Bledsoe County deputies picked Christopher Axmacher up near the Sequatchie County line Friday night to serve 48 hours at the county detention center on a drug manufacturing sentence.
He didn’t make it through the night at the Pikeville facility.
Corrections officers found Axmacher, 33, unresponsive Saturday morning when they came to serve breakfast, the cause of his death a mystery that has prompted a closer look by state agents.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating Axmacher’s death at the request of 12th Judicial District Attorney Mike Taylor, the TBI and Taylor confirmed Sunday.
“What I do in these smaller departments that don’t have internal affairs divisions, when they have an in-custody death like this, it’s just standard procedure to call the TBI to investigate the death and coordinate everything, and that’s what we did in this case,” Taylor said. “It’s not that we have suspicion that there was foul play or anything like that involved. It’s just always been our protocol to do that.”