Tearful mother addresses inquest jury
Lela Phillips says corrections staff who put her son in cell with murderer should be fired
The distraught mother of a prison inmate murdered by a calculating serial killer in their shared cell told a coroner’s jury on Tuesday the officials who bunked her son with the convict should be fired.
“I keep asking myself and believe so should everyone else how ( corrections) and their staff could put something so evil as Michael Wayne McGray in the same cell with my son or any other human being,” said a tearful Lela Phillips.
“I would expect whoever did this has lost their jobs, not just transferred to another jail where they could do the same thing again. No other family should ever go through what we are going through,” she said in a strained voice.
Jeremy Phillips, 33, was found dead in his cell at the medium- security Mountain Institute in Agassiz in November 2010, about one week after he was placed in the same cell as McGray.
McGray, 45, was serving a life sentence for six murders, while Phillips, from Nova Scotia, was incarcerated on a six- year sentence for aggravated assault.
The coroner’s jury is tasked with examining the safety of inmates in the prison system by making recommendations to prevent similar deaths. It’s not tasked with finding fault.
The jury began deliberating on Tuesday afternoon. During the day’s proceedings, the three men and two women heard federal corrections officers who assessed the violent killer before transferring him from B. C.’ s only high- security prison believed the man was repentant.
An assistant warden at Mountain Institute explained the rationale behind the move, and why McGray was paired with Phillips.
“He indicated he was committed to his correctional plan ... He was performing very well,” Brenda Lamm said.
McGray confessed to police that he bound Phillips with bedsheets and stuffed a sock in the willing man’s mouth as part of an elaborate hostage- taking ruse they concocted together.
But McGray admitted that he had planned to turn on Phillips all along, gratifying his own murderous urges.
In a raw and unnerving interview with police, McGray called himself a sociopathic killer with mental health issues and he promised to stack up more bodies before he died. He said authorities should never have moved him to a lower- security prison.
McGray repeated the same story when he pleaded guilty to first- degree murder a year later, was handed another life sentence and placed in another maximum- security prison.
McGray had been kept mostly isolated during his incarceration since about 2000.
Lamm said the transfer happened as part of a long, drawn out process that began with McGray’s voluntary application.
He had asked for a single- cell, but was placed on a waiting list, although he and his soon- tobe cellmate were interviewed about sharing a cell and both suggested they were fine with it, she added.
But the inquest also heard McGray refused the transfer twice after gaining approval on learning he would have to share sleeping quarters.
The testimony came after another former inmate told the inquest he warned corrections’ staff they should not place the pair together.