Northern California jail with history of “mysterious” deaths sued by inmates claiming they were sadistically beaten
10/13/2015 / By Julie Wilson
Inmates at California’s Sonoma North County Detention Facility (NCDF) report being brutally beaten and mentally assaulted through humiliation by sheriff officers for at least five hours, according to Courthousenews.com.
Marqus Martinez and Daniel Banks filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco naming Sheriff Steve Freitas and other members of the Detention Division, alleging “that a group of Northern California jail guards orchestrated a five-hour ‘sadistic’ attack on twenty men…” according to a report by NBC Bay Area.
NCDF has a history of mysterious inmate deaths and is reportedly built on a toxic dump waste site and believed to be linked to the cancer deaths of correctional officers who have worked there long-term.
The lawsuit filed by Martinez and Banks claims the violence began around 10:15 a.m. on May 28 during a “soap call” after “inmate Giovanni Montes slept through a shower call because he was on heavy medication.”
Inmates allege they were “systematically and sadistically” beaten by jail guards
According to other inmates, who witnessed the altercation and were also subsequently assaulted, say “Montes was handcuffed, thrown to the ground and beaten.”
Courthouse News Service reports, “Three more deputies arrived, dressed in black and wearing ski masks. They Tasered Montes, kicked him in the head, then dragged him to the shower, ordered him to strip and told him he was their ‘bitch,’ and ‘began another round of savage beatings,’ while he was ‘naked and defenseless’” according to the complaint.
“They dressed Montes in underwear ‘many sizes too small in order to humiliate him,’ dragged him back to his cell and returned several times to beat him again in succeeding hours, finally strapping him into a chair with a mask over his head to restrict his breathing and throwing him into a padded room.
“Inmate Jesus Lopez, who saw the assaults, yelled at the officers to stop, so they beat the hell out of him too, according to the lawsuit: smashing his face into the ground and jumping on his back as he lay handcuffed on the ground, while shouting, ‘Stop resisting!’
“The officers beat Lopez ‘to the point of involuntary defecation,’ then ‘locked him naked in isolation covered in his own feces for two days,’ then wouldn’t let him take a shower for four more days,” states the complaint.
Claim: Inmate left naked in feces for days after being beaten
Plaintiff Martinez has a history of “severe anxiety,” causing him to suffer panic attacks, yet guards refused to give him treatment, instead handcuffing him and beating him some more, “injuring his leg so badly that it could no longer bear weight.
“They then left him on the floor without medical assistance, and ‘for two more hours he listened to screams of pain and torture from the other inmates as jail staff proceeded down the tier, removing each individual from his cell and subjecting him to similar beatings,’” states the complaint.
In 2014, controversy encircled NCDF as guards repeatedly Tasered an intoxicated man in his cell while cameras were rolling.
Other inmates are expected to file similar lawsuits once they are freed due to a law stating they cannot file complaints while incarcerated.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office “categorically” denies the lawsuit’s claims of excessive abuse saying “there’s no basis to the allegations of torture, sadistic actions, and patterns of egregious constitutional violations or human suffering.”
The sheriff’s office says they will win the lawsuit, adding that they take the obligation to treat all inmates with dignity and respect “very seriously” in Facebook post October 5.
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Tagged Under: Inmate abuse, Sonoma County Jail
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