This article is part of a collaborative investigation into Mississippi’s Deadly Prisons.
When Mississippi officials informed Mary Anderson that her uncle had died in prison, they told her he had suffered a heart attack.
“They mentioned nothing about anything else,” she said.
But now, the FBI is investigating the 2025 death of Melvin Cancer at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility as a homicide, and the guards as alleged perpetrators.
It is the first time in at least the last decade that officials have confirmed that an incarcerated person was killed by a use of force by prison security.
Information uncovered this month by The Marshall Project - Jackson and Mississippi Today revealed he died from blunt force trauma.
Cancer died shortly after being “involved in an altercation with Correctional Officers” at the Rankin County facility, according to a recent report the state Department of Public Safety sent to the U.S. Justice Department.
The death comes after fellow prisoners repeatedly complained about the 53-year-old’s lack of personal hygiene. On Jan. 22, 2025, several corrections officers went into Cancer’s cell to take him to the shower.
“He was transported to another building, where he collapsed in the shower area,” the report stated. “Cancer was transported to a medical facility where he was pronounced deceased.”
Cancer had been serving eight years in prison after pleading guilty to a 2019 aggravated assault in Hinds County.
After prison officials’ initial mention of cardiac arrest as the reason for Cancer’s death, Anderson heard from other incarcerated people that her uncle was taken into the shower and beaten, she said. “The whole story started changing,” Anderson said.
Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said Feb. 19 in a statement that “The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation has turned its files and findings over to the FBI regarding the case involving the in-custody death of Melvin Cancer.”
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Corrections declined to comment on the death, citing an ongoing investigation.
The federal probe into Cancer’s killing comes after a joint investigation by Mississippi Today, The Marshall Project - Jackson, Clarion Ledger, Hattiesburg American and The Mississippi Link found that prison understaffing and gang violence likely contributed to the killings of nearly 50 incarcerated people, including Cancer, since 2015. Only eight cases led to criminal convictions.
Of the 45 killed, 20 died by blunt force trauma. These include beatings at the hands of cellmates and other incarcerated people.
Bailey Martin, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety, said the bureau has only investigated one death caused by use of force by guards within state prisons since 2015.
Within the past decade, federal prosecutors have convicted at least seven former Mississippi Department of Corrections staffers for assaults on incarcerated people. Melvin Hilson, a former deputy warden with the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman’s K-9 division, was convicted and sentenced to 24 months in prison in 2022 after beating a man who was waiting to see a medical provider in 2016.
Two former prison officers and a case manager were convicted in the 2019 beating of a woman at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility. According to court documents, they punched, kicked and beat the woman with a pepper spray canister as she lay in a fetal position. Three former officers were also convicted in a 2016 beating at the same prison.
Following the news team’s 2025 investigation, state Rep. Becky Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, introduced a prison death oversight bill that passed the House unanimously on Feb. 10 and is now before the state Senate Corrections Committee. House Bill 1739 would require that an oversight task force review the deaths of state prisoners and make recommendations to prevent future deaths.
At least eight men have died in MDOC custody this year, according to news reports.
Currie said earlier this month that prisoners often die under opaque circumstances, with no explanation from prison officials.
“One of the things I want us to look at is the deaths that happen. We had three deaths in the prison system last week. They were in their 20s and 30s,” Currie said. “Whatever it is that the inmate is dying at 20 and 30 years old every week from, this task force will look into that.”
