Almost every morning at around three a.m., Roxane Johnson bolts straight up in bed, her body snatched out of sleep by a sudden panic whose source she can’t quite place.

Then she remembers.

In the hours before dawn on October 1, 2019, an employee with the Metropolitan Police Department called, waking her from sleep, and began asking a string of questions: Was her name Roxane Johnson? Did she have a son named Jamaal Byrd? Yes and yes, she answered. The employee hung up the phone.

Shortly after, a detective called her back. He told Johnson that her son had been found unresponsive in his cell at D.C. Central Cell Block. They’d taken him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Johnson didn’t even know he had been arrested.

“I’ve been traumatized by that,” she tells DCist. “People shouldn’t have to be told things like that about their loved ones in that way.”

In the more than two months since that night, Johnson says she still hasn’t found out what happened, or why her seemingly healthy 33-year-old son died suddenly in police custody after he’d been arrested on suspicion of selling a controlled substance (Johnson says a detective has told her that substance was marijuana).

Both the Department of Corrections and MPD have stayed mum on the cause of death, which is typical until the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner releases its report on the matter. MPD is also currently conducting an investigation on Byrd’s death, according to a police spokesperson.

OCME tells DCist that the case is still pending, and a spokesperson could not say when the results might be available.

Activists have been railing against the city’s silence, exhorting officials to communicate with Johnson about a series of questions they say remain unanswered: How was Byrd arrested? Is it possible he was hurt during the arrest? Did he ask for medical attention at any time? How often was the officer in D.C. Central Cell Block checking on prisoners the night of Byrd’s death?

“Everyone is saying let’s just wait for an autopsy, which is frustrating and concerning because there’s a whole lot of things that happened before he died and nobody is talking about them,” says April Goggans, an organizer with Black Lives Matter D.C. “They need to be able to answer the questions about why was he arrested, what did they find on him … was there brutality, were his constitutional rights violated, should he have been in jail and should he have been kept overnight? Did he complain about not feeling well?”

Johnson and activists are also concerned because they say a detective told her that Byrd had been arrested in a “jump out” operation—which consists of police officers jumping out of their cars and searching groups of people—a tactic that MPD says it discontinued years ago. A spokesperson for the department tells DCist “we do not use tactics commonly referred to under ‘jump outs.'”

Based on official accounts, here’s what is known thus far about Byrd’s death: At about 5:30 p.m. on September 30, police witnessed Byrd in “a hand to hand transaction” with another person at a restaurant on the 1500 block of North Capitol Street NE, according to the incident report of his arrest. Police seized $82 from Byrd as evidence and arrested him. No drugs were listed as evidence or mentioned in the report.

Officers then transported Byrd to D.C. Central Cell Block, a holding place for arrestees awaiting their initial hearing at D.C. Superior Court.

According to a report from MPD, at 12:15 a.m. while counting the inmates in their cells, a guard at Central Cell Block noticed Byrd slumped over his bed. First responders arrived at the scene—it’s unclear from the report how long it took them to arrive—and began CPR. Byrd was pronounced dead at 1:16 a.m. at Howard University hospital, an hour after he was found.

The department declined to provide additional details to DCist beyond what is available in official reports.

The Department of Corrections, which oversees the Central Cell Block, tells DCist that an investigation into Byrd’s death is ongoing, and that “our condolences remain with his family during this difficult time.”

A DOC spokesperson did not respond to emailed questions regarding how often guards were checking on inmates at D.C. Central Cell Block on the night of Byrd’s death. A copy of MPD standard operating procedures online says that the cell block officer shall “perform a physical inspection of all cellblock areas at frequent intervals, but not more than thirty minutes apart.”

Johnson says the lack of information has magnified the pain of her son’s death, and further eroded her trust in law enforcement.

“I do believe providentially that I will heal from this,” Johnson says. “But not having peace with it, not having closure with what went on, delays the healing process for me as well as for my family members. It’s this open wound that we need to get closure about.”

Johnson says that a detective told her he did not see any initial signs of foul play in Byrd’s death. But she has had trouble believing that nothing is being kept from her and her family. “I want all the [body-worn camera] film from the time they picked him up, the CCTV from inside Central Cell Block, and all the records where you say you monitored him and checked him,” Johnson says.

Byrd is not the only person to die in D.C. police custody in recent months. A 67-year-old man named Joseph Haynie died on November 27 after being found unresponsive in his cell at the D.C. Jail. Haynie was being held on a $25 bond for a credit card fraud offense, per the Washington Post.

Activists say they plan to continue putting pressure on the city until they get answers to Johnson. “They don’t get to be comfortable while an entire family and loved ones and children are uncomfortable,” Goggans says. “They sleep well every night and Roxane wakes up at three o’clock every night reliving the death of her child.”

Johnson, too, says that she plans to continue pressing officials. Although she is impatiently awaiting the results of an autopsy, she says she won’t be satisfied with just that information. She wants details about Byrd’s arrest, how often guards were checking on him, and what else may have happened leading up to the moment he was found unresponsive in his cell.

In addition to his mother, Byrd leaves behind a sister and a nine-year-old daughter. Johnson says that his daughter “was the apple of his eye. The best thing to ever happen to him was to be a dad.”

She describes her son as quiet, kind, and loyal—-the kind of person who went out of his way to help people who were struggling. Recently, Johnson says, Byrd gathered extra clothes and a pair of shoes to give to an old friend who was living on the street. That was the kind of person Byrd was, Johnson says.

“He has a family who loved him. Loved him,” Johnson repeats. “He was the only son I had.”