Inmate charged with murdering deaf cellmate Javarick Gantt; NAD suspending tweets
Here are two Deaf News briefs.
Inmate charged with murdering deaf cellmate Javarick Gantt
On October 9, a 34-year-old deaf man named Javarick Gantt was killed in a Baltimore jail. The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) said they have charged Gantt’s cellmate, 33-year-old Gordon Staron (hearing), with strangling him to death inside their shared cell.
The Baltimore Sun reported that Gantt was jailed in July on charges stemming from two separate domestic disputes involving two different deaf women in 2019. Gantt missed court dates and meetings with his probation agent and as a result, had two warrants out for his arrest. Gantt said in a court hearing that he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do on probation. He had limited writing and reading skills and benefited from the support of a CDI. But a judge said there were no excuses and ordered him to remain jailed without bail while he awaited a trial. He was killed 10 days before his trial date.
Gantt’s cellmate, Staron, was also being held without bail at the jail on a separate murder charge in which he allegedly stabbed a 63-year-old man to death in September. The Sun said on the night before Gantt died, both men were locked in their cell together since about 7:20 p.m. Witnesses heard Gantt making noises and banging on his cell door that night. He was found unresponsive the next morning and was pronounced dead.
An attorney with the ACLU told the Sun “this indicates a profoundly egregious mistake by the jail” in that a disabled man facing relatively minor charges was being housed with a first-degree murder suspect.
A close friend of Gantt told the Sun that she stayed in touch with Gantt when he was in jail through videophone and that he expressed worries about his cellmate (Staron) and wished to be housed alone. There were questions raised about whether he had accommodations that were required under federal and state law, but it seems like he did not have much if any support inside of the jail.
Staron is now facing an additional first-degree murder charge in Gantt’s death.
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NAD suspending tweets due to elimination of accessibility team
The NAD tweeted yesterday that it is “suspending its tweets due to @Twitter eliminating its entire Accessibility team, and will not resume until a showing of commitment to full inclusion.”
I read in TechCrunch.com that Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, as a part of his layoffs that cut Twitter’s employees in half, laid off the “accessibility experience team, which improved the product for people with disabilities.”
Gerald K. Cohen, the former “Engineering Manager for the Accessibility Experience Team at Twitter,” confirmed last week that his entire engineering team has been let go. His team worked on accessibility features such as image descriptions or closed captioning features.
TechCrunch.com said it appears that Musk has “little regard for… accessibility” but analyzed that he is making the cuts to extract more value from the company.
So the NAD is not going to tweet in the near future. You can still follow them on their Facebook and Instagram pages as well as their website on NAD.org.
https://twitter.com/NAD1880/status/1590733573019291648
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs/