Dayán Hernández González, the older brother of the Cuban Demi Adán González —who passed away on April 29 in a solitary confinement cell at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia— described in an interview with CiberCuba how he received the news of his brother's death from Spain, via a call from an unknown number.
Dayán, who resides in Spain, explained that the press published April 28 as the date of death, but he was notified on Wednesday the 29th, around seven in the evening, Spanish time.
"A unknown number called me, and I answered and said hello. They asked, 'Is this Dayán?' I said yes. Then they said, 'I have bad news for you.' I replied, 'But what bad news? What do you have to tell me? Who are you?' They said, 'Your brother Demi: we found him dead in his cell; he has passed away,' " she recounted to journalist Tania Costa.
Upon his insistence to know who was calling, the interlocutor identified himself: "I apologize for not telling you, I am Officer Valdés from the detention area of Stewart Prison in Georgia. We found him dead."
Dayán desperately asked for more information, but the officer merely confirmed his brother's identity details—Demi Adán González, born on January 1, 1993—and told him that they could not provide any explanations.
"We have no information; we are only here out of obligation. We are obligated to inform you, but we cannot explain anything to you; we are not authorized to provide details. Give me your email address, and we will contact you when we have the letter of death," the officer said, according to Dayán's account.
The death certificate he later received confirmed the date of April 29. "It states death on the 29th, not the 28th as they say," Dayán pointed out.
After the official call, Dayán sought information on his own by contacting a friend of his brother's inside the prison. This contact revealed that a few days before his death, Demi had an altercation with a guard: “My brother had a problem with a prison officer the previous Sunday, where my brother slapped the guard, threw him to the ground, and the man hit his head and started bleeding.” The guard was hospitalized, and Demi was immediately transferred to solitary confinement, a measure considered torture by human rights advocates.
The same contact within the center informed him that Demi had ingested a chemical product and was found dead. According to the testimony, he had indeed ingested a chemical. "He drank it and woke up with bloodshot eyes and his mouth, but they say they can't believe that there, since he was my brother and got along well with them," Dayán recounted.
The official version from ICE classifies the death as a presumed suicide, currently under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. However, Demi's mother, Lourdes González Suárez, who remains in Cuba, is demanding an independent investigation and states: "The guards killed him."
Dayán also mentioned that a Mexican friend of his brother, who has already been deported, offered to testify about Demi's character and the circumstances of his death. "Why should I say anything to him? I can tell him the best things, but as a brother, people will say: no, of course, that brother is defending him. No, you can ask strangers," he explained.
This case adds to that of another cellmate who also reports irregularities regarding the death of the Cuban, and the plight of a family searching for ways to repatriate his remains to Cuba.
The death of Demi Adán González is the eighteenth of an immigrant in ICE custody in 2026, the highest number in 22 years, and the third of a Cuban this year, according to data from Physicians for Human Rights.
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