Kylan Leeper died of a fentanyl overdose at Trousdale Turner Correctional Facility on Oct. 6, 2023, about five months after he arrived. A federal judge has dismissed his family's lawsuit against the prison and its leadership, while leaving a stark account of danger at Tennessee's largest prison in the court record.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw filed the order on Nov. 3, the Nashville Banner reported. The evidence of danger, disorder and misconduct at the CoreCivic-run facility was strong, Crenshaw wrote, but it could not be tied directly to Leeper's death. "The record in this case reflects a serious drug problem at TTCC," the judge wrote, and the record also reflected concern about danger to people incarcerated there.
Strong Evidence, No Direct Tie
The ruling turned on a case-specific question: whether the evidence showed that Leeper faced a particular risk that the defendants knew about and failed to address. Crenshaw found that evidence of broader danger at Trousdale did not make that connection. The distinction does not resolve the wider questions raised by conditions at the prison; it explains why the court dismissed this case.
The case had already been narrowed once. In a memorandum opinion dated Aug. 27, 2025, the court granted a motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part, according to the opinion reproduced by Justia. At that stage the factual background came from the amended complaint and was accepted as true, as it had to be. Getting past that early screen is not the same thing as proving what happened in a housing unit.
The Claim Against a Former Assistant Warden
The family’s claim against Jermaris Porter, an assistant warden at Trousdale in 2023, was its strongest, Crenshaw wrote. The complaint portrayed Porter as a central figure in a drug operation inside the prison. Even so, the judge found the evidence insufficient to establish the link to Leeper’s death.
The Nashville Banner’s account of the opinion described allegations that Porter violated prison rules by escorting inmates who had not been searched, meeting with gang-affiliated inmates behind closed doors and bypassing security screening. The account also said the opinion found he may have delivered drugs and that people in positions of authority likely contributed to Trousdale’s drug problem. But the estate did not show how Porter’s conduct or the alleged trafficking created the risk Leeper faced in Foxtrot Bravo before his overdose.
Porter later left Trousdale and briefly worked at an Alabama prison, leaving that job under unclear circumstances. Those details did not fill the evidentiary gap identified by the judge: the estate had not tied Porter’s conduct to the specific danger that led to Leeper’s overdose.
Scanners, Short Staff, and a Longer Record
CoreCivic's response to the crisis, the Banner reported, has included body scanners, a canine unit, mail and package scanning, drone detection, perimeter patrols, shakedowns, urinalysis and video surveillance. The judge's opinion still called the prison clearly understaffed. A long equipment list and a short staff roster can sit in the same record. At Trousdale, they do.
Former staff testified that the facility sometimes saw 10 or 15 overdoses a day in the summer and fall of 2023, a number of them fatal. That figure is testimony, not an audited daily count. It sits beside a death the court would not attribute to any single policy failure or to any one employee's alleged trafficking.
The prison has been a near-constant source of reports about staffing shortages and deaths involving drugs and violence since it opened in 2016, the Banner wrote in December 2024. That account described at least 22 criminal cases in the preceding two years against employees of the state's largest prison, with alleged offenses including smuggling drugs or cell phones and having sex with an incarcerated person. Those are allegations in criminal cases, not findings in the Leeper lawsuit.
A 2025 Banner report said federal authorities had cited five stabbings within three weeks in early 2024, and at least 196 assaults and 17 deaths at Trousdale between July 2022 and June 2023. In August 2024, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was investigating conditions at the facility, which the Times described as troubled and outside Nashville. The department's case summary said the inquiry would examine whether the Tennessee Department of Correction adequately protects people confined at Trousdale from harm, including physical and sexual violence.
The drug deaths were already a statewide problem before Leeper arrived. Prison Legal News reported that overdose deaths in Tennessee state prisons rose from six in 2019 to 49 in 2021, and that at least 68 state prisoners died of overdoses in the two years after the pandemic began, compared with 14 in the preceding three years. Healthcare staff administered naloxone almost 900 times in 2020 and 2021. Separately, the Associated Press reported that an audit found the state's prisons severely understaffed, with officers worried about their safety.
What audits and reports can—and cannot—show
The figures above describe both overdose deaths and naloxone administrations, but the reports cited here do not set out a common definition or department-wide counting method for those measures. A 2019 Fox 17 report on a state comptroller audit said that, among eight deaths recorded as natural that the audit examined, five were found to be drug overdoses. The audit’s review does not establish what caused Leeper’s death.
A November 2017 Tennessee Comptroller performance audit found that Trousdale Turner and Whiteville operated with fewer correctional officers than approved and had shortcomings in staffing records and post coverage. That earlier audit does not establish the contractual obligations that applied in Leeper’s case or explain his death. Separately, the Nashville Post reported that the status of the Justice Department’s civil rights investigation was unclear at the time of its report; the investigation itself is not a finding of wrongdoing.
A Father Who Does Not Expect an Appeal
Tim Leeper told the Banner that he and his family had not given up hope. He also said he does not think they will appeal. He has spent more than $50,000 on private investigators, and he said he saw the dismissal as evidence that the prison system was too powerful to fail.
He has lobbied state lawmakers for prison-related policy changes since his son's death, and he said he will keep doing that work for the rest of his life. He has largely walked away from his businesses to pursue it. Through the nonprofit Kylan's Light, and through Facebook groups for relatives of people in Tennessee prisons, he stays in touch with a widening circle of families. NewsChannel 5 reported that he organized a town hall on prison conditions with current and former elected officials.
He told the Banner he wants people to see incarcerated people as human beings, and that reform is unlikely until people outside the walls change how they look at them. The court record already describes a serious drug problem, a clearly understaffed prison and misconduct that still could not be tied to Kylan Leeper's overdose. His father is not counting on another filing. He is counting on another round of lobbying.
