Jail commander grilled over dehydration death of inmate in the Milwaukee County Jail
The former commander of the Milwaukee County Jail endured pointed questions Tuesday about whether she misled investigators and failed to preserve key evidence after an inmate's dehydration death last year.
Prosecutors focused Tuesday on the disappearance of four days' worth of vital surveillance video and conflicting statements given to investigators by Major Nancy Evans, who oversaw day-to-day operations of the jail. They grilled Evans for 90 minutes about the death of Terrill Thomas, a 38-year-old inmate with bipolar disorder who went seven days without water in solitary confinement.
Evans' testimony came on day two of the inquest into Thomas' death. A six-person jury is hearing witness testimony and will issue a verdict on whether there's probable cause to criminally charge anybody in connection with the death.
Evans testified she couldn't explain why the surveillance video from the solitary confinement wing had disappeared. The tape would have shown who shut off Thomas' water and failed to communicate that action to other corrections officers. Prosecutors have not presented any evidence to suggest why it's gone.
Evans admitted she should have had the video preserved for Sheriff's Office internal investigators, but didn't think it was necessary to keep it for the Milwaukee Police Department, which was conducting a criminal inquiry. Investigators initially suspected Thomas died of natural causes, Evans said. She learned Thomas died of dehydration four months later.
"Throughout this whole thing, we were cooperating with police fully," Evans said.
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But prosecutors hammered Evans over a flip-flop in her account of the days after Thomas' death.
On the stand, Evans testified that she asked a sheriff's captain, George Gold, to review the surveillance video immediately after Thomas' death. Gold reported he found nothing suspicious, Evans said.
That's dramatically different than what Evans said in March, when she told investigators she never asked Gold to look at the tape until several months after Thomas' death.
In his testimony Tuesday, Gold said Evans directed him to immediately review surveillance video of Thomas’ cell from the week Thomas spent in solitary confinement. Gold said he saw an officer enter a closet, where it’s believed the officer cut off the water to Thomas’ cell and reported his findings to Evans. But Evans never told him to preserve the video, write a report or share what he saw with homicide detectives, Gold said.
In a question to Evans, Assistant District Attorney Kurt Benkley said: "The truth of the matter is you hid this critical evidence from the Milwaukee Police Department because it looked bad for you, didn't you?" Evans replied that wasn't true, and chalked up the discrepancy to mixing up dates.
Evans has since been reassigned to the administrative bureau, where she remains a major. Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. has not commented about details of Thomas' case, other than to point out Thomas was in relatively poor health and had shot a man prior to his incarceration.
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Treatment called inhumane
Evans' testimony came after expert witness Martin Horn, a former top administrator for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and New York City’s jail system, spent the morning lambasting jail staff for their treatment of Thomas.
Horn said jail staff not only deprived Thomas of water before he died of dehydration, but they never gave him a mattress to sleep on, blankets to keep him warm or time out of his cell.
“It’s unconscionable, it’s inhumane, and I don’t see any legitimate penological reason to keep a person in these conditions,” Horn testified.
Prosecutors also elicited testimony from three inmates who were on Thomas' wing before his death. All said they asked various corrections officers and captains to give Thomas water, to no avail.
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After two days of testimony, prosecutors have already made a clear-cut case that several Milwaukee County Jail policies were violated and staff failed to follow several common practices for treating mentally ill inmates. Jurors and prosecutors are considering whether those mistakes crossed into criminal acts.