That inmate, Harold Hempstead, was an orderly in the mental ward when Rainey died. It was Hempstead who first raised concerns about the episode, writing letters and filing complaints with police, the medical examiner and the state attorney about Rainey’s death as well as other alleged abuses inside the TCU.
He and other inmates and mental health staff told the Herald that state prison guards used forms of torture, including dousing prisoners with buckets of chemicals, over-medicating them, forcing them to fight each other and starving them. A group of officers at the prison that served inmates empty food trays, known as “air trays.” was known as the “diet squad’’ and they often preyed on inmates who were too ill to coherently report what had happened, prisoners said.
Around the time of Rainey’s death, another inmate hanged himself from an air conditioning vent, leaving a note sewn into his shorts detailing a litany of alleged abuses against inmates in the mental health unit.
“I’m in a mental health facility … I’m supposed to be getting help for my depression, suicidal tendencies and I was sexually assaulted,” wrote Richard Mair, 40.
The Department of Corrections never investigated Mair’s complaints, and the state attorney’s investigation in the Rainey case was limited to the facts surrounding Rainey’s death.
State investigators said they didn’t find Hempstead to be credible because his timeline was at odds with events reflected on a video surveillance camera. Also, Hempstead could not have seen some of the things he claimed to have seen because his window was covered with paper for part of that time. The document suggests he pressured other inmates to report things that didn’t happen, pointing out that many of the inmates’ statements were “inconsistent with the testimony of correctional personnel, all of the nurses, as well as the physical evidence.”
Hempstead was relocated to another state Friday, yet undisclosed, through a prisoner exchange, making him unavailable for comment. Prison officials said the timing was coincidental.
The report itself is inconsistent in some areas. On page 68, for example, the investigation says that only one inmate, Halden Casey, gave information about being placed in the shower with excessively hot water.
Earlier in the report, it mentions two other inmates: Lawrence Smith said he had been put in the hot shower about a month before Rainey died and that he had reported it to the nurses. Another inmate, Timothy Sliders, said he had been left in the hot shower for 30 minutes, but he managed to avoid injury by standing outside the spray. Another time, when he mentioned the water was comfortable, a guard went into the janitor’s closet and turned it up hotter, he told police detectives according to the report.
Rainey, who grew up in Tampa, was serving a two-year sentence for cocaine possession and had been at Dade for about four months at the time of his death. He reportedly had soiled himself in his cell and refused to clean up, so the officers led him to the second-floor shower, despite other showers being closer to his cell.
Lew, the medical examiner, noted that people with schizophrenia have an impaired ability to compensate for “heat stress” and that this, combined with the powerful medication he was taking, could have contributed to hyperthermia and created a predisposition to cardiac arrest.
She attributed his skin slippage to as an event that happened post-mortem consistent with “exposure to a warm, moist environment” and the effects of changes during the early stages of body decomposition.
Six inmates claimed that Rainey yelled that he wanted out of the shower. No member of the prison staff reported hearing anything.
Julie Jones, secretary for the Department of Corrections, said she was appreciative of the effort by police and the state attorney. The agency remains focused on implementing reforms in the way it cares for mentally ill inmates.
“We will continue to integrate services which ensure these inmates successfully re-enter society and lead crime-free lives upon release,’’ she said.
Following the Herald’s stories, Dade Correctional’s warden and assistant warden were forced out, and, later, then-Secretary Michael Crews stepped down amid political pressure. He was replaced by Jones. Other high-level prison officials have also left, including the prison agency’s inspector general, Jeffery Beasley — the system’s “watchdog” — who was accused by his own investigators of thwarting investigations.
Two of the guards identified as locking Rainey in the shower left their prison jobs, but were allowed to keep their law enforcement certifications. Roland Clarke is now a police officer in Miami Gardens and Cornelius Thompson works as a federal corrections officer.
Rainey’s family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Florida Department of Corrections in 2016. It is still pending.
The U.S. Department of Justice is still investigating possible civil rights abuses in Florida prisons.
