Warden out, 19 officers face discipline after Maryland’s 9th prison killing this year

State police and corrections officials are conducting a “potential criminal misconduct” investigation into staff at a Western Maryland prison after the latest in a rash of killings of prisoners across the state.

The case is focused on the May 20 discovery of the body of Colin Wolf, 32, inside his cell in the Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, officials said.

Corrections officers are required to conduct prisoner counts three times a day and perform rounds every 30 minutes. Yet Wolf’s father said in an interview that he has been told by investigators that his son may have been dead in his cell for hours and possibly days, as decomposition had begun to set in.

In the wake of Wolf’s killing, Roxbury’s warden and chief of security are out, state officials confirmed to The Banner. Corrections department officials also administratively charged 19 officers and banned eight medical staffers from facilities statewide.

A joint investigation with state police is ongoing, but officials declined to release details.

Homicides in Maryland’s prisons have been on the rise in recent years. Wolf was the ninth prisoner killed this year across the state’s 13 facilities, and the 33rd killed since 2023.

Carolyn Scruggs, who was appointed secretary of the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services by Gov. Wes Moore in 2023, declined an interview request. In a statement responding to questions from The Banner, Scruggs wrote that she was “outraged at the actions taken by a small but unacceptable number of officers and staff who failed to uphold the values of this agency, their responsibility to the public, and — most importantly — those entrusted to their care."

Officers, she said, had violated “basic human decency.”

“It is my pledge to Marylanders to hold every person accountable to the fullest extent of my authority and to implement the corrective actions necessary to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.”

Just two weeks before Wolf’s death, another incarcerated man, Kelvin Hite, was also killed at Roxbury. And earlier this month, officials said a gang fight between suspected members of the Black Guerrilla Family and MS-13 gangs left eight prisoners stabbed.

Union officials say the prison system at large is suffering from chronic understaffing.

“The violence at Roxbury is unfortunately nothing new,” said Linda He, communications director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 3, which represents unionized prison employees. “Without sufficient staffing levels and proper training and resources, both staff and incarcerated individuals face risk of violence, injury, and even death every single day.”

Yianni Varonis, a spokesman for the prison system, disputed the union’s contention that staffing was a factor: “Regarding the incident at RCI, every day in question included at least one — if not multiple shifts— that were fully staffed. Any assertion that rounds couldn’t be conducted is not just false, but a fabrication.”

Roxbury’s warden at the time of Wolf’s death, Laura Golliday, declined to comment. Officials said she is retiring, effective Aug. 1, and her former security chief “is no longer in state employment.”

The violence prompted state Sen. Paul Corderman, a Republican representing Frederick and Washington counties, to make an unannounced visit to the facility recently. He found a host of problems, including air conditioning in one wing that hadn’t been working for months.

Corderman sent a letter to Scruggs on Tuesday, chiding her for poor leadership and saying that the staffing issues at the prison in his district need more attention.

“The current situation and climate in the correctional facilities in this region is worse now than before your appointment,” Corderman wrote.

The state corrections system asserts that while it is grappling with challenges that mirror those in other states, it has “significantly lowered its staff vacancy rate, improved staff safety, and created pathways to opportunity for our incarcerated population.”

In an interview, Tom Wolf, a retired Baltimore Police detective and father of Colin Wolf, said the prison system did not notify his family about his son’s death. Instead, people inside the prison sent a message to his sister, and the family confirmed the news with prison officials after that.

Colin Wolf suffered from cognitive impairment, his father said, and had been incarcerated since 2013 for killing his sister’s 2-month-old child. According to Harford County prosecutors, he was angry at his sister for having a baby with a man he disliked. When left alone with the child, Colin Wolf punched the child, causing a fatal brain hemorrhage, prosecutors said.

Tom Wolf said family members had doubts about his involvement, and his son was initially deemed incompetent to stand trial because of mental disabilities. But Colin Wolf, his father said, nevertheless wanted to plead guilty in 2015.

For his first decade inside Maryland’s prisons, Colin Wolf was held at the Patuxent Institution, a treatment-oriented maximum security correctional facility. Then he got transferred to Roxbury, a medium security prison.

His family worried about him getting harassed, and he had been moved to disciplinary segregation after getting into a fight earlier this year.

On the day when Colin Wolf’s body was discovered by authorities, an officer performing rounds told his cellmate that he needed to see Colin Wolf move as part of his count, according to an internal prison report reviewed by the Banner.

The cellmate said that Colin Wolf was sleeping and refused to wake him up, the report said. The officer then entered the cell, found him unresponsive and called for medics.

A boot print was found on Colin Wolf’s head, according to a witness account in another internal report.

The cellmate, who has not been charged in the killing, told a corrections officer that Colin Wolf had been dead “for hours.” That would have been in conflict with one internal report that insisted that a correctional officer completed a round an hour earlier with no mention in the logbook of any issue with Colin Wolf.

State officials said they have made other changes following Colin Wolf’s death, including:

• High-ranking supervisors now shadow lower-level officers to confirm that well-being checks of incarcerated individuals are performed correctly.
• Sergeants are assigned to fill in at posts to help support the rest of the line staff throughout the facility. 
• Mental health staff were deployed to a section of the prison where Colin Wolf’s body was found to evaluate the welfare of other prisoners and provide an opportunity for witnesses to come forward confidentially.

Tom Wolf said he is still waiting for answers about how his son died and who may be responsible and wants a thorough investigation.

After a career spent sending people to prison as a Baltimore sex offense detective, Tom Wolf said his son Colin’s entry into prison “changed my life on what I would say about people in jail.”

“They’re not all angels,” he said. “But they shouldn’t be subject to cruel and inhumane situations.”

Banner reporters Ben Conarck and Dylan Segelbaum contributed to this story.