By Donn Esmonde
Buffalo News
BUFFALO, NY — Redemption is sweet.
I don’t know if it’s worth more than four years of injustice. I doubt that it balances the blame unfairly heaped on his head. It likely doesn’t make up for the abuse his kids took in school, or how his family struggled once the paychecks stopped. All I know is, David Padilla had something returned to him that never should have been taken: respectability.
Erie County Sheriff Timothy Howard and his people blamed Padilla for the escape five years ago of Ralph “Bucky” Phillips from the county prison in Alden. Before Phillips — who cut a hole through a kitchen ceiling — was captured six months later, he had fatally shot one state trooper and wounded two others.
Bureaucracy commonly looks for a scapegoat to deflect attention from its own bungling. Padilla, a veteran corrections officer with a stellar record, was the fall guy.
“It was the lie they wanted everyone to believe,” Padilla said.
No one believes it anymore. An arbitrator recently ruled that Padilla, who was working in a security control room at Alden that morning, was not to blame for Phillips’ escape and subsequent deadly rampage. Exonerated, Padilla last week returned to work. The arbitrator’s report said Padilla was fired “without just cause” and should be reinstated and “made whole” for losses since being terminated. Not since LeBron James’ last fast break has there been a slam dunk this definitive.
Simple facts don’t tell the story of a reputation lost and a life shattered. Padilla’s wife has multiple sclerosis and is in a wheelchair. They have five kids, ages 12 to 26. The unemployment checks stopped years ago. Nobody would hire the guy who supposedly let Bucky Phillips escape.
“Financially, we were beaten to the ground,” Padilla told me before he returned to work. “My three oldest kids worked part time to help us out. My wife’s parents helped us, and my fellow officers helped with meals and cash.”
On that fateful morning, Padilla supposedly ignored a horn blast and a computer-screen alert that someone was on the roof. He said that no horn sounded and no alert showed — assertions backed by others and confirmed by the arbitrator. But Howard & Co. needed a scapegoat, and Padilla — for whatever reason — was it.
A State Commission of Correction report (www.nyscoc.com), issued four months after Phillips escaped, blasted Howard and his administration for “policy and procedure breakdowns” that “rise to the level of willful negligence and professional incompetence.” Most of the 26 findings of fault were traced to bureaucratic bungling. They included ignoring directives to place a guard in the kitchen area, disregarding previous security problems in the kitchen and misclassifying Phillips — a career criminal with numerous felonies — as a minor threat.
Beyond that, the report cited so many holes in prison security — from malfunctioning systems to chronic understaffing — that Phillips all but had the door opened for him. None of it comes as a huge surprise. Howard’s administration has been shredded in recent years by state corrections and Justice Department officials for chronic screw-ups at the county lockups. The Phillips escape is just part of a larger picture. So was, it now seems clear, hanging Padilla out to dry.
“The sad thing,” Padilla said, “is nobody wanted to hear my side.”
Not until now, anyway. On his first day back at work last week, I heard that fellow guards lined up to shake Padilla’s hand. They welcomed him back not just to the job, but to respectability in society’s eyes. Nothing makes a man’s day like getting his good name back. Say it loud: David Padilla.
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