavirus.
A selfie of Brandon, obtained from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“Brandon had accepted responsibility for his crimes,” Brandon’s family wrote, “but [Nevada Southern] detention center failed to accept responsibility for his health, and as a result he died.” In a statement, the Nevada Public Defender’s Office echoed his family’s outrage: “[We] hope Brandon’s struggle with the agonizing complications of COVID-19 will bring a heightened awareness to the substantially increased risks incarcerated persons with serious medical vulnerabilities face.” Alison K. Guernesey, who writes obituaries commemorating people who’ve died in the Bureau of Prisons, said that Brandon’s death illuminates the pressing need to release people who have not been convicted of any crime. “Pretrial detention should never be the norm,” she insisted in a tweet, “but especially not now.”
Prisons and jails throughout Nevada have consistently failed to protect incarcerated people during the pandemic, and federal prisons such as Nevada Southern, a private prison run by CoreCivic, have experienced minimal oversight. According to reporting in the Las Vegas Sun, tens of incarcerated people at Nevada Southern have testified that the facility is not cleaned regularly and that guards behave recklessly while joking about the incarcerated people there dying from the virus. And when incarcerated people such as Brandon have contracted the virus, they have remained isolated from their families. Brandon’s public defender expressed a hope that Bradon’s case will therefore shed light on “the plight of families who are unable to freely communicate with healthcare providers or be present with their loved ones in their final moments.”
As Brandon suffered and the federal prison system ignored his pleas for help, he wrote letters from Nevada Southern to his family, conveying how much he hoped to see them again. Brandon was an individual—a father, son, brother, and friend— before he became one of many incarcerated people to die from COVID-19. May he fly high.
Brandon in Athens, Georgia with family, obtained from his Facebook page.
This memorial was written by MOL team member Laura Haight with information from reporting by Katelyn Newberg of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Pahrump Valley Times, Ricardo Torres-Cortez of the Las Vegas Sun, Greg Haas of Channel 8 News Now Las Vegas, a tweet by Alison K. Guernsey (including a press release by the Nevada Public Defender's Office), the Facebook page of Brandon Lavon Patton, and a Facebook post by Dorothy Taylor.
