On the evening of July 11, Michael Foster --5-foot-7 and
250 pounds of muscle--walked into Painless Ric's, a small
tattoo studio across the Columbia River in Camas. Just off
the Washington mill town's main street, neon signs glow
in the storefront's windows; inside, the studio is bathed
in soft white light, giving it the look of a medical office.
Foster had two similarly musclebound buddies in tow, there
for a bizarre bonding experience. Foster showed proprietor
Ric Mason a tattoo on his right forearm that read "Brotherhood
of the Strong." The 34-year-old wanted the pony-tailed artist
to duplicate the tattoo on James Borja. Mason complied,
and Foster's other friend, Wallace John Montoya, was so
impressed with the result that he asked for one as well.
All three men in the tattoo shop that evening were corrections
deputies who worked at the Multnomah County Detention Center--a
pursuit they described to Mason as "babysitters."
Some babysitters. Just a few hours earlier that same day,
Borja and Montoya were present during what is being described
as a savage assault on Dennis Lee Poe while he was being
booked at Portland's downtown jail.
The heavyset Foster had brought his tattoo over from Hawaii,
where he worked at a prison notorious for its brutal gangs
of guards who in some cases have been identified by their
tattoos. Now, in the wake of the beating of Poe--a 39-year-old
cabdriver --Borja and Montoya became Foster's symbolic brothers.
The emergence of the tattoos, along with their potential
significance, is the major reason Sheriff Dan Noelle summoned
reporters to his Northeast Portland office on Aug. 15.
There, in an old auditorium, Noelle stood next to a large
blow-up of the agency's mission and values. The second-term
sheriff announced that his office had fired Foster and placed
three other deputies, whom he did not name, on administrative
leave. Detectives were investigating Poe's beating and trying
to determine the significance of the tattoos, as well as
whether there was any link to the recent deaths of two other
inmates, Jon Beckel and James Luoto.
Noelle, looking uncharacteristically rattled, disclosed
that the FBI was looking into the Luoto and Beckel deaths,
but didn't provide many details. He was vague about why
Foster was fired. He mentioned the tattoos, but didn't speculate
on their significance.
"A death in the jail isn't normal, and two deaths in a
short period of time isn't normal," Noelle said last week
in an interview with Willamette Week. "I'm not a
big believer in coincidences."
In fact, the three instances do appear to be distinct events.
Still, they all are linked to the detention center's booking
area--a hot spot for use of force against inmates. And they
took place during a span of less than three weeks.
Interviews with sheriff's department employees, attorneys
and former inmates suggest there is a problem at the jail.
There is not deep-seated corruption or pervasive brutality,
they say. Instead, interviews paint a picture of an agency
struggling to shed the vestiges of a culture that tolerates
and protects rogue corrections deputies.
Behind the scenes at the sheriff's department, the worry
is that a rogue cadre of corrections officers was forming,
similar to the gangs that criminologists say have run Hawaii's
prisons for decades.
To his credit, Noelle quickly instituted some significant
reforms. Many deputies hope that the moment of cultural
change within the sheriff's department has arrived and that
Noelle will cleanse the department of all its bad seeds--as
forcefully as he has moved to stamp out a mindset that some
view as a Hawaiian virus.
Weeks before Poe was allegedly beaten at the detention
center, James Luoto and Jon Beckel died after being forcibly
restrained by corrections deputies.
Owing to intense media coverage, the circumstances of Beckel's
final hours are well known. The drunken 39-year-old fell
on a downtown street with sufficient force to cause a fatal
brain injury, one that went undetected by emergency room
personnel at Legacy-Good Samaritan Hospital and corrections
health nurses at MCDC ("What Happened to Jon Beckel?" WW,
July 12, 2000).
While being booked at the detention center, Beckel was
forcibly restrained by a corrections deputy. Although the
still-unnamed deputy probably did not contribute to Beckel's
injury, his attorney has complained that nurses ignored
Beckel's requests for medical aid.
As a consequence, a protocol is being drafted outlining
how corrections health nurses should treat detainees with
potential head injuries.
As weighty as Beckel's death is for all involved, Luoto's
death has potentially more serious implications for the
department.
On June 18, Luoto was arrested after crashing his car into
concrete poles and a late-model Toyota Camry in the parking
lot of the Sheridan Fruit Company on Southeast Martin Luther
King Jr. Boulevard. Though docile and cooperative, Luoto
was so drunk he could not get into the police car without
instructions, one witness to the arrest told WW.
Described by friends and family as a gentle man who loved
cooking and the outdoors, Luoto had turned to alcohol six
years ago after his sandwich delivery business failed. Two
years later he was diagnosed with diabetes, relatives say,
and his continued drinking and health problems whittled
him down to 140 pounds.
The details of Luoto's death remain under wraps, but sources
familiar with the incident say his trouble in jail began
four days after his arrest.
For reasons that remain unclear, Luoto reportedly declined
glucose injections while housed on MCDC's fourth floor,
and his blood-sugar level plunged. As a nurse later prepared
to attend to him, he pushed past her and a female deputy
and ran down the hall. An inmate trustee subdued him, taking
him to the floor; sources say a deputy then took over and
restrained him as he lay on his stomach.
Luoto was then transferred to a first-floor separation
cell to be near the main nurses' station, fed, injected
with a sedative and left there. A short time later, he was
discovered unconscious and without a pulse, having choked
on his own vomit.
Corrections employees performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
After hovering in serious condition in the intensive care
unit at Legacy-Emanuel Hospital, he eventually died on July
22. Deputy state medical examiner Nikolas Hartshorne, who
is still investigating the death, has ascribed his death
to complications from a ruptured spleen, but hasn't yet
determined how Luoto sustained his fatal injury.
Sheriff's department sources contend that Luoto's spleen
was injured in his earlier traffic accident.
But family members say trauma nurses at Emanuel were puzzled
by the many bruises on Luoto's body. To the nurses' trained
eyes, the marks weren't consistent with a low-speed car
accident, and they took photographs before suggesting that
the family take legal action, says his mother, MaryAnne
Luoto. (The family has since retained attorney Chuck Paulson,
the same lawyer hired by Beckel's family.)
It is possible for a patient to live for four days before
succumbing to a fatal spleen injury. But delayed spleen
failure happens in less than 5 percent of patients, according
to internal medicine specialists at Oregon Health Sciences
University.
Even if Luoto's spleen was ruptured in the auto accident,
jail officials should have detected the injury, says his
sister, Kristi Starr. If her brother's injuries were the
result of heavy-handed deputies, she says, the county is
even more at fault. "He never did anything bad," Starr says.
"He never hit anybody, and he wasn't a belligerent drunk.
He went to jail a functioning person, and now he's dead.
And I truly believe that it was a result of what happened
to him in jail."
Although it remains unclear whether excessive force played
any role in the deaths of Beckel and Luoto, there is little
question that, while restrained and hobbled, Dennis Lee
Poe was struck by at least one deputy--perhaps repeatedly.
Witnesses have identified four deputies involved in the
incident: Borja, Montoya, fellow deputy Rodger Cross and
Sgt. Jeffrey Ristvet. (Although Noelle declined to identify
the three officers placed on leave, sources say they are
Borja, Montoya and Ristvet.)
Down in MCDC's "reception" area, as it's known, there are
no video cameras to tape incidents. So, it will fall to
the testimony of eyewitnesses to detail the incident to
a grand jury--which is expected to reach a decision as early
as this week.
According to several sources familiar with the incident,
the picture taking shape before the grand jury is most likely
as follows:
On the afternoon of July 11, Poe was brought to the detention
center's cinder-block basement by a Portland police officer
on what Noelle called a "minor" domestic relations charge.
It was supposed to be a routine "book-and-release"--a mug
shot, some fingerprints, and a date to appear in court.
But at the nurse's station, the cab driver refused to answer
medical history questions and then declined to be fingerprinted.
That defiance allegedly was enough to trigger violence.
Cross, a red-head called "Opie" by some co-workers, allegedly
struck Poe in the face before Ristvet grabbed Poe and slammed
him into either a wall or the floor. Deputies then handcuffed
and hobbled Poe and placed him in a shower, a common tactic
when dealing with disruptive detainees.
At this point it is unclear who followed him into the shower--Borja,
Cross, Ristvet or a combination of the three--but sources
say corrections employees heard thuds coming from within.
Poe's ordeal, however, was not over. Deputies strapped
Poe to a restraining board and slid him into an isolation
cell. Then, sources say, Ristvet entered the cell, where
at least one witness heard slapping.
It is not clear whether Borja or Montoya ever had direct
contact with Poe, but sources say they were present and
did not intervene on his behalf.
Both Ristvet and Montoya declined to talk to WW
when contacted at home. WW was not able to contact
Borja or Cross.
Reportedly, Poe has told authorities he was beaten. He
has since filed notice of his intent to sue the county.
By the time Poe left the detention center, Borja and Montoya
were already over in Camas, cracking "babysitter" jokes
and forking over $50 apiece to spend half an hour in a dentist's
chair having Painless Ric needle an emblem of machismo into
their skin.
Sources in the department say Ristvet also is believed
to sport the same tattoo.
Each year 45,000 "clients" are brought downtown into the
downtown jail's reception area. They arrive in stainless-steel
handcuffs and are searched, photographed, fingerprinted,
given a brief examination by a nurse and either released
pending a court appearance or shipped upstairs to a cell.
Few of them are happy to be there; 70 percent are drunk,
73 percent test positive for drugs, and 17 percent are mentally
ill. Many are abusive, violent or uncooperative. Five times
each week, on average, detainees must be restrained with
force.
"It's the front lines," says Maj. Dave Chambers, who runs
MCDC. "It's a war zone."
The stress on these guards is extreme. To accommodate the
flow of detainees, each one has to be processed in 6 to
8 minutes on average. The booking area, designed two decades
ago to accommodate 17,000 prisoners a year, now handles
almost three times that amount.
Packing the facility with enough deputies and civilian
staff to handle the flow only adds to the tension. "It's
like you're in a submarine," says Chambers.
But, if the account of the alleged beating of Poe is true,
there is a more serious problem than stress.
Noelle will only hint at it, but the suspicion among law-enforcement
sources is that the "Brotherhood" tattoos like the one Foster
brought from Hawaii signified a potential clique among the
deputies.
In recent years the Hawaii state prison system has been
plagued by numerous cases of corruption, brutality and suspicious
deaths. Prison guard gangs have accounted for some of those,
according to Agnes Baro, a professor of criminology at Grand
Valley University in Grand Rapids, Mich., and the former
chief planner of
the Hawaii Department of Public Safety.
"It's almost like a Third World country," she says. "Maybe
it's changed in the last two years, but as of two years
ago I would still rate it as one of the most corrupt and
violent prison systems in the United States."
Perhaps the most notorious Hawaiian prison is the Halawa
Correctional Facility, a sprawling complex that houses 1,200
maximum and medium security prisoners in an industrial neighborhood
west of Honolulu. A series of court cases in recent years
revealed conditions akin to those of a medieval dungeon;
prisoners were shackled naked inside their cells, beaten
and left to lie in their own feces for weeks on end. One
guard is currently being prosecuted by the Honolulu city
prosecutor for allegedly pounding a mentally ill inmate's
head on a concrete floor while seven other guards and two
nurses stood there and watched. The inmate died.
Although there is no indication that Foster was involved
in any of the wrongdoing by guards at Halawa, it was his
last posting. In addition, although Noelle won't disclose
details of Foster's firing, he says the dismissal stems
from Foster's failure to disclose details of his work history.
The origin of Foster's tattoo is unclear. One theory is
that it marked a bunch of weight-lifter buddies. Another
is that it was a symbol for a group of guards at Halawa
with a penchant for roughing up inmates--and not snitching
on one another.
"There were a group of officers that called themselves
'the Halawa bad boys,'" says Dr. Terence Allen, a prison
physician who worked at Halawa between 1987 and 1997. Allen
says they identified themselves with tattoos, but he doesn't
know whether it was "The Brotherhood of the Strong."
No one says the Multnomah County Detention Center is another
Halawa. In fact, Multnomah County corrections deputies have
made strides in professionalism in recent years, helping
erode the jail's past reputation as a place where unprovoked
beatings were common.
Steve Sherlag and Emily Simon, criminal defense attorneys
who are vocal critics of the Portland Police Bureau's heavy-handed
tactics, say they hear relatively few complaints from inmates
at the county jail. They believe the majority of deputies
are professional and conscientious.
What Noelle is investigating right now is a small percentage
of his 550 corrections deputies. Sources say the most violence-prone
guards seek out the booking area--which provides ample opportunity
to take out frustrations on detainees.
Department sources stress that such deputies are a minority
of the staff, but feel the guards' ability to take liberties
with prisoners is eased by inattentive middle managers,
favoritism and lax internal discipline.
Some hold up Ristvet as an example. Sources say he was
recently caught turning in a payroll slip authorizing pay
for an employee who was actually at home recuperating from
a motorcycle accident.
Traditionally, untruthfulness constitutes sufficient grounds
for immediate termination in the Multnomah County Sheriff's
Department. But for Ristvet's alleged falsification of paperwork,
sources say he was suspended for 20 days without pay. Noelle
declines to discuss individual cases but may have referred
to Ristvet when, in a recent interview, he mentioned giving
a break to employees who lied but "believed they were doing
a very good thing."
Cross, who also allegedly took part in the Poe incident,
has a longstanding reputation within the department as quick-tempered
and violence-prone, sources say. "Here's a guy who at times
walked around wearing fingerless leather gloves," says one
sheriff's department employee. "What's that suggest?"
In 1993, a teenager named Anthony Locastro sued the county,
claiming that after he demanded clean sheets, a number of
corrections officers, including Cross, entered the cell
and beat him until he lost consciousness.
During the incident, Cross punched Locastro in the nose
twice, despite a long-standing directive within the department
against striking inmates with a closed fist. Locastro suffered
two black eyes and a broken nose, which swelled up to twice
its normal size. (See "Brute Force," WW, March 11,
1993.)
Rather than transfer Cross to a job away from inmates,
administrators at MCDC let him work in the high-stress booking
area. What's more, sources say they assigned him to train
new hires in the use of force--which was viewed by some
employees as an implicit endorsement of Cross's reputed
brand of violence.
Noelle declined to discuss Cross's case and defended the
department's internal-affairs unit: "Our IAU people, from
my perspective, have been very effective. They have been
very complete in their investigations."
Despite lingering questions about Ristvet and Cross, Noelle
is generally getting high marks within the agency for his
response to the recent incidents. Use of force is often
necessary, he says, but people should not have to worry
that they will be brutalized behind bars.
"Truthfully, I am Attila the Hun and I always was, street-wise,
as a policeman," says the former Portland deputy chief of
police, who worked his way up from walking a beat. "But
I don't want to have to fight with you in order to take
you to jail because you're afraid you're going to be hurt
in jail."
On Aug. 15, he announced installation of a video system
to monitor bookings and invited the National Institute of
Corrections to investigate the situation at the downtown
Portland jail. Also, he says, the department has started
transferring employees out of the booking area and will
consider shifting managers to other locations.
Noelle wants to empower civilian jail employees to speak
out. Sources tell WW that many civilians simply look
away with distaste when guards are employing force against
inmates.
So at his press conference, Noelle called for training
civilians in the department's policies on the appropriate
use of force. Civilians will be asked to look away no longer,
to help expose wrongdoing and deter such incidents in the
future.
In his quest to clean up the department, Noelle has a crucial
ally.
The public often stereotypes law-enforcement unions as
protecting even their most brutal members. But the Multnomah
County Corrections Officers Association is doing just the
opposite.
Union president Sgt. Darcy Bjork has raised eyebrows with
his public pronouncements decrying the alleged behavior
of the deputies being investigated. He's also taken the
unprecedented step of attending roll calls to exhort the
troops to remember their oath to serve the public, behave
ethically and uphold the law.
Bjork's message appears to be resonating with the men and
women who work in Multnomah County's jails. During a recent
association meeting, the question of whether the union should
pay for the accused deputies' legal bills was raised. Sources
say not one member spoke up in favor.
Bjork and Noelle, however, will need help from District
Attorney Michael Schrunk if they are to break the subculture
of excessive force that seems to simmer at the detention
center.
County prosecutors are now presenting evidence to grand
jurors in Beckel's death and Poe's alleged beating. Luoto's
death is expected to go to a grand jury within a few weeks.
The prosecutors' actions could well determine whether employees
ever again come forward to blow the whistle on alleged misconduct,
as they did in the Poe case.
Some attorneys question Schrunk's willingness to indict
officers and deputies from the agencies he works with on
a daily basis. "I think the DA doesn't do a very good job
of policing the police," says Sherlag. "The ties are just
too strong."
Prosecutors says it's hard to build a case on the testimony
of accused criminals.
"It's one thing to fire somebody because they're a jerk,
and it's quite another thing to prosecute somebody beyond
a reasonable doubt," says Schrunk. "I think we're as aggressive
as anybody."
Meanwhile, back in Camas, Ric Mason is wondering what those
tattoos meant. He says that about two weeks after he tattooed
"Brotherhood of the Strong" onto the forearms of Borja and
Montoya, one of them showed up at his shop--this time asking
that the tattoo be covered up.
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