ON THE 2025 LYNCHING OF AUBREY MCKAY IN A REMOTE VIRGINIA PRISON (2026) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Aubrey McKay was lynched by a mob of white guards at Virginia’s notorious Wallens Ridge State Prison. He was murdered on June 4, 2025, just a month before his scheduled release. As so many Blacks have suffered across the U.S. South for over a century and a half, he was lynched because he’d distinguished himself for speaking out against the abuse and injustices of a racist white status quo. A status quo that – from the Va governor’s office down to the prison’s rank and file staff – tried to sweep his murder under the rug, while using it as a weapon of terror against the local population from whence he came.

The Wallens Ridge staff routinely boasted about his killing and threatened the same to others who opposed them with complaints, lawsuits, or by simply speaking out.

The injustice of his murder and his grieving family’s trauma were multiplied by the fact that his mother, who suffers from lupus, had been recently diagnosed with cancer, and was awaiting her beloved son’s release so he could accompany her to her grueling chemotherapy treatments, which he had promised to do.

Like so many victims of U.S. lynchings, Aubrey was murdered by a mob of cowards who beat him to death after he was rendered defenseless.

According to witnesses, as corroborated by autopsies that ruled his death a homicide, Aubrey was beaten, kicked, and stomped by guards while he was handcuffed behind his back and leg-shackled. According to his autopsy, he suffered blackened eyes, died from blunt force trauma and a crushed throat, and bore lacerations to his wrists and ankles, proving that he was cuffed at the time of the attack. Yet the official story remained that guards “found” him unresponsive in his cell.

The ONLY reason attention came to and remained on his case, was because individuals and prisoner support groups like CCCAN and UPROAR persisted in protesting his death, advocating for his family, and demanding justice for Aubrey.

At every opportunity these groups kept Aubrey’s case in the public eye and the spotlight on officials. They brought his case and family forward at meetings with the VADOC’s ombudsman’s office, (who participated in his the coverups), and with the campaign of then Va governor elect Abigail Spanberger, who offered only a sympathetic ear to Aubrey’s grieving mother and aunt, who, to add insult to injury, were sent vandalized and wet items of property by the prison that weren’t even Aubrey’s.

Lynchings of this sort have been happening for a long time at these remote Va prisons, that are staffed by all-whites drawn from segregated rural communities in the mountains of remote Southwestern Va, while the prisoner populations are near totally Black and Brown.

One well documented case was that of L. Frazier, a Black Connecticut prisoner who was beaten and electrocuted to death by a mob of white guards at Wallens Ridge in 2003, while he was restrained by his extremities to a steel bedframe. The official story was he’d died from diabetic shock, but his autopsy revealed he died from repeated electrocutions with multiple electric weapons. Frazier’s murder and a subsequent ACLU lawsuit led Connecticut officials to terminate their contract to house their prisoners at Wallens Ridge. (1)

In the wake of Frazier’s murder and a scathing Amnesty International report on the abuses of electric weapons in Va prisons, the VADOC was made to remove handheld electric weapons such as tasers and Ultrons from its prisons. However, over the past year, and with the passage of a few decades and the forgotten memories of past abuses of these weapons, VADOC has now reinstated the uses of tasers again. And YET AGAIN they have been used in another lynching, the murder of a transgender prisoner Michael Haley, on November 26, 2025 at Wallens Ridge’s sister supermax, Red Onion State Prison, whose death has also been ruled a homicide.

Frazier’s lynching and the attended insult of Wallens Ridge officials shipping his decomposing, chopped up, and mutilated corpse (in the tradition of Southern lynchings), to his family wrapped in a bloody sheet, was chronicled in an independent documentary titled UP THE RIDGE, which can be viewed on YouTube.

On January 14th 2026, members of UPROAR met with Virginia legislators, including Senator Dave Marsden (D) who presides over the prison oversight committee. During the recorded conversation, Marsden arrogantly admitted a racist culture in Virginia’s prisons, then blew off the racist abuses this officially created situation generates.

As these cases make clear, lynching continues across the US South, and officials at the highest levels continue to create the environments and conditions that cause, enable, and conceal these practices.

Amerika has NEVER reconciled itself with these crimes, which government officials often led and participated in, nor even admitted them, which is why they continue and the white supremacist culture that underlies the US social contract remains intact, although insulated by denial. After thousands of Blacks were lynched since 1865 under the outrages of Jim Crow segregation, which has now continued since the 1960’s under the new slavery and Jim Crow of mass imprisonment, the federal government only passed anti-lynching legislation a few years ago in the wake of worldwide exposure and protest of the police lynching of George Floyd in 2020. These racist crimes and government complicity continue.

We must expose them, rip open the lies and denials of the US prison system, and eradicate these crimes, and usher in a new dawn of people’s power that displaces this decadent capitalist and white supremacist system.

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!

Endnotes:

1. Bowing: “The ACLU Lawsuit Connecticut Officials Will Move Prisoners Out of Notorious ‘Supermax'”. ACLU, July 24, 2001 https://www.aclu.org/news/bowing-aclu-lawsuit-ct-officials-will-move-prisoners-out-notorious-virginia-supermax.