A former Tarrant County jailer must serve five years’ probation and pay $250,000 in restitution after lying about checking on an incarcerated man who died in his cell, according to county court records.
Darien Kirk and Erik Gay were both indicted for tampering with a government record after the death of Javonte Myers in 2020. Myers died of a seizure disorder in his cell, and his body lay undiscovered for hours, according to his mother’s lawsuit against the county.
Kirk pleaded open, meaning he asked Judge William Knight to decide his sentence. In August, Knight ordered Kirk to pay restitution and serve probation. Gay pleaded guilty last year and got the same punishment.
Jailers don’t often face criminal consequences for their actions on the job, said Dean Malone, the attorney who represented Myers’ mother in her lawsuit.
“We're glad to see this is really the exception rather than the rule,” he said.
KERA News reached out to Kirk’s lawyer and called a phone number associated with Kirk in a public records database. Neither responded before this story’s publication.
An internal investigation showed Kirk “failed to carry out the duties required of all detention officers at the Tarrant County Jail,” Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Laurie Passman wrote in an email.
“His failure to perform mandatory safety checks on inmates and falsification of the logs was a direct violation of policy and professional responsibility,” she wrote.
The county settled Myers’ mother’s lawsuit in 2023 for $1 million. It was the biggest settlement in county history at the time, but it was surpassed months later by a $1.2 million settlement in another jail lawsuit, related to a woman whose baby died after she gave birth alone in her cell.
Malone has represented several families in Tarrant County Jail lawsuits, including the family of Georgia Kay Baldwin, one of several people who have died of dehydration in jail since 2020.
Tarrant County has bigger problems than two jailers who did wrong, he said.
"I really don't think criminal prosecutions, of what are often the lowest level jailers, changes anything systemically,” he said. “What has to happen to change something systemically is the people at the top have to care."
Myers was booked into jail for trespassing and drug possession of two ounces or less, court records show.
Texas Ranger Trace McDonald was assigned to investigate Myers’ death. Sheriff’s office employees alerted him that Gay and Kirk may have falsified checks, according to his investigation report, obtained through a public records request.
McDonald recorded interviews with both the accused jailers. Kirk told McDonald he and Gay missed the checks because they were talking, and he admitted he had faked other checks before.
Gay told McDonald the problem was systemic. Superiors told him to lie on check records, Gay said.
“They’re only concerned about making the computer look good,” he said.
Kirk told McDonald he was never told to falsify checks. In an interview with WFAA, Sheriff Bill Waybourn said Gay was just trying to defend himself.
In a more recent interview, Kirk did say there were bigger problems that led to the faked checks.
In June, Tarrant County probation officer W. Scott Wray interviewed Kirk to determine whether he’d be a good candidate for probation. Wray’s summary of the conversation is in Kirk’s public criminal file.
Kirk expressed regret that he may have contributed to Myers’ death, “even in a small way,” Wray wrote.
“The only mitigation he offered about his failure to make diligent observations consistent with his documentation in this log included the chronic understaffing among TCSO jailers, and the plethora of other duties that often interfered with or distracted from making the required rigorous observations and documenting them in the electronic log,” Wray wrote.
The Tarrant County Jail — alongside jails and prisons across the country — has struggled with understaffing. Last year, the jail administrator told KERA News jailers were working mandatory 52-hour-a-week overtime.
Understaffing isn’t a good excuse, Passman wrote in her email.
“Mr. Kirk’s claim that staffing levels or competing duties prevented him from fulfilling these obligations is without merit,” she said. “Every officer is expected to prioritize inmate safety, regardless of workload.”
Passman did not address Kirk’s other claim in his interview with Wray, that he was never informed of Myers’ medical problems as he should have been.
The sheriff’s office remains “committed to accountability and to ensuring the safety and integrity of our jail operations,” Passman said.
Kirk and Gay are not the only former Tarrant County jailers who have faced criminal charges. Rafael Moreno and Joel Garcia are awaiting trial for murder following the killing of Anthony Johnson Jr. last year.
The county medical examiner’s office determined Johnson died of asphyxiation after jailers pepper sprayed him, and Moreno knelt on his back for more than a minute. Garcia, a supervisor, filmed the incident but did not tell Moreno to get up, according to the sheriff's office.
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