Mack Greer, 46, was released from the Tarrant County jail in Fort Worth, Texas, at 10 a.m. on June 17, court records show. By then doctors had already declared him brain dead. He died the next afternoon at John Peter Smith Hospital.
His parents say an officer told them he would be freed on a personal bond after he was on life support. His bond had been set at $1,000. “That doesn’t mean my son wasn’t loved because I didn’t have the money,” his mother, Leatta Hurd, told Bolts magazine. His father, Joseph Hurd, said: “That’s gotta be against the law for them to put his fingerprint on it like that.”
The fingerprint detail is Bolts’ reporting: that deputies pressed Greer’s thumb to a release form while he lay brain dead. Sheriff Bill Waybourn’s office denies wrongdoing. Its spokesperson, Passman, called the contention that releases are sought to avoid accountability “entirely inaccurate.” The office says it has a compassionate release policy for terminally ill people in custody.
The paperwork matters because a death in custody triggers an outside investigation under Texas law. The state passed that requirement in 2017 in the Sandra Bland Act, named for the Black woman who died in a Waller County jail in 2015. A person released before dying may not count.
Greer was one of five people tied to the jail who died between April and June, Fox 4 reported: John Barr, 36, on April 19; James Johnson, 40, on June 15; Carl McCray, 40, on June 16; Greer on June 18; and Victor Rennels, 61, on June 25.
Rennels had a medical event in the jail on June 24 and was released from custody the next day, the day he died. His niece told Fox 4 he stayed handcuffed to his hospital bed until just before his death: “They were removed before the pronouncement or declared time of death. There may have been a five-minute difference.” The sheriff’s office declined to comment on that and noted that the Texas Commission on Jail Standards found the case does not meet its definition of an in-custody death. It has also said several of those who died had refused medical assessments or had existing conditions.
Commissioner Alisa Simmons, one of two Democrats on the five-member Tarrant County commission, has pressed for answers alongside the families. “Moving someone from a jail cell to the county hospital should not move that case beyond accountability,” she said.
The pattern is older than June. Bolts has reported that at least 65 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody since Waybourn took office in January 2017, against 25 in the eight years before. The state has also found the county violated the law requiring independent investigations, KERA reported in 2024: the sheriff listed the Fort Worth Police Department as the outside investigator, but the department only reviewed the sheriff’s own internal work.
Simmons has joined calls for Waybourn to resign and for a federal inquiry into the jail.
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