NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Learning that someone you care about has passed away is always difficult.
For Charles Ewing's family, it was extremely devastating.
Charles Ewing, 66, was serving a prison sentence at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center when he died. His family did not learn about their father's death for nearly six months.
"I didn't receive a birthday card in the mail, which he sends every year, and I waited a few weeks after our birthday, which is Dec. 3 — we share the same birthday. After that, I looked him up online and saw the word 'deceased' next to his name," Brandy Ewing said.
Ewing was serving a murder sentence when he got sick in June and died of pneumonia. His children learned about his death through Tennessee's felony offender registry. That's where they went after he didn't send Brandy a birthday card.
No phone call, no letter, and no effort at all from the prison run by CoreCivic was made, according to his two oldest children.
But in Tennessee, no rule requires families to be notified of an inmate's death.
A spokesperson for the private prison company told me that they attempted to reach the one emergency contact on file, but the phone number was non-working and they couldn't get through.
We take very seriously the passing of any individual in our care. In this case, the only emergency contact that we had been provided couldn't be reached because it was a non-working phone number.
"Like, I mean...they had contacts, cause [Brandy] wrote him all the time, and sent him money," said Charlie Ewing, the son. "They could've done more than what they did to get in contact with us."
Ewing lived a complicated life.
In the early 1980s, he killed his wife Brandy and Charlie's mother, Marjorie. Though the police didn’t initially link him to her murder, he was arrested in 2009 for stabbing her to death.
Despite the unimaginable pain and loss, Brandy and Charlie found a way to keep their father in their lives.
They said no matter his crimes or what the community thought of him, at the end of the day, he had a family that cared about him.
"In my eyes, he was just a number to them. And he's not just a number to us," Brandy said.
The Ewing family is urging anyone with a loved one in prison to make sure the emergency contact is up to date.
For perspective, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into Trousdale Turner Correctional Center and its living conditions in August. That investigation is ongoing.
Not too long ago, the State Comptroller's Office took a hard look at the prison as part of an audit and highlighted its lack of correctional officers. According to that audit, which looked at data from 2023, the state found one officer responsible for 360 inmates. At the time of the report, more than half of the jobs at the facility were open.
You can tap to read those audit findings here.
Do you have more information about this story? You can email me at hannah.mcdonald@newschannel5.com.
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