Destinee Macklin still gets emotional when she thinks about the day she was made to stand guard over a dead body in the D.C. jail.
It was May 2025, and Macklin, a retired Baltimore Police detective, was just months on the job as a criminal investigator for the D.C. jail’s internal affairs unit. She was sent to the Central Detention Facility to stand beside Carlos Shelley, a 29-year-old from Southeast Washington who was killed in a fight there.
Though she was new to the role, Macklin said she had no faith that Shelley’s loved ones would get justice. She was already disillusioned with the jail’s Office of Investigative Services and its leadership.
In a 39-page complaint filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia earlier this month, Macklin laid out her concerns with the jail’s internal affairs unit in detail. She recounted what she described as inadequate training, an abandoned stabbing investigation, the improper handling of seized narcotics, and, in Shelley’s case, poor management of a crime scene.
In an interview with The Washington Post this week, Macklin’s voice became strained as she remembered standing next to Shelley’s body.
“It was heartbreaking,” Macklin said. “Here I am, watching a young man who is dead, and I can’t do the best of my ability to stop it, because it’s not serious to them. It’s terrible. It hurts.”
In February, prosecutors quietly dropped the charges against Shelley’s accused killer, Marquise Jones, without explanation. The U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment on their decision to abandon the case. Jones’s attorneys had argued at a probable cause hearing in July last year that he acted in self defense, according to media coverage.
Macklin, who was fired in December last year, said her preexisting PTSD was again triggered by the ordeal with Shelley’s body, and that she was still struggling from it.
She said her firing was retaliatory — a response to repeated attempts to report improper practices at the jail and her requests for accommodation for disabilities stemming from line-of-duty injuries she suffered in 2018, during her time in Baltimore.
“There’s no oversight for OIS,” Macklin said of the internal affairs unit in an interview. “We are the top of the top. That’s the problem. I didn’t even know who to complain to.”
The lawsuit, filed by Macklin’s attorney Pamela Keith, mainly alleges whistleblower retaliation and discrimination against Macklin for her sexual orientation.
It also details incidents in which Macklin felt her supervisors broke from the department’s policies, such as the unarmed transport of seized narcotics that “placed the public and staff at risk.”
The D.C. Department of Corrections said it could not comment on the lawsuit and would “respond through the appropriate legal channels once the complaint is formally received.”
Macklin also claimed she received improper directions from her supervisor, including being told to stop investigating a suspected gang-related stabbing.
The reasoning passed along by the supervisor, according to the complaint, was that the victim did not want to cooperate with the investigation.
“This instruction made absolutely no sense,” the lawsuit said. “There was CCTV footage of the incident, and clear indication that the violence could escalate if the matter was not addressed.”
Though her lawsuit largely focused on her evidence of discrimination, Macklin relayed additional complaints to The Post in her interview.
She accused jail officials of purposefully suppressing drug-related cases to manipulate official statistics and failing to investigate serious allegations of smuggling and violence.
“Large amounts of drugs being brought in, someone being stabbed, someone being choked, these are crimes that deserve immediate attention,” Macklin said, describing the investigative division’s leadership as “lethargic.”
Macklin also said a fellow investigator kept open hundreds of cases dating back to 2017 with no resolution, which she said was “unacceptable.”
In response to those complaints, a corrections spokesperson said that the agency “does not agree with characterizations that its investigations are suppressed, statistics are manipulated, or oversight is lacking.”
“OIS investigations are subject to supervisory review, and DOC leadership continues to reinforce the importance of accuracy, thoroughness, and integrity in all investigative work,” the spokesperson said.
Keith, Macklin’s attorney, told The Post that the corrections department’s internal affairs unit has “no accountability structure.”
“When you are in an environment like that, individuals become the law,” she said. “The supervisor becomes the law.”
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