Elijah Roberts bought an engagement ring and proposed to his girlfriend, Brittany, in the months before his incarceration at Two Rivers Correctional Institution. He’d been sentenced to just over three years for nonviolent crimes related to his battle with addiction in 2022. 

Roberts, 35, also recently came into some money, and the deed to his childhood home in the Metzger neighborhood of Tigard, after his adoptive mother passed away. She was his only remaining family. Roberts hoped his time in prison could be used as a reset; a period where he could gain some sobriety and return to society with a waiting bride, a small nest egg, and a chance to start over.

However, Roberts wouldn’t make it home. 

He was found unresponsive in his cell at TRCI before being transferred to nearby Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland, Washington, where he was pronounced dead in the early evening hours of March 1. 

A press release announcing Roberts’ death was released days later, with no cause of death listed. TRCI Executive Assistant Kaycie Thompson told the Mercury that all records related to his death were unavailable “due to a pending internal Special Investigation Unit investigation.” 

Roberts' only remaining family—his girlfriend and her sister, Ashley Wolff—drove three hours to Kadlec hospital when they heard the news. They made it in time to see Roberts one last time before doctors turned off his breathing machine. Although he was in a coma, Wolff says his ankles were cuffed to his hospital bed with a prison guard present in the room the entire time. 

Wolff says the doctors told them Roberts had overdosed on fentanyl. 

Prisons in Oregon have seen a rise in inmate drug use over the past three years, with an increased number of inmates testing positive for fentanyl, as well as a variety of illicit substances, including buprenorphine, a medication used to treat opioid addiction.

The rise in drug use in the state’s prisons coincides with an opioid epidemic in Oregon and nationally. Overdose deaths, many of them from fentanyl, surged an astronomical 1,500 percent between 2019 and 2023 in the state. And according to a first-of-its-kind report published by Oregon’s most populous county’s health department in May, 868 people have died from a fentanyl overdose in just Multnomah County during the past six years.

Born in Prison

Roberts' mother, Neokeo Gaines, gave birth to him in 1989 while serving time at a state penitentiary for burglary. He was adopted by Janis Roberts not long after. He attended Tigard High School and was a member of the snowboard team. Ismael Geronimo, who was on the Tigard High snowboard team with Roberts, remembers him always trying to make others laugh.

“I just remember the jokes we used to share on the ski lifts at Mt. Hood Meadows,” Geronimo said. “He had a memorable laugh and big, white teeth.”

Roberts struggled with addiction after high school and developed a lengthy criminal record in Oregon, including numerous arrests for drug possession, theft, and identity theft, according to court records. Wolff, who was close with Roberts, said he struggled with homelessness as well, but he never seemed to lose his good spirit. 

“He would always make the best out of every situation,” Wolff said. “He was just fun to be around. He was funny.”

Trouble at Two Rivers

Christy Running was asleep when she got the call in the early morning hours of January 9, 2023.

On the other end of the phone was a TRCI nurse asking if anybody had spoken to her about her brother, Eddie Dungan, who’d been incarcerated at the prison since 2020. Dungan pleaded guilty to charges stemming from shooting at an Oregon State Police trooper during a traffic stop in 2017. 

“I said ‘no,’” Running said. “Then she told me ‘I’m sorry but your brother has died.’ I was hysterical at the time. I couldn’t speak.”

Running said she called back a few hours later. This same nurse told her that Dungan hadn’t been feeling well and had refused medical treatment, opting to lay down in his cell instead. The nurse told her officers later found him unresponsive and attempted CPR to no avail. 

Running claims she then asked the nurse about Dungan’s cellmate. The nurse said he didn’t have one at the time. Running said this was the first moment she felt something was off. She claimed she talked to Dungan about his cellmate only four days before his death. 

A state trooper investigating Dungan’s death confirmed to Running that Dungan was in a dry cell at the time of his death. Dry cells lack any plumbing facilities: there is no shower, no sink, and the toilet has no water. The idea is that, if an inmate is believed to have swallowed contraband, it will eventually pass through the inmate’s body and prison officials can recover it after it does so.

“At no point should I have been lied to about the details leading up to his death,” Running said. “The nurse that called me was not even on shift when Eddie died. Protocol for this type of situation says it should have been the warden that called me.”

Running alleges that prison staff saw that Dungan was unwell, but put him in a dry cell for more than 70 hours anyway, “where they watched him die.”

Running and her family have held numerous protests in the Eugene and Springfield area of Lane County since Dungan’s death. She’s also held events in collaboration with Steven Parker, a formerly incarcerated activist and founder of AIC’sAdvocate. They even held one in Los Angeles in April. 

“This could be me, this could be your brother or your friend, it could be anybody,” Running said. “We need to shed light on these prisons, and say ‘hey, this is not okay, these are people, they are valued and remembered, and we aren't just going to accept their deaths. They matter.”

Two Rivers History 

Two Rivers was billed as the “prison of the future” when it opened in March 2000. Inmates quickly likened the new facility to the remoteness of the infamous Alcatraz Penitentiary. Its distant location in Eastern Oregon, and its state-of-the-art computer and video monitor screens, led to Two Rivers being given the same nickname as the former San Francisco prison island had in the 1930s: The Rock.

The prison, which was built for $121 million, is designed to be more like a row of 14 small jails, lined up and walled off from each other. The idea was to limit the contact inmates had with one another, keeping them secluded to their unit for the entirety of their sentence. 

“This place is more like a max,”—a maximum security prison—an inmate told the Associated Press in 2000. 

The Oregon DOC employs 4,500 staff members at 12 institutions, two community corrections offices, and several centralized support facilities throughout the state. This year, the state's prison population was about 13,200, according to data released earlier this year by the DOC.

Of those in custody, more than 50 percent have a substance abuse problem.

In 2014, the East Oregonian reported that TRCI had the most “unexpected deaths” in the entire DOC between April 2013 and April 2014. Unexpected deaths are classified as deaths that aren’t from natural causes or old age and can include overdoses and suicides. 

A police sergeant who investigated deaths at TRCI told the newspaper that four inmate deaths in less than a year was above the norm.

Since at least 2012, the DOC and TRCI have come under fire for underreporting inmate deaths and for failing to keep track of overdoses, both fatal and nonfatal.

Corrections officials told The Oregonian in September 2023 that the DOC is unable to say exactly how many prisoners overdose on street drugs each year. Corrections officials acknowledged they don’t track numbers of overdoses, fatal or non-fatal, and said the agency’s outdated medical chart and billing systems make it difficult to do so.

Betty Bernt, DOC communications manager, told the Mercury over email that the medical examiner now records all overdose deaths, whether it's fentanyl or not, on a tracking log within the Health Services Division.

However, she noted that there is still no system in place to warn staff or inmates of potentially deadly drugs circulating the prison after an overdose. The way TRCI is set up, this means an inmate could overdose on fentanyl without other inmates hearing about it, leading them to take the same drugs that caused the original overdose. 

“There is not a specific mechanism in place for notifying adults in custody or staff of an overdose,” Bernt said. 

Bernt said the DOC is currently piloting several programs aimed at addressing substance use disorder issues within the state's prisons. However, none of the pilot programs are being tested in TRCI and there are currently no plans to introduce future programs at TRCI. 

“Wastewater testing equipment has been installed at Oregon State Penitentiary and Oregon State Correctional Institution, with Snake River Correctional Institution coming online soon as the third and final location in DOC’s substance use disorder pilot,” Bernt said. 

Wastewater testing is the practice of testing the wastewater from the prison for drugs as opposed to the standard random drug test. This can help detect which drugs prisoners are using as a whole, but doesn’t narrow down which prisoner specifically is using, since it's a sample size from the whole facility. 

"Wastewater testing improves DOC’s ability to both provide services to those who would benefit from medically assisted treatment, and target sources of illicit drugs in our prisons,” Bernt said.  

The early results of the wastewater pilot programs will be the subject of DOC’s testimony to the Ways & Means Subcommittee on Public Safety in the upcoming September legislative days September 23 to 25.

Bernt also said the DOC has proposed a change to its rule on mail after experiencing a sharp rise in paper and envelopes infused with narcotics. The new rule proposes limiting the type of envelopes and paper allowed for incoming mail, as well as removing gendered language and adding clarifying language consistent with other department rules.

A public hearing on the proposed changes is scheduled for 1 pm, September 16, with a comment period open now through September 25. 

Picking Up the Pieces

Roberts’ Chrysler 300 with tinted windows still sits broken down in the driveway of Wolff’s parents' home. Her sister, Robert’s former fiancé, still takes care of the couple’s mini goldendoodle, Rover. 

“I feel like a bunch of people that I went to high school with, people that I grew up with that lived around me, so many of them have passed away,” Wolff said. “It’s just sad, you know?”

Wolff said she still has most of Roberts’ belongings in a storage unit that he got after selling his childhood home. She has his ashes and hopes to spread them somewhere special in the future. 

“Brittany has had a hard time accepting that he’s gone, we both miss him a lot,” Wolff said. “Friends keep coming by to share stories about Elijah, I think it’s kind of given us both motivation to do better in life.”