By Julie K. Brown
The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.
NEW YORK — By her own account, Tova Noel was the last person to see Jeffrey Epstein alive.
It was the evening of Aug. 9, 2019 — and Noel, a rookie corrections officer, was conducting the 10 p.m. inmate count on Epstein’s tier at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the 12-story federal detention facility in downtown Manhattan.
Epstein, arrested July 6, 2019, on federal sex-trafficking charges, was in cell 220 on the L tier of the Special Housing Unit, lying on a mattress on the floor beside his bunk. Noel peered into the small window in the door and knocked. Epstein put his hand up, acknowledging her.
He asked her to take the cord of his sleep apnea device under his door and plug it in, which she did. It’s not clear whether she ever entered his cell.
“Did anything seem unusual with him?” an investigator asked Noel.
“No. See, there’s exceptions being made for Epstein because he is Epstein,” Noel said. No other inmates were permitted to have devices with long cords, but he was an exception, she explained.
Some eight hours later, the other officer on duty, Michael Thomas, would find Epstein dead in his cell, though neither he nor Noel would explain what he saw or heard that night until two years later.
Noel had been scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday, but her session was postponed on Wednesday. A new date has not yet been set.
Still, when Noel testifies, it will only be the second time she has been formally questioned about the night of Epstein’s death, and it could provide the most detailed accounting yet of Epstein’s last days.
In the aftermath of Epstein’s body being found, both corrections officers were allowed to leave the detention center and go home without providing statements, records show. By the time the FBI tried to question them two days later, they refused to talk on the advice of their attorneys.
Both were subsequently suspended from their jobs — and then indicted on criminal charges in November 2019 for falsifying their inmate counts that night. Prosecutors said at the time that while Noel recorded counts and rounds that night, she and Thomas were sleeping and surfing on their computers during the overnight shift.
No corrections officers conducted rounds in Epstein’s unit from 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 9 until 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10 , when his body was discovered, prosecutors said.
Noel and Thomas’ 2021 interviews were conducted by agents with the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, which has no prosecution powers. Noel was interviewed for six hours, and Thomas sat for four. The interviews were part of a deferred prosecution agreement that led to all charges being dropped in December 2021.
The interviews, contained in the DOJ’s Epstein library, are wide ranging, but focus primarily on policy failures — such as understaffing, excessive overtime and misconduct that the DOJ later said contributed to Epstein’s suicide.
The oversight committee’s investigators are skeptical about some of the events around the time Epstein died. Among the questions raised are why Noel made multiple cash deposits into her bank account beginning in 2018, including a $5,000 deposit made 10 days before Epstein’s death that was flagged in a bank suspicious activity report.
“Our goal is to understand whether this was simply a series of failures inside the Bureau of Prisons or whether additional questions remain unanswered,” Committee Chairman James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, said in a statement announcing the request for testimony.
Last week, the Herald reported that an inmate housed at MCC told the FBI he overheard guards talking about covering up Epstein’s death on the morning he died.
“Breathe! Breathe!” he recalled officers shouting about 6:30 a.m. Then he said he heard an officer say “Dudes, you killed that dude.” A female guard replied “If he is dead, we’re going to cover it up and he’s going to have an alibi — my officers,” the FBI notes said.
The inmate’s account has not been substantiated, and neither officer has been implicated in Epstein’s death.
Both the New York Medical Examiner and the Justice Department concluded that Epstein died by suicide, but a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s family, Dr. Michael Baden, maintains that Epstein’s injuries were more consistent with strangulation than suicide by hanging.
Noel, then 32, had been working as a corrections officer at MCC for a year. But little has been reported about her background — and her history growing up — first in St. Croix, then in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, where she scored so high on placement tests that she skipped several grades.
This story is based on court records and documents released by the Justice Department as part of the Epstein files.
Born in Antigua, Noel was raised by her single mother and her grandparents. Her mother emigrated from St. Croix to Tannersville, Pa., in the Pocono Mountains, to pursue an education when Noel was young, leaving her with relatives. When she was 13, Noel joined her mother in Pennsylvania, where she excelled in high school, graduating in 2005 when she was 16.
Her mother, Sylvia Ephraim, remarried and had a son while earning a doctorate degree in philosophy. The family moved to the Bronx, and Dr. Ephraim became a highly regarded college professor at Berkeley College in Manhattan.
After graduation, Noel tried to join the military, but her mother refused to allow her to enlist as a minor. She attended community college in New York until she was 19, then enlisted in the Army National Guard. In 2012, she served in active duty in Kuwait during Operation Enduring Freedom, court records show.
In 2013, Noel’s 7-year-old half-brother and his mother were murdered in St. Croix. Other than a few briefs about the case the St. Croix newspaper at the time, few details are known about what happened. The killer was never arrested. Noel’s court records show she was deeply affected by the loss and suffered from depression afterwards.
While serving in the National Guard, Noel became a naturalized citizen, worked several jobs, and earned an associate’s degree. She was honorably discharged from the Army in 2014, then obtained her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from John Jay College in New York in 2017, records show.
In June 2018, the Bureau of Prisons hired her as a corrections officer at MCC. She quickly learned that there was a “BOP way,” and an “MCC way,” depending on who was conducting her training, according to her lawyer, Jason Foy, who submitted a background letter as part of her deferred prosecution agreement in 2021.
She said she was forced to sign a document that confirmed she had trained for the SHU, even though she did not get the training. This was just one of many violations in policy that were condoned at the prison, she and her lawyer both noted. Never looked at cameras the night of Epstein’s death
Her lawyer, in the deferred prosecution letter, said Noel had never worked the SHU before Aug. 9, when she was assigned to work a double – from 4 p.m. to midnight, then midnight until 8 a.m. on Aug. 10 . Thomas was working a triple shift, records show.
The night of Epstein’s death, Noel said she didn’t see anyone entering or leaving Epstein’s tier, but she also admitted she wasn’t paying attention. She stated she never looked at any of the cameras that were operating in real time, and it wasn’t until later that she learned that none of the cameras – except one in the immediate area of the bubble, or guard’s station – were actually working.
Her lawyer maintained that, being inexperienced, Noel listened to Thomas when he told her that the rounds were not necessary that night. Thomas pulled a hoodie over his head and slept most of the shift, her lawyer said.
The Herald has not been successful in reaching Noel’s attorney.
The questions during her 2021 OIG interview focused mostly on policy: What she was supposed to do and what she did. She answered most of the questions with “I don’t know.”
She testified that she was not informed about many of the requirements of her job, and claimed she didn’t know that Epstein was required to have regular checks. When she first arrived on the Aug. 9 , she said she didn’t even know who Epstein was and later had to look him up on the computer.
She recalled that after Epstein returned from visiting his lawyers about 8 p.m. on Aug. 9 , one of the lieutenants placed him in a shower stall to make a personal, unmonitored phone call. The lieutenant then ended his shift, leaving Epstein on the phone in the shower stall.
That call, which investigators later learned was to his girlfriend in Belarus , lasted 20 minutes. Noel removed the phone, and left him in the shower stall to go to use the restroom, she testified. No cellmate
When she returned, someone else had placed Epstein back in his cell. She claimed that she was unaware he was alone, without a cellmate, despite instructions — issued both in writing and verbally to officers in the unit — that Epstein was not to be left alone. At all times, he was to be housed with a cellmate.
His cellmate, Efrain Reyes, had been mysteriously moved that morning, and no one admitted they knew he was removed.
Noel said that at about 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10 , Thomas went up to Epstein’s tier to serve him his breakfast tray. He immediately noticed Epstein was in distress and entered his cell. He shouted to Noel to get the “cutters,” – which was unexplained in Noel’s transcript.
Noel said she stood outside Epstein’s cell and did not have a clear view of Epstein’s body. She initially claimed she never looked inside to see what was happening, which the OIG agent found implausible.
The agent: “So this is what I want to know. What did you see? What could you see? Everything. Because I’m getting confused with what you’re telling me. I thought you said you never looked in. You never saw anything.”
Noel: “— goes in the door first, I don’t see anything. I hear a rip and then he lowers him to the floor.”
She said she never saw Epstein hanging – and only saw Epstein briefly when Thomas held Epstein under his arms and brought him to the floor of the cell.
She explains: “I just witnessed when the top part of his body went to the floor.”
After Epstein’s death, the FBI subpoenaed both her and Thomas’ cell phones, as well as their financial records. Noel’s bank, JP Morgan Chase, flagged to the FBI about a dozen cash deposits made to one of her accounts, the largest of which — $5,000 – was deposited on July 30 , just days before Epstein’s death.
She was not asked about the deposits during her OIG interview.
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This story was reported with the assistance of Sourcebase.ai
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