Last weekend, while many people were making plans to attend their annual journey to their local Irish pub – right at the end of the day – the Miami State’s Attorney’s office released its memo regarding the 2012 death of Darren Rainey in a Miami prison. I had never heard of the case until I read this story from the Miami New Times condemning the fact that the SA Katherine Fernandez Rundle would not charge the four officers involved. So I did a little light reading.
Rainey was a mentally ill man who, on the day of his death, had smeared his own feces all over himself and his cell. He was discovered by a corrections officer who locked him in a shower to wash off. About two hours later, he was found collapsed in the shower and first responders to the scene said that Rainey had red marks on his body and skin slippage. A couple of people thought he had been burned. Inmates said he had been left in there with the water on the hottest possible setting.
That’s the postcard version. Given this, it seemed odd to me that no one would face any charges in this case at all. I thought, “How do you come to that decision?” So I found the report on the state attorney’s website and read it, all 100 pages of the report and photos of the shower, a log book, an accounting of the last videos Rainey appeared on, and a map of the facility, aptly called the Transitional Care Unit.
You can read the report below — and I’ve read it every day for a week now because it’s mind-blowing. I think that reading this document is central to understanding how easily a person with power can change the conversation, can swing the focus in such a way as to maintain the status quo. You might not have time to go through the whole document, but here’s my takeaway:
1. This report is not so much about Darren Rainey as it is about Harold Hempstead, because if it were about Rainey, there would be no other choice than to press charges against the officers involved. This report spends a huge amount of ink discounting the testimony of Hempstead, who was the whistleblower inmate who took this story to the media, almost two years after Rainey died. I think in one of my notes, I referred to this as a hit piece against Hempstead, which is harsh. Until you realize that right after the report came out, he got transferred suddenly to a prison in Tennessee, and not even his family knew where he was for a time. That move was called “coincidental.”
Hempstead is considered the main witness against the inmates and this report takes pains to show that he had his times wrong and that he couldn’t physically see any of what he testified to. Considering the maps, this is probably true – Hempstead’s cell is directly above the shower Rainey was in. So that might indeed discount him as a witness. But here’s my rub: Hempstead had privileges other inmates didn’t have. He was a “houseman” and was allowed to keep soap in his cell. In fact, he had to give one of the guards soap to give to Rainey. So it’s hard to believe that he would sacrifice that status for a made-up story. But that in itself isn’t proof of anything. But one other thing Hempstead did was tell investigators the names of other people who had also been placed in this shower for punishment, and that led to others who did confirm that they had been placed in the shower in hot water for a time. But the SA dismisses all these accounts because they’re inconsistent. But you know who else’s stories are inconsistent?
2. The corrections officers. Roland Clarke says he found Rainey in his state doing a security check at around 7:30. John Fan Fan says he found Rainey first and told Clarke to get him in the shower. The handwritten unit log says that Rainey was found in his cell closer to 8 p.m., after Clarke’s 7:30 p.m. check that was “all secure.” The video log says Clarke got Rainey at around 7:30, put him in the shower eight minutes later, and then goes back to the shower area for a couple minutes. And it has Clarke making a couple other visits to Rainey between 7:38 p.m. and 8:17 p.m. Rainey was discovered unresponsive in the shower by Clarke at 9:26. Toward the end of this report, we have the SA establishing that Rainey accidentally died between 9:13 (the time of the last security check to his area, completed by Cornelius Thompson) and 9:26, when he was discovered. OK. OK. But consider the dimensions of this shower. It’s just under three feet wide and 8½ feet long. And it has a 3½ -inch lip meant to keep water from spilling out. The report also contains a photo of the shower when the water is on. It’s a fairly small PVC pipe and it’s not a showerhead, so the water pressure looks low. So? Well, when Rainey was found, there was already about three inches of water around his body. (Rainey’s body was on top of the drain.) That’s a lot of water to pool around a man’s body in, what, 13 minutes-ish? Now, if you really wanted to get to the bottom of finding out what happened here, you’d maybe consider recreating this scene. But this isn’t about finding out why Rainey died! Don’t be silly.
3. Speaking of the officers, I read all the way through this document for the part where we get the answer to some of the more obvious questions, I’d say. Such as: a) Why was Rainey in the shower for almost two hours? b) Is that normal to leave someone locked in a shower for two hours? c) If that’s normal, people should be fired.
OK, that last one wasn’t a question. (Incidentally, Rundle, in an effort to show openness, has posted a FAQ about the Rainey case and it basically offers the same non-answers as the report, but on one page. My favorite non-answer is to the question of how long Rainey was in the shower. “Well, it was more like an hour and a half, but they checked on him!” Sigh.)
So here’s where we are with this. We’ve got corrections officers saying he was in there almost two hours, presumably because he wouldn’t wash off. Some of the inmates say he was in there for less time. Even the sergeant on duty, Fan Fan, who allegedly found Rainey with feces on him in his cell, says he was in there for one or two hours. There’s a big difference between 60 and 120 minutes, and both are too long to keep someone locked in a shower with running water. One inmate says people where often kept in that shower as a holding cell for a short time. One thing that makes me wonder just how long he was in that shower is that Clarke says he put Rainey in the shower at 7:38. But then doesn’t go to get soap for him until about 8:12, and when he goes to give Rainey the soap, inmates came to their window. Why? Oh, don’t read this report to find out. The state attorney isn’t the least bit curious, so. And the soap is interesting in another way. Early on, it’s said that Rainey is taken to the shower because he has bio-hazardous material all over him, which is why he’s taken to the shower, so he can clean himself off. Without soap?
4. Skin slippage/peeling and the red marks: We have several people, including Sgt. Fan Fan and nurses first on scene saying that Rainey’s body looked as though it had been burned, due to the warmth of his body (102 degrees), the presence of red marks and his skin falling off at the touch. This is nasty business and it’s a terrible way to die. Unless you’re Rundle or deputy medical examiner Dr. Emma Lew. Lew, right off the bat, tells the investigating police officer that all those people are wrong. He’s not been burned! Skin slippage is a part of decomposition! That’s true. However, skin slippage is not the first thing that happens to a dead body. Slippage is literally the top layer of skin separating from the body and it’s part of the decomposition process, but it’s generally not the first thing that happens, because your skin separating from your body takes some time. Yet Rainey is a special case in that it happened to him within 14 minutes. Riiiiiiight. It’s much more likely that Rainey had second-degree burns – well, if you trust the Mayo Clinic’s website. Two of the symptoms of such burns is redness and skin peeling. And we have an inmate who cleaned the shower after Rainey died who found skin on the floor of the shower the following day.
5. The shower is an innocent bystander. I think I stopped counting at eight the number of times everyone speaks fondly of this shower. It’s never done anything like this before! It would never allow itself to be used to torture an inmate! This is what I mean about changing the conversation. According to this document, this shower has been an upstanding member of this prison for a long time and the water has never been too hot! We know this because a prison official checks the temperature every month. Except the last two months before this happened. See, the thermometer broke, so.
But a couple days after Rainey’s death, Darlene Dixon, who is the prison’s health and safety officer, used a thermometer from food services and found the water temperature was 160 degrees, which is 40 degrees more than the hottest the water can be. Then she found out that the assistant warden of the prison had already taken the water temperature, and he came up with only 125 degrees, which I guess made her go take the temperature again – under no pressure from anyone else, I assume – and she also found the water to be 125 degrees.
6. Let’s also talk about time, and then we’ll get to how Dr. Lew says that Rainey died and why it clears everyone of wrongdoing. Rainey died in 2012 and Lew says right away that he did not have burns on his body. Definitely not. She tells the police officer that she’s going to need time to look into this one. A tricky case, it is. How long? Well, in the spring of 2014, the police officer touches base with Lew again, just to say hi and to ask how that autopsy is going. What’s interesting about the timing of the resurrection of this case is that it’s right before the Miami Herald publishes a story about Rainey’s death, with Hempstead as a source. First, let’s just marvel at the very real possibility that this man’s death would have gone essentially unnoticed if not for a nosy journalist. God bless you, Julie K. Brown. Second, let’s note that because they were trying to sweep this under the rug, they didn’t interview a single inmate in this matter for two years. Even the corrections officers only gave sworn statements two years later. So, in 2015, Lew finishes the autopsy. She concludes that Rainey died when his schizophrenia, the meds he took as a result, an undiagnosed heart condition, an “elevated” body temperature and confinement to the shower converged perfectly to cause his death. This is so ridiculous and outrageous that you need to read this nonsense for yourself:
So that’s the report in a very large nutshell. It doesn’t answer a lot of questions, and in fact it forces even more questions that are not satisfactorily answered. Such as:
1. Let’s say Rainey had covered himself with feces before, as is suggested in this report. Let’s also say that he had not wanted to shower to remove the feces before, as is also suggested in the report. How did he get clean on those occasions?
2. How long do inmates get to stay locked in a running shower?
3. Why are people who responded first to the scene say that Rainey had indications of burns, including peeling skin, but the medical examiner says she sees nothing out of the ordinary?
4. Why does the unit log have Rainey getting in the shower at around 8 p.m. and the video log has it about twenty minutes earlier? It’s also worth noting that the first page of this document has the incident happening at 8 p.m., not 7:38 or at 9:30-ish. (Yeah, right below where it says Rainey had no injuries.)
5. Why did the inmates to go their windows at 8:17, right after Clarke got soap for Rainey?
6. Did the SA ever get the photos police took of Rainey’s body?
7. This Strobble thing is a little interesting to me as well. In Hempstead’s statement, he said he heard a “Nurse Strobble” rush to the shower with Nurse Robinson and said “Oh my god, he’s dead.” The report notes that there was no Nurse Strobble in the prison. No Strobble gave a statement, either. But in the unit log, Robinson goes to the shower with a Hidrobo, who isn’t anywhere in this report. So is Strobble/Hidrobo the same person perhaps? Why didn’t anyone interview Hidrobo, who was one of the first people on scene? Or is the log mistaken and there’s no such person?
I’ve been listening to the “Undisclosed” podcast for a long time, and currently, they’re taking a look at the death of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody and no police officers were ever convicted, despite all the witnesses who dispute the officers’ accounts. Kalief Browder was kept at Riker’s Island for three years, despite that he never went to trial on charges he stole a backpack. He committed suicide later. Trayvon Martin was shot dead by someone who picked a fight with him, and that guy is walking the streets. They’re far from the only ones, so we have a pattern here. Rainey was a mentally ill man who died under suspicious circumstances and the people who were responsible for his care have just been cleared of all blame. You know why there’s a group called Black Lives Matter? It’s not racist. It’s because black lives don’t matter to everyone. If you need more proof, consider the case of Darren Rainey.