Anchorage Correctional Complex on Tuesday, June 10, 2025. (Bill Roth / ADN)
At 4 p.m. on Thursday, Patricia McMillan posted $250 bail to get her son out of the Anchorage Correctional Complex, where he’d been for six days on DUI and assault charges.
Ten hours later, Jeffrey Foreman died while being restrained by correctional officers in his cell — raising questions about what happened.
Foreman, 53, had not been released yet despite bail being posted because he needed to complete final steps for electronic monitoring release, corrections officials said.
Officials have made only the broad outlines of the incident public: They say Foreman was fighting with a cellmate and resisted efforts by guards to break up the fight around 1 a.m. Friday. He was put in leg restraints and shortly after became unresponsive, according to officials. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead at 1:50 a.m. Friday, according to Alaska State Troopers.
The Alaska Department of Public Safety is actively investigating the incident, corrections spokesperson Betsy Holley said.
Foreman was raised in the Houston, Texas area and moved to Alaska about 15 years ago to find work at canneries and restaurants, his mother said. In Alaska, he had spent brief stints in jails in Fairbanks, Anchorage and on the Kenai Peninsula starting in about 2014, according to data from the corrections department.
Foreman had a drinking problem, and his legal troubles all stemmed from alcohol, his mother said. McMillan said she’d last seen her son a few years back. He had no children and was not married.
“But everybody who met him just loved him,” she said.
McMillan, who lives in Texas, said she’d spoken to her son daily during the days he was at the Anchorage jail.
“I was his lifeline,” she said. There was no indication he was in poor health or otherwise suffering, she said. He sounded “chipper, like he was in good spirits,” especially when she said she’d be posting his $250 bail.
McMillan said she was notified of her son’s death by a chaplain, who told her it may have been caused by a heart attack. She said she doesn’t have confirmation that is the case, and is waiting on the Alaska medical examiner to determine a cause and manner of death.
She has questions about the restraint hold her son was put in, as well as about the sequence of events that led up to it.
The Anchorage jail received Foreman’s bail paperwork from the Alaska Court System at 3:52 p.m. Thursday, July 10 — near the end of the business day, wrote Holley, the corrections spokesperson. But before he could be released, he needed to be fitted with GPS electronic monitoring equipment by the pretrial enforcement division.
“Mr. Foreman was scheduled for equipment installation the following day, Friday, July 11,” Holley wrote. “Tragically, Mr. Foreman died very early on July 11.”
Holley said the department doesn’t control court schedules or bail determinations, but works “diligently to release individuals as promptly as possible once all legal and procedural requirements are met.”
Both the Alaska Department of Corrections and the ACLU of Alaska, in a rare moment of alignment, called the fact that Foreman died just before his scheduled release “tragic.”
The timing of Foreman’s death after bail but before release is “a tragic detail that illustrates how our criminal legal system and its administration are a matter of life and death for incarcerated Alaskans,” ACLU of Alaska spokesperson Meghan Barker said.
McMillan said she wants to find out more about what happened to her son. His death is a shock, she said.
“But I think the bigger shock is the circumstance.”