By St. John Barned-Smith
Houston Chronicle
HOUSTON — When a Sheriff’s Office compliance team found Terry Goodwin in his Harris County Jail cell, the mentally ill inmate had been left there unattended for weeks, surrounded by bug-infested food containers, a feces-clogged toilet and ropes from his shredded jail uniform hanging from the ceiling.
Authorities investigating those conditions later said paperwork signed by the detention officers tasked with Goodwin’s care stated that his cell had been regularly checked and the inmate was in good condition.
On Tuesday, a grand jury indicted the two Harris County detention officer sergeants believed to be responsible for leaving Goodwin unattended in his fetid cell with two counts of tampering with a governmental record, a felony.
Ricky D. Pickens-Wilson and John Figaroa - civilian employees - could face two to 10 years in jail and fines up to $10,000 if convicted, said officials with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.
The indictment comes as Sheriff Adrian Garcia prepares for an expected mayoral run, and where his stewardship of the facility - one of the largest in Texas - could become an issue in the campaign.
The charges announced Tuesday stem from an incident in the fall of 2013, when Goodwin, a 24-year-old mentally ill inmate, was booked into the Harris County Sheriff’s Office jail at 1200 Baker St. on a marijuana charge while on probation.
His plight came to light last fall, when a whistleblower contacted state authorities and the media, prompting the sheriff to order an internal investigation and the creation of a new bureau to monitor jail conditions.
“You wonder how something like this could develop,” said Julian Ramirez, chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. While investigators were not able to determine exactly how long Goodwin had been in the cell, it was at least “several weeks,” Ramirez said.
The grand jury had been presented with evidence Figaroa had signed off on a cell check form saying Goodwin was in good condition, and also made entries into the sergeants’ “pass on book,” indicating that Goodwin’s cellblock had been searched, even as he’d ordered Wilson’s cell to be skipped. Pickens-Wilson also had signed forms stating Goodwin’s cellblock had been searched.
“In fact, no searches were conducted in inmate Terry Goodwin’s cell,” Ramirez said. “The investigation indicated that Mr. Goodwin was living in some unsanitary conditions which were unsafe.”
One of the justifications the jail employees gave was Goodwin was a “combative inmate,” Ramirez said.
“At least one of the detention sergeants did not want a ‘use-of-force’ to be necessary, and so they chose to avoid the issue and simply not search the cell,” he said.
Goodwin was declared incompetent to stand trial and spent time at a mental hospital before returning to court and pleading guilty to assaulting a detention officer. He is currently serving a three-year sentence in a Dallas-area prison.
Robert Goerlitz, president of the Harris County Deputies’ Organization, which represents sworn law enforcement and the jail’s detention officers, said he was “stunned” that members of the Sheriff’s Office’s command staff had not been more closely scrutinized.
“It seems like everything’s being dumped on these two sergeants,” he said. “If they’re being looked at for failure to supervise, who’s supervising these two sergeants? It doesn’t just stop there.”
Ramirez said the investigation examined whether other laws had been broken, but were unable to find evidence that jail staff had maliciously sought to deprive Goodwin of his civil rights.
The incident first became public in September 2014, after an ABC-13 report that sparked a criminal investigations by the Sheriff’s Office and the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.
The commission checks county jails across the state every year.
“We had not seen anything remotely like that at annual inspections, which are unannounced,” said Brandon Wood, the commission’s executive director. Subsequent surprise inspections did not find similar issues, he said.
The Goodwin case is one of the latest in a series of long-running problems over the last decade for the Harris County Jail complex, which holds more about 8,600 inmates and employs approximately 1,800 detention officers.
In February, a grand jury declined to indict eight sheriff employees of criminal wrongdoing for an incident in 2014 where an inmate later died. The inmate said he was going to pass out as he was taken to an infirmary, after being forcibly removed from his cell. He died in a hospital.
In 2014, Garcia fired five detention officers after they were charged with smuggling contraband into the jail. And in 2012, he fired two detention officers and a deputy for failing to help a 72-year-old mentally ill inmate who died after one of the detention officers punched him in the face and left him bleeding in a cell.
The jail also came under the scrutiny of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 2008 before Garcia became sheriff. It recommended “remedial measures needed to ensure that conditions at the jail meet federal constitutional requirements” related to medical care, mental health care and sanitation.
In a statement released by the Sheriff’s Office, Garcia said Figaroa and Pickens-Wilson had been relieved of duty.
“While this incident should have never happened, I hope that it does not tarnish the good work of the many honest and hardworking detention employees who do their job with honor and pride, and uphold the public’s trust every day,” Garcia said in the statement.