SWORN STATEMENT¶
DIGITALLY RECORDED¶
OF¶
OIG CASE #:¶
2019-010614¶
OFFICE OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL¶
JULY 20, 2021¶
RESOLUTE DOCUMENTATION SERVICES¶
28632 Roadside Drive, Suite 285¶
Agoura Hills, CA 91301¶
Phone: (818) 431-5800¶
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OTHER APPEARANCES:¶
NONE¶
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General. This investigation is being conducted pursuant to the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended. The investigation pertains to job performance failure and security failure.Ӧ
It’s in general. It has nothing to do with you directly, it’s in general, the investigation we’re doing. “This is a voluntary interview.¶
Accordingly, you do not have to answer questions. No disciplinary action will be taken against you if you choose not to answer questions. Any statement you furnish may be used as evidence in any future criminal proceedings or agency disciplinary proceedings or both.” The waiver states, “I understand the warnings and assurances stated above and I am willing to make a statement and answer questions. No promises or threats have been made to me or no pressure or coercion of any kind has been used against me.” Please review the document and let me know if you understand. If you do understand, please sign the document where it says, “Employee signature,” and print your name.¶
MR. : And just for the record, it doesn’t basically state what you just said,¶
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they consider it the MPA, multi-purpose area of the unit. You are not able to see down the actual ranges of the units, so no. I wouldn’t say, “The ranges,” I would say, “The multi-purpose area.”¶
really moving anywhere within the institution.¶
A count sheet is called the E-1 and it is printed off from the internal MCC system called SENTRY. Control validates all respondent numbers from the head counts and marks an X on the E-1 sheet to confirm the count. This happens for every check of every unit. E-1s are supplemented with count slips that are properly filled out and stapled to the E-1 timesheet. Once all head count numbers are verified to be correct, everything is documented, recorded and then considered to be a good count. began her shift on August 10th at 12:00 midnight to 8:00 a.m. stated that Lieutenant took care of¶
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like, let’s say if an inmate was leaving and not coming back, would it state on there?¶
uld it state on there?¶
MS. : Yeah, it would say, “WAB,” but most often times, pre-trial is - because they’re not our inmates, they’re Marshals inmates, the Marshals can move them at any given time and just forward us back a disposition of the inmate leaving. “Inmate so and so was released to Probation. Here’s a cut slip for you guys, file -” - then we can go ahead and key them out. But we don’t key inmates out WAB if they’re going out to court. We key them out - at that time, we were doing what was considered an out count. We weren’t keying inmates out, we were keying them on an out count so we know that we have an account of who went out to court and we have an account of who came back from court.¶
MR. : So are you saying that you guys wouldn’t remove the inmate completely from the count, you would just leave them under the out count?¶
MS. : Yes. We would only remove him if prior to that list, when we got the list, it says, “Transferred WAB, we’re sending¶
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him somewhere to Brooklyn or he’s going back to the state,” that night before we would know that. But sometimes at the spur of the moment, things might arise, a judge might give a person time served, he might commit him to drug treatment program, Probation might come and pick him up. It could be a number of things that take place at court that it might be just a regular court proceeding but then he gets released and he doesn’t come back to the institution.¶
MS. : If he was on that list at that time, then I’ve seen it, but I don’t recall now, speaking now, but at that time, yeah, if his name was on the list, yes.¶
MR. : Do you recall if his - I know you said you don’t recall, but by any chance, would you have known if he left WAB? What does WAB stand for?¶
MS. : With all belonging, meaning they’re being transferred either to an air lift, transferred to another BOP, transferred to another state institution, that the Marshals¶
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time, they’re both fax and email so any single person we could just grab an email from them if it was archived?¶
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MS. : If he’s going to court on this, you wouldn’t see - at that time, you wouldn’t see that he went to court. You would have to run an out count to show who was keyed out to court. So, you wouldn’t be able to see that on this because this just tracks who came into the institution, who left the institution and what housing units they were transferred from, whether they came out of SHU or they went to SHU or they got moved from one unit, housing unit, to another housing unit or if they’re say an inmate got sentenced, this would show you that he might have went from a A-pre, meaning a pre-trial inmate to a hold, he might have pled guilty so now he’s longer a pre-trial¶
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leaving and - so it sounds like the latter to that are totally different things. But if -.¶
MS. : Well, no. They could be on the court list and they could appear and go out to court as a court and they might get ordered to time served.¶
MS. : So, now, we have them on an out count as going to court because we weren’t keying inmates physically out of the institution, we were placing them on an out count. So you would send them out to court as a court, but if you got a disposition back from the Marshals stating that, “Inmate so and so was sentenced to time served,” now you would go back in the system and you would key him out, time served. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that they could be on the court list as a WAB because that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes they do get released straight from the courthouse and never come back to the jail, so those things do happen.¶
MR. : And that’s what ha- so, what we’re trying to get to is, is there any way by looking at that, we can determine if¶
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would only know that if I looked at the court list at that time, then I can determine that,¶
“Okay, yeah, we keyed him out that way because he was leaving with all his belonging,” Or,¶
“No, we keyed him out that way because we got a disposition later and stated that he wasn’t coming back.” I can’t just say, just by looking at this, “Oh, well, we keyed him out that way because he was a WAB.” Now, I can look at this GCT release and this full term release or this treaty transfer and tell you that these were guys that were getting full term release from the jail and they were not coming back. But - and I can also say that he’s not coming back, but I can’t tell you why he was pre-removed. I don’t know the circumstances of why he was pre-removed. I would have to go back to his folder, look in his folder, pull up his documents of why we keyed him out. I can’t just say, “Oh, yeah, because he left with all his belongings, oh, it was a court -” - I can’t -.¶
MR. : So you can’t tell that, but you can tell 8:38 he left and was not expected to return.¶
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MR. : And what’s the time frame?¶
MS. : If inmates - but sometimes in R&D, we don’t always get to sit down at the computer right then and there and key them out, because we’re dealing with the Marshals, they’re walking out with one guy, we still have somebody else we might have to strip out.¶
We’re still dealing with this, we’re dealing with the phone. When an inmate is being released, you’re supposed to key them out right then and there, but you have up to a minimum of at least, I think it’s an hour or two hours, to key somebody in that’s coming in the institution. But, like I said, just looking at this, it just tells you the time he was keyed out. I don’t know if he was picked up earlier and already taken to the courthouse, then he was keyed out, pre-removed after, I couldn’t - I can’t answer that. I don’t know. It’s not - I can’t answer that.¶
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wouldn’t say that, no.¶
MR. : So the SHU very well may never have been contacted or would have been contacted saying, “Reyes isn’t coming back, consider him gone.”¶
MS. : Correct.¶
MR. : Okay. So they would have only known that based upon doing rounds and counts is what you’re saying?¶
MS. : Right. But if they don’t know that he needs a cell mate, because I don’t believe there was any notification that another individual had to be placed in a cell with him so, nobody would know that. Even if you are making rounds and counting your unit, you wouldn’t know that we need - if there’s no notification.¶
MR. : Well, notifications were made and the people are saying that they passed it along to other shifts saying, “Yes, he’s required to have a cell mate.” However, they’re saying, “Reyes is gone, possibly not returning. Make sure you get him a bunkie if he doesn’t.” So it’s kind of like, at what point does it determine —¶
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that the inmate might - and then, because of the shift change, you might have an officer from these specific set of hours and then now you have a new officer coming in at these specific set of hours. They won’t know who went out to court unless they read their court list or they look at their log, they probably wouldn’t know. And if they’re doing a count and their count is what it’s supposed to be, they won’t know.¶
MR. : So you’re a very unique person that we’re talking to as both - has both sets of knowledge with the fact that you’ve worked with custody as well as non-custody and you know how these things work when people are removed. If the people in the SHU knew, and let’s say, let’s just for this example, say everybody in the SHU knows —¶
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was known that this inmate was leaving and he wasn’t coming back and if it was known that this individual needed to have someone else in the cell with him, then yes, at that time, it would be required to replace or move him in a cell with somebody else. So, yeah.¶
MR. : So when you’re saying “known” though, so, I mean, known that he’s WAB, so does that -.¶
MS. : Known that he’s WAB and also known that this individual requires a cell mate at all time, cannot be housed alone. Now, there are some inmates that have to rec in cell alone and there are signs on their doors and there are some inmates that might be required to have a cell mate. But if there’s no notification, and I work a unit and this is not my normal unit and I’m working this unit and I’m just filling in here and there and I’m working and I don’t know and there’s nothing placed on the walls that state that or on this inmate’s - on the door or maybe on my clipboard, I wouldn’t know that.¶
MR. : No, no, no. So what I’m saying, and I’m not talking about - I think¶
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- this is primarily on day watch and evening watch because there’s no movement on morning watch, not unless it’s an emergency, but you’re not moving nobody on morning watch. So on day watch and evening watch, if you see that inmates were moved around or a counselor calls you in Control and say, “Hey, I’m moving inmate so and so from this unit to this unit,” then as a Control Center Officer, what I would do, I’m not going to say what everybody else would do, I would call over the radio, “Hey, unit officers, if you lost an inmate or you gained an inmate, call Control and verify your base count.” And I would say - they would say, “Oh, inmate so and so left and I have 87.” Or, they might give me a wrong count. I’m like, “No, that’s bad, you need to check your base count, verify who left the unit.” But that’s what I would do. But most often times, the Control Center Officer would look at this and see who’s moved and verify it with an E-1 and make sure everything is accurate.
MR. : So once they are notified, what would the Control Officer update that you wanted?¶
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MS. : There are supposed to be balance and checks, yes. But sometimes people move inmates and they fail to report to maybe the officer or they fail to notify the Control, “I’m moving inmate from this unit to this unit,” or something might happen on a unit, an inmate might get locked up and you’re in the Control Center, you know, you’re doing whatever you hear, an emergency on a unit, you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know if the inmate is going out to the hospital until somebody actually physically calls you and say, “Hey, I’ve got an inmate that’s (Indiscernible¶
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*01:10:14),” if you’re not looking at the camera, you see them moving this inmate from this unit and walking him into SHU and you’ll call that unit, “Hey, you got one locked - who got locked up?” You might call the Unit Officer and ask those questions. So, it has happened.¶
MR. : Whose responsibility would it be if they’re moving an inmate, to key it in?¶
MS. : To key it in? Depending on what type of move it is. If it’s a unit to unit move, that would be the Unit Management, Unit Team. If an inmate is getting locked up from the unit and going to SHU, the Control Center Officer might move that unit, move that inmate from the unit to SHU or SHU might key that inmate into SHU. So, I just depends who does it.¶
MR. : So, and it can be one of those things that in a situation, let’s say an inmate gets moved. The SHU Officer can be like, “Ah, no Control will do it.” And Control Lieutenant will be like, “No, the SHU will do it.” Is it one person that’s actually responsible to make sure that it gets keyed in?¶
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MS. : Well, a lot of times things happen. Like I said, around here, you might have a Lieutenant go to a unit and then walk an inmate out and the inmate gets locked up. Or you might have an inmate that’s suicidal and he gets placed on suicide watch so now he’s not in the unit, he’s in suicide watch. Or you might have an inmate that was taken off of suicide watch, might be put in a housing unit or SHU, you don’t know unless somebody notifies you because when you’re in the Control, you’re answering phones, you’re looking at a keypad, you might be looking up and down but you’re not constantly on the camera so you won’t know unless somebody actually notifies you and say, “Hey, we’re moving inmate so and so.” So, a lot of times, you just have to - if you got an inmate that you received a new inmate, call Control, verify your base because you won’t always know everything.¶
MR. : So you’re saying it should have been on the SHU Officer to make sure that, “Hey, listen, this inmate is being moved.” Did she even notify Control, “Hey, listen.”¶
MS. : If the officer of a unit¶
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the one that’s preparing the counts and taking the counts and viewing the count slips with the Lieutenant is not there. I’m in charge of the radios, they keys, you know, like a count and making sure that all my equipment is accounted for, letting staff know, “Hey, we’re on duty.” We got to do a pre-announcement and going over equipment and stuff, all those type of things, so no, I didn’t - I wouldn’t be aware of this if I didn’t prepare it, no.¶
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MR. : Definitely not yours? My assumption is that was written at midnight, but we still can’t figure it out. That’s what we’re still trying to figure out. We would have thought that the plus one stuff would have happened at the 10:00 p.m. count since we believe that that’s when Reyes was keyed in. he was keyed in on the 10th for the 9th because - not Reyes, I’m sorry, Fernandez.¶
MS. : Normally, when a Lieutenant checks off the slips, it’s because they’re verifying that it’s the unit, it’s the accurate count, it’s the accurate date, time and staff signature print of two staff members. That’s normally how Lieutenant would mark off a count¶
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o’clock count. Okay, so, he’s not keyed into R&D. So, this is where your plus one is. So he’s still showing in Special Housing but he’s in R&D during the 10 o’clock count. So this is¶
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supposed to be R&D?¶
MS. : Well, to be honest with you, because I work in R&D and I’m going to tell you what goes on, they drop inmates in there and they don’t - a lot of the times, staff - that’s why now we tell them, “Tell us what you’re bringing inmates down here for.” Because they would bring an inmate down and place that inmate in a cell. You won’t know because you’re busy dealing with the Marshals, you’re dealing whatever movement you have going on in R&D and you won’t know that they brought an inmate down in a cell. So, it could work both ways that, you know, maybe they figured they were just going to place him down there, keep him down there and then maybe bring him back upstairs. So, it could have been a number of things, but I just know from experience, inmates have been brought into my R&D that we weren’t aware of and we realized, walking around R&D, “Yeah, we got an inmate in here.” “What is he down here for?” So -.¶
MR. : So this, for me personally, the E-1 isn’t as concerning on the 4:00 p.m., although —¶
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“We got one outside.” It shouldn’t be 73 plus one. They’re utilizing the same number it looks like on the E-1. Somehow it seems that they had that number, that base count number and they knew, “We need - this is the number we need to report, but also we got a plus one over in R&D.”¶
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MR. : Does everyone know they can’t - especially if we’re talking about round sheets. Does everyone know that you can’t go and - say it goes from 8:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m., you can’t go in at 8:00 a.m. and write out everything you did for around all the way to 12:00 p.m.?¶
MS. : You cannot do that because anything can happen. An emergency can take place. An inmate could get removed from your unit. You can get a new guy. Any - there’s a number of things that could take place that you are not supposed to - even your log book, pre-fill out your log.¶
MR. : Is there any training though that you all receive saying like, “You got to do this when you’re actually conducting the rounds?” And certainly, you know, maybe after the fact is okay because you already did it, but beforehand -.¶
MS. : Maybe if the Lieutenant sees it, you know, they might say, “Hey, you know, you’re not supposed to pre-fill out your count¶
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learn by asking questions and maybe another officer just showing him ropes and everybody don’t do everything the way they’re supposed to do so. I might come in as a new officer and you might be showing me stuff and it could be completely wrong, but I’m doing what you showed me because that’s all I know. So, it just depends on who’s training who and who’s showing who what to do and that’s pretty much it because on the job, right now, we have new staff training new staff. We have staff that’s here like a month training staff that’s here a week. So, the blind leading the blind.¶
MR. : So if someone makes the excuse that, “No one ever told me I could do that, but I saw other people filling out round sheets ahead of time so that’s why I did it,” is that an excuse do you believe? So you think that that is an actual excuse to say like, “Well, he did it, so I did it,” and that makes it okay? Because don’t you think it’s pretty common sense that, no, you can’t - you’re certifying a document saying you conducted that round at that time?¶
MS. : Yes, common sense to the¶
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MS. : And if you don’t read it in black and white for yourself, how would you know that this is actually what you should be doing? And it’s just a lack of training around here. Staff are not being trained and that’s what creates a lot of our problems. We don’t have a bad institution, we just have a lack of training, you know, and I don’t think that people are not willing to work, I think they want to work, but it’s a lack of training and it’s a lack of morale in the institution, so I think that’s what the biggest problem is. People are not being properly trained. So, yeah, if I see you doing it, I think it’s okay. I’m not ever thinking, “Oh, you know what? Maybe I shouldn’t do that, something might happen.” If nothing ever really happens, so.¶
MR. : I have a few more questions -¶
MS. : Uh-huh.¶
MR. : — a few more, but we can come back. Some of the questions are going to be redundant —¶
MS. : Uh-huh.¶
MR. : — redundant because we asked¶
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MS. : Do we give Control those? No, we don’t give Control a copy. I don’t think we give Control a copy of the disposition form because they - we don’t give them a copy of it.¶
MR. : So this circles back to what we talked about before. So once you find out an inmate is definitively not coming back, you do not contact anyone to say, “This guy didn’t come back.”¶
MS. : We key them out and normally the Control Officer, if you have a good counts and assignments officer, and he’s paying attention, he’ll say, “Oh, you guys keyed one out?” We’ll say, “Yeah, he’s not coming back, he got time served or the Marshals took him and he’s not coming back.”¶
MR. : The R&D doesn’t proactively provide that information.¶
MS. : No, because they’re supposed to automatically be checking the computer to like a checks and balance, so it’s something that’s automatic. When we have inmates going out to court, we have a receipt that we give to¶
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the Marshals and a copy also goes downstairs to the Control Center as well, so the Control has a copy of every move we do in R&D, so they get a copy of that.¶
MR. : Can you recall any situations where an inmate leaves for court and R&D is notified, “Hey, listen, the inmate is not coming back,” where R&D actually called the unit to let them know, “Hey, he’s not coming back?”¶
MS. □: Yeah, we have. We have.¶
MR. □: Is that because they requested to be notified or is it because, is that something that R&D normally does?¶
MS. : No, we might have - it might have been that the inmate had property upstairs and we might need him to secure the inmate’s property and bring it down. So, that’s normally sometimes why we might notify the unit officer because sometimes the inmate, they’ll call back to the jail and say, “Oh, they released me. I got my property upstairs.” And we’ll call upstairs to the unit officer and say, “Hey, inmate so and so is not coming back, can you secure his property?”¶
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MS. : So, Lieutenant, she made rounds on the unit because the SHU staff called the door for her to pop - for us to pop her into the SHU and when they call the door, when you hit that door, a visual of the door, who standing in front of the door pops up in the Control Center, so you know who is going into the SHU. During the body alarm, our usual staff just responds to a body alarm, so, you know they say, “Hey, we have a medical emergency in SHU,” or wherever they call. You got the SHU crew calling the door so staff can run in and assist, so, whoever ran in, I couldn’t tell you. But whoever was on shift at that time, responded.¶
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MS. : You would need an emergency key that you would have to get from the Control Center. But no one gets those keys. And especially on morning watch when there’s no need for us to give out those keys. Staff are calling the door, so, no, there’s no other way to get in that unit.¶
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The time is 6:12 p.m. on Thursday,¶
July 15, 2021. We’re ending the interview and turning off the recorder.¶
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CERTIFICATE¶
I hereby certify that the foregoing pages represent an accurate transcript of the electronic sound recording of the proceedings before the Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General in the matter of:¶
Interview of¶
Signature¶
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