Cuyahoga County Jail Warden Alfred Wilcox resigned on Sept. 2, a little more than a year after starting the job.

His resignation was effective immediately. He wrote in a letter to officials that it was time to “take a step back, focusing on my family and reflecting on what lies ahead.”

Cuyahoga County Press Secretary Jennifer Ciaccia said Damara Shemo is serving as interim warden, and declined to share additional details on Wilcox’s resignation beyond what was provided in the letter.

Wilcox was hired in August 2024 to share leadership responsibilities with Warden Michelle Henry. He arrived after Jeremy Everett was forced out in 2023, after just six weeks on the job.

Adam Chaloupka, an attorney with the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said that Wilcox was generally well-liked by the staff during his tenure.

“That said, I hope one day the jail will have a set of top administrators who stay in those positions,” Chaloupka said. “The revolving door of administrators degrades the institutional knowledge of the sheriff’s department, which is a detriment to employees and supervisors alike.”

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Brittany Hailer is a staff writer for The Marshall Project - Cleveland. She reports on local criminal justice stories and examines the persistent problems in Cleveland,. Hailer joined The Marshall Project after serving as the director of the Pittsburgh Institute of Nonprofit Journalism, a news outlet she co-founded in 2021. She won the best investigative journalism award in the 2022 Nonprofit News Awards for her reporting on jail deaths.

The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. Through a partnership with Signal Cleveland, The Marshall Project is weaving more resident voices into its reporting and building an understanding about how the justice system works — and doesn’t work — in Cleveland.