His killer was wearing an ankle monitor. Now SC courts weigh who is responsible
The killer never should’ve been on Broad River Road in the early morning hours of Feb. 13, 2022.
Around 3 a.m. on that Super Bowl Sunday, Rayjon Smith and Antwon Brown were seen speaking in the parking lot of the Vegas Knights nightclub. A party continued inside. The theme was “Forever Heartless.”
Cameras recorded the two men crossing Broad River Road to Smith’s car. Two minutes later video captured muzzle flashes as Brown gunned down Smith, a father of three with a passion for film and photography, and then fled into the night.
An ankle monitor was strapped to his leg.
It was put there as a condition of a bond requiring that Brown be confined to his home following an arrest on an armed robbery charge the previous October. It was just one of 10 charges that Brown racked up in the previous two years, including assault by mob, kidnapping, receiving stolen property and being a felon in possession of a gun or ammunition.
But the monitoring device, operated by a private company, did little to stop Brown from brazenly violating home confinement.
In the two days leading up to Smith’s killing, the device sent 13 email alerts to the 5th Circuit Solicitor’s Office warning that Brown was not at home. Typically, alerts warning that a defendant is violating the conditions of their bond are sent by email to the assistant solicitor assigned to the case, who can then ask a court to revoke the bond. If a judge agrees, law enforcement officers will arrest the defendant.
But in this case, the alerts arrived at a dead email address belonging to an employee who, according to the lawsuit, not only never worked on Brown’s case but no longer worked at the office.
Brown pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in June 2024 and was sentenced to 28 years in prison. He is appealing that sentence.
But the shortcomings of this monitoring system, which is a growing and profitable slice of the criminal justice industry, have been laid bare in a lawsuit brought by Verda Knox, Smith’s mother, on behalf of his estate.
“Someone needs to be held accountable,” Knox said in an interview with The State. “We just can’t keep pushing this under the rug. I don’t want another parent to have to go into a courtroom and say ‘this is what happened to my child.’ No justice was done in this case.”
Electronic monitoring is an increasingly common tool in the criminal justice system, touted as a way to balance competing interests of public safety, a defendant’s presumption of innocence, and overcrowded jails.
In 2005, an estimated 53,000 people in the United States were assigned ankle monitors. By 2021, that number had grown fivefold to over 150,000, according to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice, a think tank that studies the criminal justice system.
It is also a lucrative industry. South Carolina is one of many states that require defendants to cover the cost of their ankle monitors, which is provided through a private company. Fees for ankle monitoring are roughly $300 a month, with additional installation fees. A bond and electronic monitoring reform law passed by the General Assembly in 2023 requires that the county pick up the bill if a court finds that a defendant can’t meet the cost of the ankle monitor.
“Ankle monitors are a good option when they work, are actively monitored and violators are held accountable,” said Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott. But Lott, who described Brown in 2022 as a prime example of “catch and release” in the justice system, warned that electronic monitoring is “not the deterrent courts and citizens think.”
“There’s a real lack of research that demonstrates that ankle monitors reduce crime,” said Jessica Zhang, a research associate with the Vera Institute’s Incarceration and Inequality Project. Part of the problem is that responsibility for defendants remains a “hot potato,” Zhang said. “All of these layers of outsourcing create this question of ‘who is actually responsible?’”
Many of the defendants in Knox’s lawsuit, including the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, the 5th Circuit Solicitor’s Office and the bondsmen who paid Brown’s bond, have been released from the case after circuit court Judge Thomas McGee III ruled that they either had immunity or no legal obligation to protect Smith.
Now, the companies Offender Management Services, Pronto Consulting and Prontotrak, which attorneys say were involved in attaching, maintaining and monitoring Brown’s ankle monitors, also argue that they bore “no legal duty” to prevent Smith’s death.
Brown’s actions could not have been foreseen and were beyond the control of Prontotrak and Offender Management Services, according to filings from their attorneys.
While based in South Carolina, Offender Management Services is registered in Georgia to the same address as Prontotrak and Pronto Consulting. The companies also share an attorney.
When reached, a representative of OMS and Prontotrak declined to clarify the nature of the relationship between the companies and said that they could not comment due to ongoing litigation.
The real questions here, said Richie Gergel, one of the attorneys representing Knox, is whether we’re “operating in a world” where no entity involved in electronic monitoring is responsible if a defendant commits a crime.
Brown’s history of violating release conditions
On the morning of Feb. 13, 2022, Verda Knox was driving to church when she got a phone call from her youngest son.
“Mom, Ray got killed last night,” Knox remembers him saying.
In that moment, she couldn’t believe he was talking about his own brother, her oldest son. So many young men had died from gun violence in her community that her thoughts immediately went to whatever family might now be grieving. Knox, who runs a nonprofit called Neighbors Helping Neighbors that helps people find housing, thought that when she left church she would drive over to visit with the family and give whatever comfort she could.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, whose child is that?’” Knox remembers. In that moment, she had no idea it was her own child.
Knox adopted Smith when he was 9, and he went on to help get his other siblings out of DSS custody. He left behind three children of his own, including one born after he died.
Today, Knox says that she still struggles to understand how Brown was at the club that night.
Over nearly two years of electronic monitoring, Brown was repeatedly arrested on new charges and for violating the terms of his release. But each time he was released on bond.
Between January 2020 and February 2022, Brown was arrested four times, according to court records and Knox’s lawsuit. Each time he was released on bond, and on at least two occasions he was assigned electronic monitoring.
Emails included as part of the lawsuit show that both the 5th Circuit Solicitor’s Office and Offender Management Services were aware that Brown was violating the conditions of his confinement.
In October 2021, Brown was released on a $100,000 bond following charges of receiving stolen goods and unlawfully carrying a pistol as a felon. Brown was to pay $9.25 per day for the ankle monitor, according to documents included as part of the lawsuit. A $500 installation fee appears to have been waived, according to the records. Brown was permitted to leave his home to visit his attorney, court, a doctor, church and school, according to the document. The device had to be charged for 30 minutes twice a day.
Just five days after that monitor was attached, an email from Offender Management Services to the solicitor’s office warned that Brown was not spending the night at his home address.
The OMS employee said she called Brown to remind him of the conditions of his house arrest and he said that he “understood,” according to the email. He then returned home for 33 minutes before leaving again.
“Now he is traveling on I-20,” the employee wrote.
That December, Brown was arrested again, this time for sale or delivery of a stolen pistol and failing to stop for a police command. He was released and remained under the supervision of the ankle monitor, according to the lawsuit.
On Feb. 11, two days prior to Smith’s murder, Offender Management Services attached a new ankle monitor to Brown after his previous one died. Brown started violating the conditions of his release almost immediately.
But instead of alerts going to someone assigned to Brown’s case, they were sent to the email address of Lakesha Jeffries, a domestic violence prosecutor who had left the office the previous December. In an affidavit submitted as part of the lawsuit, Jeffries said that she was never asked to monitor or supervise Brown.
Brown had a “serious criminal history,” Gergel said. “He’s the kind of person that if he was going to be released to home detention and put on an ankle monitor, you would want to make sure that he was in fact being monitored, and that he was in fact being supervised, because he poses such an obvious danger to the community.”
Company has complicated history in Richland County
This isn’t the first time that Offender Management Services has ended up in a legal battle in Richland County.
In 2016, the company was the subject of a high profile legal battle when the county’s public defender, Fielding Pringle, sued the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office over the ankle monitor program. The lawsuit alleged that ankle monitoring discriminated against poor defendants, because they couldn’t pay the company’s fees, and was an invasion of privacy. A judge ultimately found that the ankle monitor program had been created unlawfully.
At the time, the company had an office inside the Richland County Courthouse. This office had a bank of monitors displaying in real time the location of defendants under electronic monitoring. The company also had an office inside of the solicitor’s office in the same building.
Today, Offender Management Services has an office on Broad River Road in Columbia. When a judge orders a defendant wear an ankle monitor as a condition of bond or home confinement, the judge can also order that the fees be waived. When they do, the county picks up the bill.
Ankle monitors can also be attached by bail bondsmen, private companies that put up cash for bond. Bondsmen often require their clients wear ankle monitors to ensure that they show up to court and comply with conditions of their bonds so that bondsmen can collect on the money they put up.
The bulky, black plastic cuff is locked around a defendant’s ankle. It holds a rechargeable GPS tracker that monitors the wearer’s location and can send alerts when they are somewhere they’re not supposed to be.
Electronic monitoring is increasingly used in both the criminal justice system as well as the immigration system. This growth has followed along with improvements in the technology as electronic monitoring has transitioned from radio frequency to GPS and now even to phone apps that scan biometric data, like a face or a fingerprint, for “check-ins.”
Monitoring is not the only issue facing ankle monitors. In Maryland, hundreds of people faced being sent back to jail in 2024 when emergency COVID funding that paid for electronic monitoring dried up. In Chicago, the ACLU reported that defendants on electronic monitoring struggled to get approval from the companies to go to work or attend school.
Despite the 2016 legal battle, in July 2021, Offender Management Services beat out four other bidders to retain a contract with Richland County to provide electronic monitoring services for defendants who cannot afford to pay the costs on their own.
Minutes from a July 27, 2021, Richland County Council meeting show that staff members recommended the company be paid up to $80,250 a month.
In their lawsuit, Knox’s attorneys wrote that the contract required OMS to alert Richland County, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department and the 5th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, and/or the 5th Circuit solicitor when a defendant under supervision violated the terms of their release.
Asked when law enforcement is supposed to be notified that an offender is violating the conditions of their release, Lott said, “immediately.”