Stathol wrote:
I'm having a hard time buying that this was 100% accidental. I can understand how they might not have realized he was in custody to begin with, but not noticing that there's a screaming man in the solitary wing for 5 days? To quote the article:
One matter still unclear is why no one heard him. Chong told the San Diego Union-Tribune last year that he heard footsteps, muffled voices and the opening and closing of cell doors, even from the cell adjacent to his. Yet no one responded to the ruckus coming from inside his cell.
I can see why you would think that, but there is no actual reason to think it
was intentional. This is more likely a case of "yeah, yeah, I'll get to it later" and no one bothering to check on him, forgetting about it because they were busy with something else, and almost certainly started when someone forgot to put him into an inmate tracking system. This is probably not done by DEA agents, but by some sort of corrections official.
This does not excuse the negligence at all; when our station was jammed up with over 800 aliens earlier this year (for reasons I won't divulge, but suffice to say jobs were lost for refusing to take aliens from us when we were at 5 times capacity and had nowhere to physically put them anymore) we did not have anyone not get a drink, or even get lost in the system that day. People DO sometimes get forgotten, but in our case they are in mass cells so if one alien is forgotten, or starts experiencing a medical problem or something, the other ones get us. There also is a water fountain in every cell, and we have an orange water cooler in each one as well.
This brings up the question of what fool designed a cell with no water or toilet in it, but that can hardly be blamed on the agents either.
In any case, it is very hard indeed to believe they just suddenly decided to leave this particular guy in a cell for 4 days. Why him? Just out of the blue "hey, I feel like starving someone to death today!"? No. Maybe they wanted to break him to give them information? More plausible, but if so why doesn't this happen with anyone else? And why leave him in there long enough to nearly kill him? If he'd died, that would hardly have elicited information from him.