Fulton jail records: Father charged with starving daughter stabbed in botched robbery

ATLANTA - A father charged with starving his daughter to death suffered stab wounds inside the Fulton County jail, after allegedly trying to rob another inmate who fought back, according to sheriff’s office records.

Rodney McWeay, 32, already faced 16 felony charges and four misdemeanors in the killing of 4-year-old Treasure McWeay and alleged abuse of her brothers and other family members, including murder, cruelty to children, kidnapping, aggravated assault and family violence.

Now McWeay faces three more felony counts for allegedly trying to rob a larger man at the jail using a makeshift blade, or shank, according to warrants obtained by the FOX 5 I-Team.

Roswell criminal defense attorney Joshua Schiffer said the incident is par for the course inside the Fulton County jail, plagued with overcrowding, filthy conditions and violence.

"There have been security problems as long as I've been practicing law at the Fulton County jail, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of violent events every single year," Schiffer said. 

"A big problem at the Fulton County jail is the actual facility itself is crumbling," he said. "The crumbling facility materials are now being turned into dangerous weapons – pieces of metal, pieces of brick and cinderblock, pieces of cement."

The incident happened at the Rice Street facility, in cell 108, on May 17. The I-Team learned of the new charges through court records, then filed an open records request with the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office for the details.

Earlier this year, an I-Team investigation into Treasure’s death exposed cracks in Georgia’s child protective services system, revealing how Atlanta police and state Division of Family and Children Services caseworkers may have been able to save the girl from a slow death inside her father’s squalid duplex unit in west Atlanta. 

But the two agencies didn’t work together, and though officers and caseworkers were outside the unit on multiple occasions, they never got past the front door. 

Treasure died Dec. 11, described by a detective as "just pure bone," weighing 24 pounds – about what a 2-year-old should weigh.

A Fulton County Superior Court judge denied McWeay’s bond request in January, saying, "I think he’s a danger to reoffend," and the new charges appear to bear that out.

According to jail incident reports and warrants, McWeay planned to rob fellow inmate Durricor Humphrey, who's charged with murder in the 2021 shooting death of Keon Yarber in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn district.

Surveillance cameras caught McWeay entering cell 108, then leaving three minutes later, a report says. Within that time, he’s accused of pulling a shank from his waistband and demanding Humphrey give up his "store," meaning goods purchased from the jail’s commissary, the warrants say. A sheriff's office spokeswoman said investigators don't know exactly what McWeay wanted to take. The commissary sells snacks, socks, underwear, writing paper, and stamps and envelopes, among other things.

Humphrey is quoted in incident reports explaining: "Yeah, I stabbed him … He came in my room with a shank and tried to rob me for my store … We got to tussling … He dropped the shank … I picked it up and stabbed him with it."

A deputy reported being flagged down by several inmates, then finding McWeay bleeding heavily, with a deep gash running from his cheek to his neck, a severe shoulder wound and two puncture wounds to his back. 

McWeay was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital for treatment. He now faces additional charges of aggravated assault, possession of a dangerous weapon and rioting in a penal institution.

Humphrey, the other inmate, wasn't criminally charged over the shank incident. But a sheriff's spokeswoman said he received disciplinary jail charges.

Schiffer said McWeay is probably looking at life without parole if convicted of his daughter's death. So he had little to lose when he allegedly entered Humphrey’s cell with a shank, the attorney said.

"It’s common that inmates lose all hope when they’re facing something as substantial as murder, felony murder, or other lifetime punishments," he said. "So violence becomes a regular and common occurrence with people that are either facing, or under sentence, for life, life without parole, and other major amounts of time."

McWeay is accused of kidnapping Treasure and her two brothers from their mother in Maryland, after DFCS had removed them from his duplex unit over "deplorable" conditions, according to DFCS records. Their mother had fled to Maryland over alleged domestic violence.

The children wound up back in the same duplex unit, where DFCS had previously noted the children seemed hungry, with mold on the walls, the stench of urine, no air on, and exposed wiring. The I-Team’s investigation found that during the five months between the kidnapping and Treasure’s death, DFCS asked police for help checking on Treasure and her siblings at least three times.

After one request for a welfare check, police didn’t go to the duplex at all, according to court testimony from a homicide detective. The second time, 911 records show, an officer wasn’t dispatched until an hour and a half after a 911 call. The final time – less than a month before Treasure’s death – it took police almost five hours to arrive at the house.

All the while, McWeay had surveillance cameras set up throughout the unit watching the children, and one set up to watch the front door.

With the I-Team asking questions about the case, in January the Atlanta Police Department announced an overhaul in how it handles calls for assistance from DFCS, with calls about children in peril to be dispatched within two minutes and tracked over time to ensure proper follow-up.

While the new criminal charges from the attempted jail robbery don't impact McWeay's murder case directly, Schiffer said they could be used as leverage in a plea deal.

"They got him, from everything I can find, pretty dead to rights on the major murder stuff," Schiffer said. "They're going to pick and choose and lean on him. And he has a public defender who has a really tough job."