By Scott Sandlin
Albuquerque Journal
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Christopher Shields, arrested for driving while intoxicated, was distinctly uncooperative and belligerent when he was booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center a few days before Christmas 2011.
Mouthiness cost him.
An indictment charges that one corrections officer took him into the shower room and beat him, then that officer emerged and another went at him.
A trustee at the jail — an inmate given the privilege of cleaning, and thus being out of his cell on the graveyard shift — testified Monday that there was so much blood in the shower area afterward that he had to dispose of the mop head when he was finished.
The trial of Kevin James Casaus, charged with violating the civil rights of a pretrial detainee by using excessive force, and then lying about it, began Monday in U.S. District Court before Judge William P. Johnson.
Demetrio Juan Gonzales, the ex-Corrections officer who began the beating, confessed to it in a plea agreement and was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison. He is expected to testify today in the case being prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Baker said in an opening statement that Casaus initially stood by while his 6-foot-3, 200-pound colleague beat Shields bloody.
“What followed was an effort to cover up,” he said. Casaus told a detective investigating the incident that nothing happened to Shields and that there was no blood in the shower, but Gonzales himself is expected to say that is untrue.
Defense attorney Arturo Nieto deferred making an opening statement.
Fara Gold, a DOJ attorney from Washington, D.C., walked witnesses through video footage taken from the jail’s 24-hour monitoring cameras that show officers going into the shower area, where they knew there were no cameras, with Shields.
A paralegal with the Office of the Public Defender testified that when she conducted intake interviews a few hours after the incident about 4 a.m., Shields initially didn’t respond when his name was called. When she finished up with other interviews and called his name again, he came forward slowly, limping, and sat down with pain etched on his face. He said he’d just been beaten up in the shower, and when she called over a corrections officer to ask about reporting it, she said she was told it was the guards.
John Avila, a councilman at the Pueblo of Sandia, was serving time in MDC for a DWI and working as a trustee cleaning up at night when he saw Gonzales, who had been working in the fingerprint unit, take Shields into the shower, holding him “by his T-shirt collar like a rag doll.”
He heard shouts and then grunts emanating from the room and then was called to clean up the mess - blood spattered up the walls and puddled on the floor.
Asked about his reaction, he said he was “confused. Because I pretty much knew what happened in the shower room” and understood that it was evidence.
Copyright 2013 Albuquerque Journal