Receive Weekly Email and Text Message Updates:
Sign up for latest info on concerts, dining, promotions and more!
Go!

Most Popular

National Features >

  • Village Voice

    The Great Walls of Chinatown

    With the exception of the electric rice cookers, this Bowery tenement could have come straight from the Nineteenth Century.

    By Elizabeth Dwoskin

  • Houston Press

    Getting Off

    DUI attorney Tyler Flood wins 80 percent of his trials--even if his clients were 100 percent drunk.

    By Mike Giglio

  • Miami New Times

    Park or Die Tryin'

    From the homeless parking mafia to the meter fairy, finding a spot in Miami has taken a turn toward the surreal.

    By Gus Garcia-Roberts

  • City Pages

    The Baddest Men on the Planet

    Straight from the Sam's Club tire shop, Brett Rogers prepares to meet Fedor Emelianenko in mortal combat.

    By Bradley Campbell

Dead End

Beaten, hanged, strangled, and ignored, these men and a woman lost their lives in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's custody

Share

  • rss

By John Dickerson

Published on December 18, 2007 at 3:03pm

• On March 26, 1996, Jose Rodriquez, 39, died in a pool of his own vomit on a jail floor. His cries for help went ignored by Arpaio's jail employees. Rodriquez's dehydration, fever and twitching ultimately led to his death, even while inmates shouted for help.

• On June 1, 1996, Scott Norberg, 35, suffocated in one of Arpaio's restraint chairs. Detention officers wrestled Norberg into the chair and bound his mouth with a towel. They continued to beat and Taser him after he was handcuffed, surveillance video and court documents show. His family later won an $8.25 million settlement against Arpaio.

• Mentally retarded Charles Agster III, 33, was arrested for trespassing on August 6, 2001. Detention officers pulled a hood over his head and slammed him into a restraint chair. Agster was asphyxiated to the point that he became brain dead. He was pronounced legally dead three days later. In 2006, a federal court awarded $9 million to his family.

• In 2003, Phillip Wilson was serving two months in Tent City for a nonviolent offense. Wilson was attacked by the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and bludgeoned into a coma. He never recovered.

Deborah Braillard, 46, was documented as a diabetic in the jail's health records. Her cellmates say a nurse did not give Braillard insulin, and then detention officers ignored her when she went into diabetic shock. Braillard died on January 23, 2005, ultimately from lack of insulin.

• Legally blind and serving a short sentence in Tent City for shoplifting, Brian Crenshaw, 40, was transferred to solitary confinement after a tussle with Arpaio's detention officers. Six days later, he was found comatose in his solitary cell with a broken neck, ruptured intestines, broken toes, and severe internal injuries. Arpaio maintains Crenshaw sustained the injuries when he fell off his four-foot bed. Crenshaw died on March 14, 2005.

• In December 2005, Clint Yarbrough suffocated in a jail restraint chair. On April 18, 2007, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved an undisclosed settlement payout to Yarbrough's family in excess of $1 million.

• Months before Thomas Bruce Cooley, 44, was found hanging by the bed sheets in his jail cell, a federal inspector had warned Arpaio that the jail psych ward was a suicide waiting to happen. A 1996 Department of Justice report specifically cautioned that inmates could use "overhanging structures" to hang themselves.

• Three more inmates died in the same way as Thomas Cooley while in Arpaio's custody: Kevin Holschlag, Michael Sanderson, and Juan Vasquez.