Joe Arpaio Turns a Blind Eye to Jailhouse Justice

Both inmates and detention officers questioned later in DeLong's civil suit remembered him as low-key in the jail maelstrom.

As he tried to stay invisible, DeLong says, he also kept vigilant. He says he saw three or four assaults in D-pod during his month there and observed one inmate exit the bathroom holding teeth that just had been knocked out.

Maricopa County's Durango Jail, where DeLong was jumped by fellow inmates.

Abel Hinojosa served as a "torpedo" and knocked out DeLong's eye.

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More About

• Alan DeLong
• Durango
• Joe Arpaio
• Crime and Law
• Criminal Sentencing and Punishment

"I wanted to roll up out of there because it was insanity," he tells New Times. "I told the guards it was a madhouse, and they needed to put me someplace else, anyplace. They said, 'You did the crime; just do the time. Get back where you belong.'"

Which DeLong did, until the night he fatefully stepped into D-pod's wicked bathroom.

About 10:30 p.m., DeLong decided to fill up his water jug to make some Kool-Aid from his personal stash. He told an attorney during a 2007 deposition what happened next:

"I remember getting out of bed and going to the bathroom. I walked in there, and the next thing I know, I was getting tapped on the shoulder in the kind of dark in there and the lights out.

"And I turned to my right to see who it was, and I got hit in the eye. And then, like, four or five other guys jumped in on that, and I was beaten and hit and slammed to the floor, and I didn't know what was going on.

"I was screaming for help and fighting to get out of there before any more damage was done to me. I didn't know it was coming . . . My mouth was busted, my teeth were all knocked loose. I had ribs caved in. My knees were raw, no skin, scratches. Just pretty messed up."

He says he recognized the man, Abel Hinojosa, who smacked him in the eye, an inmate with whom he never had communicated in any way.

"I had a direct view of him," DeLong says. "The others rat-packed me. I didn't see them."

Immediately after he escaped from the bathroom, DeLong says, he ran to an emergency buzzer in the pod, and, "I pressed and pressed, but nobody came."

The "bubble," which is where detention officers often sit, was empty, so DeLong retreated to his cot. He grabbed a towel to hold over his destroyed eye.

The pain, he says, was awful.

"Blood was all over me," DeLong says. "I sat there, started passing out, as white as a ghost. Then I got a second wind and was ready to go back and get the guys that did this to me. They all backed off, apologized to me. I was the wrong guy."

Jason Lewis, head of the Woods, says he learned about the attack on DeLong within moments and immediately walked over to address the Chicanos' boss, his equal inside Durango.

In a deposition, Lewis said the other guy avowed that DeLong's beating was "unsanctioned," which meant Hinojosa and the others had made a serious mistake.

Several inmates said later that it took about a half-hour before detention officers responded, during which time emotions inside the pod reached a fever pitch.

The Woods and Chicanos lined up across from each other, hurling insults and threatening to wreak violence on each other.

"It was about to pop," Jason Lewis later recalled, but somehow it didn't.

Finally, the officers unlocked a door and allowed DeLong to leave.

A SWAT team armed with guns and tear gas entered the pod, locked it down, and soon started their routine of "knuckle checks" — observing inmates for signs of blood or bruising.

DeLong penned a short statement at the request of authorities before they transported him to the Maricopa Medical Center.

"The Hispanics in the pod said they made a mistake," he wrote that night. "I was not the intended victim!"

DeLong recalled in his deposition that one detention officer told him at the time, "That's what you get for not ducking."

Another allegedly said, "'You're just trying to get your name in the New Times like every one of you SOBs.' They were very hateful."

Except, DeLong added, for detention officer Raymond Ferreira.

"He was telling me how his wife wanted him to quit," DeLong says. "He held my hand right into the surgery room when they were taking my eye, prayed over me. He was a really nice fellow."

Ferreira is a retired firefighter and U.S. Army veteran. When lawyers in DeLong's lawsuit deposed him, he already had left the Sheriff's Office and was working for the Arizona Department of Education.

But in September 2004, Ferreira was deployed to the county hospital to guard DeLong after the Durango assault. He said he never had spoken to the inmate before that night.

DeLong was "a real easygoing guy," Ferreira told lawyers, who had spoken openly about the attack in the Durango bathroom.

"The bathrooms are a problem from this regard," the ex-detention officer testified. "They don't have any security cameras."

Ferreira said he prayed with DeLong at the hospital that night:

"I mean, we're human just like they're human. As far as I'm concerned, anyone [who] was at Durango, until he went before a judge and was found guilty, was just an inmate that was there. [DeLong] was the wrong tall white guy. Tragic. And it cost him an eye."