INVESTIGATION: NC prisons still heavily understaffed following 2017 murders

"If things don't change, it's a given, someone's going to die," says Wendy Callahan, the mother of the first prison employee killed in North Carolina in 2017. "Someone's either going to die or they're going to be totally disabled."

2017 was a deadly year for the North Carolina prison system with five employees killed in brutal attacks.

It's been just over a year since Wendy's daughter, Sgt. Meggan Callahan, 29, was murdered.

WITN is investigating what changes have been implemented in the prison system since then and if it's enough to protect employees going forward.

First, we take a look back at what happened when those employees were killed as new details continue to be released and family members and co-workers speak out.

"Meggan was an outgoing person, very funny, very smart," Callahan says. "We really thought she was going to go into standup comedy, but she went into corrections instead."

Meggan became a correctional officer (CO) in 2012 and then an acting sergeant in 2016.

Despite the dangers facing COs, Wendy says her daughter was not scared going into work each day.

But those dangers would prove deadly on April 26, 2017.

Her alleged killer, Craig Wissink, was serving a life sentence at Bertie Correctional Institution for a 2004 murder.

"She knew that he was after her and she told my husband that," Wendy recalls. "That day, she was on the phone with another sergeant and said, 'If something doesn't change in this prison soon, someone's going to die.' And an hour later, it was her that had died."

The Department of Public Safety says Wissink started his assault with a fire in a trash can.

"She went in with a fire extinguisher and thought she had two people with her, but they never entered the floor," Wendy says.

The autopsy says while she was trying to put out the fire, "the inmate threw hot/boiling water into her face."

"He went after her with a shiv, and she fought him," the grieving mother describes. "Then he got the fire extinguisher off the floor and he beat her with it."

Her cause of death is listed as "traumatic head injuries due to assault with fire extinguisher."

About six months after Meggan was murdered, the death count rose for prison employees in Eastern North Carolina.

It was October 12, 2017. The Department of Public Safety (DPS) says four inmates planned to escape and, in doing so, murdered four employees: Officers Wendy Shannon and Justin Smith, sewing plant operator Veronica Darden, and maintenance worker Geoffrey Howe.

"We've got three officers that are severely hurt," you can hear a dispatcher say during a 911 call from that day. "They're on the ground. They beat them with hammers and stabbed them with scissors.

Records say inmates Mikel Brady, Seth Frazier, Jonathan Monk, and Wisezah Buckman began by brutally attacking Darden and Smith in the sewing plant.

Both were pronounced dead on the scene.

Darden's autopsy says she was repeatedly beaten around her head, stabbed in the back, and had her throat cut.

Smith's report says he was stabbed more than 60 times in his head, neck, and torso.

Thomas Ashley was a sergeant at Pasquotank and was working in master control at the front of the prison, watching the chaos unfold through cameras.

"After the inmates attacked, they had access to the radio," he describes. "They had keys, they had batons, everything the officer had they had."

Then he recalls, "It's coming across the radio there's a code on a unit, which is all the way on the opposite end of where people needed to be."

After starting a fire and calling a code across the prison, the inmates make their way down the freight elevator. That's when Shannon and Howe are attacked.

They were taken to the hospital but their conditions never improved. Shannon died on October 30th and Howe died three days after. Their autopsy reports say they both died of complications of blunt force head injuries.

"If they start coming in here, I'm going to have to fight them," an officer tells a 911 dispatcher. "I got me a hammer, I'm ready."

"Inmates running down, it's like anything they come in contact with, if it wasn't an inmate, they were getting punched, they were getting whatever," Ashley says. "Hitting the fence, climbing just as hard as they could."

Two of the inmates were able to get over one fence, but they eventually surrendered.

Eight other employees and four inmates were injured during the deadly attempted escape.

"I can't protect Meggan anymore, but I can try to protect other people from having the same thing happen," Wendy Callahan says. She's become an outspoken voice since her daughter's murder.

She not only blames Meggan's accused murderer, she also blames the Department of Public Safety.

"Prison is never going to be a safe place, but they made it so much worse," she says. Meggan may have been attacked that day but if she had staff, she might not be dead. If she had a staff that did not run away, she might not be dead. If that man had been in maximum prison instead of medium prison, she might not be dead."

"There should never be a loss of life on a job site, period," Ashley says.

He worked at Pasquotank for nearly 12 years, but recently left and even took a pay cut.

"There's still incidents of officers getting punched, stabbed, and stuff like that and it's like, yeah, I think it's time for me to go," he says. "These inmates ain't in there for going to church."

Since that October attack, DPS says 38 employees have been assaulted so bad they lost work time and eight of them were at Pasquotank.

In April, the Labor Department cited Pasquotank Correctional Center and Corrections Enterprises, which ran the prison sewing plant. The two were fined $7,000 each for workplace safety violations, which the state has contested.

The National Institute of Corrections (NIC) released a report on Pasquotank in January which says the prison was operating at a 25-percent staff vacancy rate on October 12th. That means one in every four positions was not filled.

WITN's Lindsay Oliver went through the number of vacant positions for each prison in the state and discovered shocking data.

At the beginning of 2017, Pasquotank's vacancy rate was 41-percent. While they were able to fill some positions since then, they have continued to operate with a vacancy rate of 25-percent or more.

And that is not the only institution.

Since November, after the attacks at Pasquotank, eight prisons across the state continue to see a vacancy rate of 25- to 41-percent, including Bertie Correctional Institution where Meggan was murdered.

The understaffing problems escalated in 2016. According to DPS documents obtained by WITN, in January 2016 the statewide vacancy rate was 8.9-percent, but it jumped to 15.5-percent by September. The statewide number reached 17-percent by March 2018.

The Department of Public Safety says while some institutions are in need of filling a large number of vacancies, they say the prisons work to make sure each post is manned by shuffling staff and through a lot of overtime.

However, that was not true for the October attack.

"There was only one officer up there in that sewing plant and there should have been two," Ashley tells WITN.

The NIC report says that second CO position had been vacant for some time, leaving one officer to watch 30 inmates in the sewing plant.

It says overtime was causing "staff burnout, complacency and taking of shortcuts."

For instance, while the inmates are supposed to be strip-searched before coming in and leaving the sewing plant, the report says it only happened about 20-percent of the time.

Ashley says COs were forced to pick up extra 12-hour shifts regularly. "It's more like 13 hours and you might have to pull one extra shift per week," he says.

He says he worked so much overtime as a CO, it eliminated his raise as a sergeant. Wendy Callahan says it was the same case for Meggan.

Ashley says Pasquotank was so understaffed that he was never allowed to take off for training to advance his career.

Staff are not only overworked, they're also underpaid. DPS says the average pay for a correctional officer in our state is $35,300. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the national average for COs and jailers was $47,600 in May 2017.

"I don't think there's any dispute that folks are overworked and they're fatigued," says Judge Reuben Young, the new Interim Chief Deputy Secretary of Adult Corrections and Juvenile Justice.

He took over the position at the end of December after David Guice stepped down November 1st.

While Young believes there are things the state can still improve on, he does not think staffing was not the primary cause of last year's attacks.

"This crime was committed by people who intended to escape, and in an effort to do so, they murdered our employees," he says. "The biggest challenge we had that came out of the NIC report was the inconsistency of the policies of Corrections Enterprises and prisons, and quite frankly we've addressed that issue."

The NIC also lists an absence of personal safety equipment, a gun cabinet being left open, a door being left unlocked which aided in the inmate's attempted escape, blind spots on cameras, and cameras in the sewing plant not being monitored.

Of the inmates accused in the attack, Jonathan Monk was in for first-degree murder, Wisezah Buckman was convicted of second-degree murder, and Mikel Brady was found guilty of shooting a trooper in the face.

They were all allowed unsupervised access to dangerous tools, which were issued to them by another inmate at the sewing plant. But that policy has since changed.

"If they are felons convicted of violent crimes, they don't work in Correction Enterprises," Young says. "They've been reclassified."

Also in the report, insufficient training across the board, which is something DPS is working to correct.

Young says they have also eliminated the backlog of new employees needing to go to basic training. Beforehand, new officers could go months on the job without ever being trained.

"I started in June, but I didn't go to basic training until like October/November," Ashley says.

New officers now go to basic on their second week.

Staff at Central Prison tell WITN that one of the best changes made so far is in the disciplinary process, saying the previous disciplinary policy was too lenient and that inmates found write-ups to be a "joke".

"Making the charges more strenuous, more segregation time for incidents such as disobeying an officer's orders, trying to induce drugs into the facility and also homemade weapons, which has always been a problem," says John Williams, an assistant unit manager at Central. "It's actually slowed down the disciplinaries."

Judge Young says the state is seeing a more violent and mentally ill prison population, and while he says they are doing everything they can to keep employees safe, it's an inherently dangerous business.

"We house some of the most violent people in this state," he explains. "And to the extent that we have to deal with that population, our folks know the risks that are involved."

In April, current and retired correctional officers from across the state pleaded with lawmakers that more needs to be done.

One retired CO says, "There is a war on staff."

A current officer told lawmakers, "The assaults on staff have been tremendous.'

A female officer from Pasquotank asked them, "We're trying to protect public safety, but who protects us?"

The state says they are still in the process of a number of changes, including in personal safety equipment.

Tasers have been ordered for supervisors in select close custody male prisons, more batons have been ordered, and so have 13,000 stab resistant shirts.

As state lawmakers get closer to passing a budget deal, their current proposal allows for $15 million for prison security upgrades.