A Northeast Kingdom man convicted of murder has died of an apparent suicide at a privately run prison in Mississippi.
Christopher Chase is believed to be the first Vermont inmate to die by suicide at an out-of-state prison in the more than 20 years the state has been sending prisoners outside its borders due to lack of capacity here.
Chase, 39, was pronounced dead at about 1:05 a.m. on Monday, according to Vermont Corrections Commissioner Michael Touchette.
Chase’s cause of death appears to be suicide by hanging, using a sheet and an electric cord, the commissioner added.
At the time, Touchette said, Chase was housed the general population in a cell by himself at the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility, which is in Tutwiler, Mississippi, and owned and operated by CoreCivic.
Touchette said Chase was not on suicide watch and had given no indication to prison officials that he intended to take his own life.
Chase had been jailed since Sept. 10, 2008, and was serving a 20-year-to-life sentence for the slaying of his girlfriend, 22-year-old Sara Bragdon, in her Guildhall home. He has been housed in an out-of-state prison since 2010, according to Touchette.
Matthew Valerio, Vermont’s defender general, said Tuesday he will be sending an investigator from his office’s prisoner’s rights division to investigate Chase’s death.
“Most of the time we look at them as preventable,” Valerio said of prison suicides.
Valerio said he knew little more about Chase’s death than had already been publicly released from the Vermont Department of Corrections.
“This is the first out-of-state suicide that we’re aware of,” added Valerio.
Vermont, which lacks the capacity to house all prisoners in state, has been sending inmates to out-of-state facilities for more than two decades.
Vermont began sending its out-of-state prisoners to the Mississippi facility in October 2018, after reaching a contract with Nashville-based CoreCivic, the country’s largest private prison contractor.
[Related: Inside the prison holding Vermont inmates 1,366 miles from home]
Touchette said Tuesday there are currently 276 Vermont prisoners in the Mississippi facility.
Valerio said officials from the Defender General’s Office had been at the Mississippi facility last week as part of a regular review of operations there.
“The inmate wasn’t someone who reached out to us when we were there,” Valerio added of Chase.
Chase admitted to shooting Bragdon in the back of her head as she slept, Essex County State’s Attorney Vince Illuzzi said Tuesday.
In a news report from Chase’s change of plea hearing in December 2009, Illuzzi, who prosecuted the case, said that Chase had been “remorseful and distraught state along with appearing suicidal” after the shooting.
On Tuesday, Illuzzi said he didn’t recall why he believed that Chase appeared suicidal at that time.
David Sleigh, a St. Johnsbury defense attorney who represented Chase in the murder case, said Tuesday he hadn’t had any contact with Chase since he was sentenced in 2010.
As for the slaying, Illuzzi said, “We never really had a motive. We never did find out what caused him to shoot his girlfriend.”
Chase fled Vermont after the shooting and was arrested a couple days later outside a Walmart in the Rochester, New York, area, Illuzzi said.
Touchette, corrections commissioner, said the Vermont Department of Corrections Health Services division will conduct an “administrative and clinical” review into Chase’s death.
