News: inside the jail, the Night Jeffery Epstein Died

INSIDE THE JAIL THE NIGHT JEFFERY EPSTEIN DIED

When Jeffrey Epstein’s body was found in his Manhattan jail cell in August, people wondered how such a high-profile inmate was left so unsupervised that he was able to hang himself.

Yesterday, two federal guards who were tasked that night with watching Mr. Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center became the first people to face charges stemming from a criminal investigation into his death.

With those charges, an official account of what possibly happened inside the jail began to emerge.

The details 

The guards, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were charged with failing to check on Mr. Epstein every half-hour, as they were supposed to, and then lying about it on documents, according to an indictment unsealed yesterday.

Instead of checking on detainees from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., the indictment said, the two jail employees “sat at their desk, browsed the internet and moved around the common area.” Ms. Noel, 31, shopped online for furniture, and Mr. Thomas, 41, browsed motorcycle sales and caught up on sports news, according to the indictment. At points, investigators concluded, the guards appeared to be asleep.

Ms. Noel and Mr. Thomas then signed “count sheets,” falsely saying they had checked on inmates several times, the indictment said. They discovered that Mr. Epstein was dead in his cell — 15 feet from their desk — only when they went to give him breakfast.

The indictment said that only on-duty corrections officers would have had access to the unit where Mr. Epstein, a disgraced financier, was being held on sex-trafficking charges. Security camera video suggested that only two other workers entered the unit that night.

The indictment backed up the New York City chief medical examiner’s finding that Mr. Epstein’s death was a suicide by hanging. Lawyers for Mr. Epstein have challenged that ruling, and a forensic pathologist hired by his family has claimed that “evidence points to homicide.”

The reaction

Jose Rojas, an official in the prison workers’ union, said Ms. Noel and Mr. Thomas were being made scapegoats for Mr. Epstein’s death. Mr. Rojas said that missing rounds and doctoring records were generally treated as policy violations, not as criminal matters.

But that could be changing, Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, told Congress yesterday. “If people just chose not to do their job, we’re hoping the U.S. attorney’s office will pick up those cases and prosecute them for us,” she said. “Because we don’t want those people in the Bureau of Prisons. They are dangerous to everybody — the inmates and the staff.”