PHILADELPHIA _ A Lansdowne man incarcerated at Delaware County's jail died by suicide Christmas morning, county officials said Monday.
Austin Peter Mulhern, 45, was found hanged in his cell at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility just before 1 a.m. Wednesday, according to a report prepared by the county medical examiner. Investigators said they believe he killed himself earlier that evening with a bedsheet fastened to the frame of the bunk bed in his cell.
His father declined to comment when reached at his home Monday.
Mulhern's death came just hours before five female inmates were rushed to local hospitals after overdosing on heroin sneaked into the jail during Christmas visitation hours.
It wasn't immediately clear why Mulhern, a security officer at Delaware County Community College, was incarcerated. He pleaded guilty to a DUI charge in August, but was accepted into an intermediate punishment program that only called for 20 days of jail time, according to court records.
A former co-worker at the college, Gail Myrick, wrote on the website of the Chadwick & McKinney Funeral Home that working with him had been "a pleasure."
"You are free now with no more worries and no more pain," Myrick wrote. "With Deepest Sympathy!"
The county-owned jail in Thornton is operated by the GEO Group, an international private-prisons conglomerate.
Robert DiOrio, the solicitor for the county's newly formed Jail Oversight Board, said that little additional information was available on the incident, and that it's under investigation by both GEO and county detectives working for the district attorney's office.
Guards at the prison, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said George W. Hill has been short-staffed around the holidays, and that GEO has been offering overtime to those working as a way to cover the open shifts.
George W. Hill has a history of suicides, most recently July 31, when a prisoner found his cellmate unresponsive, according to a GEO spokesperson who declined to release the inmate's name or cause of death.
Between 2002 and 2008, 12 inmates died at the facility, including from suicide, with seven in 2005 alone. In 2017, the family of one woman was awarded $7 million in a wrongful-death lawsuit after her suicide there.
GEO notes on its website that the average number of inmate deaths at George W. Hill between 2013 and 2017 was 1.08, which is lower than the 1.31 recorded in the same time period at other county jails across Pennsylvania, most of which are county-operated.
