Prison Guards Who Boiled A Schizophrenic Man to Death not charged by State Attorney

cooks1 said:
Are you shitting me?????? There are many, MANY things you can fire a person for that are not against the law.

You don't need evidence of criminal wrongdoing to fire a person. You can fire them just because they are not doing a good job. You can just say, 'Hey, you took this guy to the shower. He died. You are supposed to make sure they don't die when you take them to the shower. Your fired." Florida is an 'at will' employment state. They could legally fire these guys for liking the Gators as opposed to the Seminoles.
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OK, well, fair enough. Maybe what I should have said was "How can you fire them when there is no evidence of wrongdoing?" The guy shit himself in his cell, which is why he was taken to the shower. The heat of the water is highly contested in this case, but as others pointed out, getting 180F water for multiple hours isn't a simple task. Yeah, the guy died in the shower, but it was from a heart attack (cardiac arrest) according to the medical examiner.

I guess is there grounds to fire these guys in such a case if no wrong doing can be concluded? I'm not defending anybody on either side because I wasn't there, but with the lack of any real evidence it's hard to determine exactly what happened. Maybe they wouldn't let the guy out of the shower until he bent over to clean his ass? I don't know man, just so many holes in Miami-Herald description of events that it's tough for me to believe much of any of it.
 
This is some ISIS level execution.

Stand proud Florida.
 
Desdinova said:
Or he could have died from heat stroke...
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That could be possible, the medical examiner mentioned that in their statement :


"Lew, the medical examiner, noted that people with schizophrenia have an impaired ability to compensate for “heat stress” and that this, combined with the powerful medication he was taking, could have contributed to hyperthermia and created a predisposition to cardiac arrest."

This is also a quote from the ME :
"Dr. Emma Lew, Miami-Dade’s medical examiner, was emphatic, however, that Rainey did not suffer burns of any kind, and there was no evidence of any trauma on his body, according to the state attorney’s report issued Friday."
 
Why is a guy with Schizophrenia in a regular prison? 2 hours in the shower? I'd be ok with the prison guards being summarily executed.
 
usmctanker242 said:
Here's the ME... are you assuming this person is lying to further protect the conspiracy?

Dr. Emma Lew, Miami-Dade’s medical examiner, was emphatic, however, that Rainey did not suffer burns of any kind, and there was no evidence of any trauma on his body, according to the state attorney’s report issued Friday.
Lew, the medical examiner, noted that people with schizophrenia have an impaired ability to compensate for “heat stress” and that this, combined with the powerful medication he was taking, could have contributed to hyperthermia and created a predisposition to cardiac arrest.

She attributed his skin slippage to as an event that happened post-mortem consistent with “exposure to a warm, moist environment” and the effects of changes during the early stages of body decomposition.




Then you've also got the main "witness" here and here's what your investigation says about him.

State investigators said they didn’t find Hempstead to be credible because his timeline was at odds with events reflected on a video surveillance camera. Also, Hempstead could not have seen some of the things he claimed to have seen because his window was covered with paper for part of that time. The document suggests he pressured other inmates to report things that didn’t happen, pointing out that many of the inmates’ statements were “inconsistent with the testimony of correctional personnel, all of the nurses, as well as the physical evidence.”


All I'm really saying here is that there are so many inconsistencies that how in the flying fuck would anybody be able to prosecute this case? The family cremated the body, who knows if they were truly pressured to do so as the article suggests. What is a prosecutor supposed to do here... there is absolutely no evidence beyond the statements from a few inmates in a mental ward. I'm not saying all of this is a lie, but I am saying that people with impaired mental faculties can't always be considered credible.
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That's not the full medical report but lets just play along

So what you're essentially saying is a one paragraph statement from a medical examiner who works for the county and basically for the office of the State Attorney is more credible than multiple eyewitness statements from prisoners, nurses and staff. That all of the testimony was just a conspiracy that it was all make believe and that none of it is credible because one witness had paper on his window and convinced everyone else to make up the story?

Lew, the medical examiner, noted that people with schizophrenia have an impaired ability to compensate for “heat stress” and that this, combined with the powerful medication he was taking, could have contributed to hyperthermia and created a predisposition to cardiac arrest.
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Even if this speculation were true this is more than enough evidence by the medical examiner's own words that locking Schizophrenics who are under medication in hot shower rooms for 2 hours is what caused this man to die. That statement itself is more than enough evidence to place the blame on the prison guards and the system itself for this man's death. Notice she put "could" because she's doing nothing more than speculating on what happened evidently because she doesn't know shit and the body was cremated before the cause of death was concluded.

It sounds like you're just clinging on to your cognitive dissonance sorry to destroy your perfect little world inside your mind but yes there is corruption within the system and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Would a criminal prosecute their own gang ? Same for the system it cannot hold itself accountable because it simply knows that it can get away with it because there is no authority above it that will say otherwise. This is the nature of the beast it's not about justice it's about what you can get away with.
 
Gangsters_Paradise said:
That's not the full medical report but lets just play along

So what you're essentially saying is a one paragraph statement from a medical examiner who works for the county and basically for the office of the State Attorney is more credible than multiple eyewitness statements from prisoners, nurses and staff. That all of the testimony was just a conspiracy that it was all make believe and that none of it is credible because one witness had paper on his window and convinced everyone else to make up the story?



Even if this speculation were true this is more than enough evidence by the medical examiner's own words that locking Schizophrenics who are under medication in hot shower rooms for 2 hours is what caused this man to die. That statement itself is more than enough evidence to place the blame on the prison guards and the system itself for this man's death. Notice she put "could" because she's doing nothing more than speculating on what happened evidently because she doesn't know shit and the body was cremated before the cause of death was concluded.

It sounds like you're just clinging on to your cognitive dissonance sorry to destroy your perfect little world inside your mind but yes there is corruption within the system and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Would a criminal prosecute their own gang ? Same for the system it cannot hold itself accountable because it simply knows that it can get away with it because there is no authority above it that will say otherwise. This is the nature of the beast it's not about justice it's about what you can get away with.
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Fuck off with this bullshit. I have no issues with holding authority accountable for abuse of power in all forms. The issue I have is that before you toss someone under the bus you need enough evidence to do so. In this case there isn't enough evidence, and you repeating the same thing over over doesn't change that fact. I like the way you're insinuating that the ME in this doesn't know anything about the situation, but somehow YOU are more informed than she was (assuming "she" with a name like Emma).

And yes, I have to say that people in a mental ward of a prison are LESS reliable than the ME whose entire career would be destroyed if she were caught lying about this. Even the article, which YOU posted, says that "Hempsted" wasn't a reliable witness and that he was trying to incite other inmates to lie. As for the nurses and staff it seems like their stories are highly inconsistent, so how can you put much weight in their statements? Maybe it's all true and there's a gigantic conspiracy to cover up prison guards routinely torturing, beating, starving, and possibly even raping inmates. I do find this to be less likely than this guy, who wasn't a spring chicken and was arrested for cocaine, who happened to have an internal organ failure (cardiac arrest).

Just for some reference here, cocaine use is a massive multiplier to any existing heart condition. Here's a bit of reading just to show you what I'm talking about.

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/122/24/2558
https://www.elementsbehavioralhealt...e-major-risk-factor-for-sudden-cardiac-death/
 
usmctanker242 said:
OK, well, fair enough. Maybe what I should have said was "How can you fire them when there is no evidence of wrongdoing?" The guy shit himself in his cell, which is why he was taken to the shower. The heat of the water is highly contested in this case, but as others pointed out, getting 180F water for multiple hours isn't a simple task. Yeah, the guy died in the shower, but it was from a heart attack (cardiac arrest) according to the medical examiner.

I guess is there grounds to fire these guys in such a case if no wrong doing can be concluded? I'm not defending anybody on either side because I wasn't there, but with the lack of any real evidence it's hard to determine exactly what happened. Maybe they wouldn't let the guy out of the shower until he bent over to clean his ass? I don't know man, just so many holes in Miami-Herald description of events that it's tough for me to believe much of any of it.
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Maybe I'm just an unreasonable guy. But I personally think that if you are a guard in a mental ward, and you take a guy who has shit all over him to a shower, and you leave him there in a hot shower, regardless of whether it was 120, 150, or 180 degrees for a couple hours, and he dies, that's probably grounds for dismissal. I fire people for not making sales quotas for fuck sakes.
 
Stories like this are why journalists hold a valuable place in society. All that news commentary and influencing needs to be left behind.
 
@usmctanker242 , If I were the family of the deceased, I would seek a second opinion on that autopsy.

Postmortem skin slippage is a later postmortem change (usually over one day), but the deceased was discovered at less than 2 hours after death. The medical examiner would have the body refrigerated to retard this kind of change. Witness-accounts of blistering closer to the time of death are relevant information.

Also, there are no unequivocal findings of heart attack if the victim dies in less than 2 hours. The examiner likely found coronary atherosclerosis, which is present in most elderly black men.

The postmortem findings are highly speculative.

Because the prison officials are the ones less restricted in terms of audio and video recording, the prisoner is at a disadvantage, as evidenced by the case of Ken Trentadue and probably this case as well.
 
cooks1 said:
Maybe I'm just an unreasonable guy. But I personally think that if you are a guard in a mental ward, and you take a guy who has shit all over him to a shower, and you leave him there in a hot shower, regardless of whether it was 120, 150, or 180 degrees for a couple hours, and he dies, that's probably grounds for dismissal. I fire people for not making sales quotas for fuck sakes.
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I see what you're saying... if the guy wasn't willing to clean himself up, what's the solution? I would imagine that SOP would not allow the guards to just leave him, soiled, in his cell. Maybe they wouldn't let him out until he cleaned himself? As I posted earlier the guy wasn't young, was on anti-psychotic medication (according to the ME), had a previous history of cocaine use (according to his arrest record), and he was in a hot shower for a while. Seems like lots of things maybe have contributed to his death, but who knows for sure.

I guess the big question here is did the guards violate SOP in any manner which would call for their termination? As has already been discussed the temperature of the shower is highly disputed, especially for that duration of time. We don't know what really happened so can we hold the guards accountable to the point of firing them without expecting a lawsuit? Of course, by we, I mean the state and their courts.

I don't know man, my wife works for the government and she can't fire her employees unless there's a certain amount of incident reports and multiple sessions of coachings and all kinds of bullshit because of their union. So when it comes to firing someone it's often not so simple as "You fucked up, you're gone." Again, did the guards even fuck up or were they following SOP for a soiled inmate? Not like they were going to go in there and clean his ass for him... perhaps the reason he shit himself and refused to clean himself up was because he was already having some medical issue which went unnoticed by the guard?

I'm just spit-balling here, but who really knows exactly what happened, and is anything actionable in this situation?
 
gatchaman said:
@usmctanker242 , If I were the family of the deceased, I would seek a second opinion on that autopsy.

Postmortem skin slippage is a later postmortem change (usually over one day), but the deceased was discovered at less than 2 hours after death. The medical examiner would have the body refrigerated to retard this kind of change. Witness-accounts of blistering closer to the time of death are relevant information.

Also, there are no unequivocal findings of heart attack if the victim dies in less than 2 hours. The examiner likely found coronary atherosclerosis, which is present in most elderly black men.

The postmortem findings are highly speculative.

Because the prison officials are the ones less restricted in terms of audio and video recording, the prisoner is at a disadvantage, as evidenced by the case of Ken Trentadue and probably this case as well.
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OK, good information. Are you credentialed? Not trying to butt heads, just curious. For skin slippage the ME said it was accelerated because the guy was in the shower stall, any truth to that? For the autopsy, since the family cremated the body, what kind of recourse is there for a 2nd opinion on an autopsy?

I understand that prisoners are in a tough situation in terms of proving anything, especially in a mental ward.
 
jefferz said:
I'm no prison water heater expert but 2 hours for a water heater to maintain that temp doesn't seem possible.
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lol, there are residential water heaters that can supply an endless amount of hot water. The water is instantly heated.

That prison water has a commercial water heater and can also supply endless amounts of hot water.
 
unless the water is at a rolling boil you ain't gon' cook no man!
 
usmctanker242 said:
OK, good information. Are you credentialed? Not trying to butt heads, just curious. For skin slippage the ME said it was accelerated because the guy was in the shower stall, any truth to that? For the autopsy, since the family cremated the body, what kind of recourse is there for a 2nd opinion on an autopsy?

I understand that prisoners are in a tough situation in terms of proving anything, especially in a mental ward.
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By the same token that cold can slow postmortem changes, heat can speed them, but I think that less than 2 hours would be awfully fast. If the nurses documented blistering close to the time of death, I would favor that as an indication of an antemortem event. You can read here for terminology of early and late postmortem changes ( http://medchrome.com/extras/postmortem-time-death/ ), and you can use the terms for google search strings if you would like more information.

I post sometimes about deaths in custody. I am especially troubled by the case of Barry Stewart (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) who was imprisoned (for nonpayment of transit fine) in a room with Justin Somers (about whom mental health staff warned of violent insanity) and one bed. Barry Stewart was stomped to death, but no individual was blamed ( http://forums.sherdog.com/threads/c...-killed-by-mentally-ill-inmate.3006585/page-2 ).
 
Skin fell off when they touched him...................

Yeah, that is up there with terrorists throwing acid. Disgusting.
 
lifelessheap said:
lol, there are residential water heaters that can supply an endless amount of hot water. The water is instantly heated.

That prison water has a commercial water heater and can also supply endless amounts of hot water.
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Up to 180F? Not too sure about that buddy.
 
lifelessheap said:
lol, there are residential water heaters that can supply an endless amount of hot water. The water is instantly heated.

That prison water has a commercial water heater and can also supply endless amounts of hot water.
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It's a prison so I figured they would use the cheapest stuff possible.
 
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