A man who beat his cellmate to death at the Hinds County Detention Center in 2023 will serve a life sentence without parole. 

On Wednesday, a jury found Avery Bankston, 38, guilty of first-degree murder for the death of Tyrone Wilson. 

The night of Feb. 23, 2023, the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation found 50-year-old Wilson dead and lying on his back in the cell he shared with Bankston. 

Video camera footage showed both men enter and exit the cell and visible movement from under the cell door: a struggle and a red-sleeved arm reach from under the cell, according to the Hinds County District Attorney’s office. Later, video captured Bankston using a white cloth to clean the inside cell window and door. 

“For our system of law to work, prisons have to be safe. We will not tolerate our detention centers to become battlegrounds,” Hinds District Attorney Jody Owens said in a statement. “Every act of violence behind bars will be prosecuted as aggressively as one on the street.”

Owens said he hopes the verdict will bring closure to Wilson’s family who lives in Illinois and didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to him. 

At the time of the killing, Bankston was being held at the Raymond facility awaiting trial for burglary charges. Charge information for Wilson was not immediately available. 

Bankston’s attorney asked the court to suppress or limit testimony about any alleged previous altercation between Bankston and Wilson as hearsay because no one personally witnessed an altercation, and to limit allegations of Bankston’s prior arrests. 

At least six people have died at the Hinds County Detention Center this year, including the homicide of a man whose body was found in his cell after an apparent assault.  

In the state prison system, a team of Mississippi reporters found that at least 43 people have died by homicide inside Mississippi prisons since 2015. The corrections commissioner has vowed to revisit investigations of the unprosecuted homicides and undetermined deaths.