Was the prison killing of a Conn. inmate preventable?
By KATIE MELONE
Hartford Courant
HARTFORD, Conn. — Prison officials say they didn’t know Cales had a connection to Waldemar Rivera — who is charged with stomping Cales to death to avenge his cousin’s death — when they placed the two in the same, 114-man prison block. Nor were they aware that Rivera threatened Cales in the days leading up to the killing.
Prison violence is not rare, but should a prison administration be more proactive in ferreting out potentially problematic inmate relationships?
Yes and no, corrections experts said in a series of interviews, citing an agency’s inability to guard against every attack, but also a state’s obligation to maintain “care, custody and control,” the mantra of modern prison management.
“You have to know a fair amount of detail about a crime and who is in your system,” said Michael Jacobson, who oversaw Rikers Island as commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction from 1995 to 1998. “Obviously, you want to try to know as much as possible. There’s no way you’re going to know everything.
“Having a homicide is not a small incident; it is a large and public and obvious system failure,” he added. “You can’t be a correctional administrator and never experience one, but your goal is to do anything in your power to keep anything like that from happening.”
In another high-profile system failure, two Connecticut death row inmates briefly scuffled in May after they were released into a corridor at the same time.
Russell Peeler Jr. suffered minor injuries in the fight at Northern Correctional Institution. Daniel Webb, the alleged assailant, was not injured, police said.
In Connecticut, the Department of Correction monitors prisoner connections by asking inmates if they have relatives in the system, or a “problem” with any other inmate in the system. Inmates, however, are asked just once, when they are admitted into the system and go through what is referred to as an intake assessment.
Beyond that, “we won’t know unless they tell us,” said Joan M. Ellis, administrator of the DOC’s freedom of information office.
That appears to have been the case with Cales and Rivera, both of whom responded at intake that they did not have any problematic relationships with other inmates, according to prison records.
“If this was a high-profile crime, it would not have taken a whole lot for the department of correction to ask ... ‘Who are the victims? What are their names, and do they have relatives in custody?’” said Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services. Cales “wasn’t sentenced to death, but he got a death sentence because the DOC couldn’t figure out how to keep clear potential enemies away from each other,” she added, referring to Cales.
“The security of our correctional facilities and the protection of the public, our staff and the inmates is paramount in all we do,” responded Brian Garnett, Connecticut DOC spokesman. “We continue to investigate this incident and will address any enhancements that may be identified.”
As for the court system’s role, asking victims if they have any friends or relatives who might have conflicts with defendants is beyond the scope of the Office of Victim Services, says Rhonda Stearley-Hebert, a spokeswoman for the state’s judicial branch.
Investigators at the prisons also gather intelligence about inmates as a way to prevent prison violence, said Garnett. But prison officials were not aware that Rivera had started to threaten Cales about two weeks after he had arrived on N-pod, the cellblock at McDougall-Walker Correctional Institution where the two men were housed at the time of the killing.
“You better leave,” Rivera told Cales around May 9, according to Rivera’s account.
Cales did not heed the warning. So, on May 13, when Cales was eating lunch, Rivera walked up to Cales, knocked him to the ground and stomped on his head in a quick succession of blows.
“If I was doing life, I would have killed the guy, I just wanted to teach him a lesson,” Rivera told guards minutes after the incident, apparently unaware Cales was dead.
Connecticut’s last prison murder was in 1999, when John Barletta, a convicted murderer serving 60 years, strangled his cellmate, Kenneth Briggaman, a convicted robber.
Barletta and Briggaman had shared a cell for one day at the time of the murder; Barletta’s previous cellmate was so scared of him he bit a prison guard in order to get an immediate transfer out of their cell.
Between 2001 and 2005, 240 inmates were killed in state prisons across the United States, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice.
In Massachusetts, shaken by the 2002 prison murder of John Geoghan, a high-profile pedophile priest, a reform panel established in the wake of the killing recommended that prison officials increase the frequency of inmate screenings in an effort to better separate inmates with conflicts.
Unlike the Cales case, however, it was clear that Geoghan would have been a potential target.
Shortly after being sentenced to 10 years for fondling a 10-year-old boy, Geoghan was transferred to a prison where he was killed by a fellow inmate who had been molested as a child and professed hatred for pedophiles, which was known by prison officials.
“Good classification systems tend to look for those kinds of things,” said Elyse Clawson, executive director of the Crime & Justice Institute, referring to the connection between Geoghan and his killer, and the one between Rivera and Cales. “There is a breakdown because something like that passed them.”
Cales and Rivera, both longtime criminals with lengthy prison records, each last re-entered prison in May 2006.
They were both held at Hartford Correctional Center, Rivera for a robbery charge; Cales for the May 27 car chase that killed his ex-girlfriend, Maryneliz Jimenez, 21, and a group of her friends on Chamberlain Highway in Berlin.
On the day of the fatal crash, Cales stalked Jimenez and chased her car at speeds up to 120 mph before her car went off the road, killing all five passengers, sending one body into a tree. “I got her now, I got her now,” Cales said as he neared Jimenez’s car, according to court records.
Meanwhile, in September 2006, Rivera was transferred to McDougall-Walker when he was sentenced to seven years in prison on the robbery charges he faced.
In wasn’t until 19 months later, this past April, that Cales also arrived at McDougall after being sentenced to 79 years. According to court documents, it was around that same time that Rivera had learned of his cousin’s 2006 death at Cales’ hands.
“He killed my cousin and her friends,” Rivera told a correction officer moments after the assault, according to an arrest warrant. “I told him before to get out of the unit and I couldn’t look at him anymore.”
Copyright 2008 The Hartford Courant