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A serial rapist cop

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There have been a lot of cop stories lately but none like Ernest Randall Comeaux.

Between the late 1980s and mid-1990s a series of brutal rapes terrorized the southern part of Lafayette Parish as well as several adjacent parishes. The first rape occurred on November 2, 1986. It took the Lafayette Police Department nine years before it officially began investigating the possibility that the sexual assaults were being committed by the same assailant.

Finally, in 1997 the local police were able through DNA evidence to connect six of the rapes to one assailant. It was only then that the local police began looking for a “serial rapist.”

Comeaux was hired by the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Department in 1979. He rose rather rapidly through the ranks, becoming a detective in the department’s juvenile division investigating physical and sexual abuse of children. During that rise through the department, Comeaux was investigated on three separate occasions by the department’s Internal Affairs Division for reasons never made public.

But one complaint to Internal Affairs was made public.

In 1992, a girlfriend of Comeaux filed a complaint with Internal Affairs claiming she had been physically abused by the cop. The girlfriend told Internal Affairs that Comeaux should not be working in the juvenile division because he was a “sex addict” and was “sexually perverted.” The ensuing IA investigation was terminated as “inconclusive” and no action was taken against Comeaux. He remained in the juvenile division.

In September 1997, a law enforcement “task force” was set up to investigate the “serial rapist” case. In addition to the Lafayette Police Department, the task force included the parish sheriff’s department, the FBI, and the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Despite repeated rumors in the Lafayette community that the rapes had been committed by someone in “law enforcement,” the task force failed to investigate the rumors. The task force was disbanded after only seven months of investigation without producing any suspects.

Then in November 1998 Captain James Craft received information from an anonymous caller that investigators should “investigate Randy Comeaux” in connection with the rapes. Comeaux was still assigned to the juvenile division at the time. He also worked part time at a local supermarket as a private “security guard.” Craft and other detectives set up a surveillance of Comeaux’s work habits at the supermarket. They discovered he took a “smoke break” each night at the same time, always throwing the cigarette butt on the pavement nearby.

Following one of these smoke breaks (according to Comeaux), the detectives collected a discarded cigarette butt Comeaux had smoked. They conducted a DNA analysis of the salvia on the cigarette butt. It matched the DNA evidence collected in the “serial rapist” case. The detectives arrested Comeaux and he immediately confessed to being the rapist.

Comeaux is an enigma.

I got to know him in a protection unit at the Wade Correctional Center. The unit had initially been created for ex-cops convicted of criminal wrongdoing but soon morphed into a protection unit for pedophile priests, juveniles convicted as adults, and high-profile government witnesses (which is why I was housed in the unit).

Comeaux and I worked together in the prison laundry. That working relationship evolved into a talking relationship that opened the door to many long, philosophical discussions. The ex-cop spoke freely to me. I was a famous prison journalist, a published author, and a jailhouse lawyer. As strange as it may sound, I became Comeaux’s role model. He craved my attention and interest. He wanted me to either write his “story” or help him write it.

Although I got to know a lot about his personal life, I could never figure out the contradictions that seem to define him.

As a cop in the juvenile division, he came in contact with many children who had been physically and sexually abused. He despised the offenders who abused them.

“No matter what else can be said about me,” he said, “I did not molest children. I was not a child molester. My victims were grown women. They were not children. I’m not like some of the sick child molesting sonuvabitches in this unit. I’m not one of them.”

Yet, as a rapist, he could enter a woman’s home, force her to undress, stick his service revolver in her mouth, draw her panties over his head, and have sex with her. He always carried out his sexual assaults within hours of targeting his victims. He was, as the girlfriend described, a “sex pervert.” He didn’t seem to mind that label, but he deeply resented being called a “sex offender.”

Comeaux was a “good inmate.” He did not violate the rules. He obeyed instructions from prison officials. He diligently performed his prison job assignments. He despised official preferential treatment given to inmates and the corruption associated with that practice.       

Comeaux is serving six life sentences without the benefit of parole. Three of those sentences must be served consecutively. He has already made funeral arrangements for the death that will surely come in prison.

Yet, in a perverse way, he stubbornly clings to a remote hope that he will one day be a free man again. He is a devout Catholic who worships at the altar of the Virgin Mary. He loves the hope she inspires. He hopes that in the end the Virgin Mary will somehow spare him a prison death.

But he understands that a life sentence in Louisiana must be served without the benefit of parole. The only hope for release is through the state’s executive clemency process – a rare hope inasmuch as there are nearly 6,000 lifers in the state’s prison system, and that hope is even more remote for those offenders convicted of rape, much less serial rapes.

I did not like or dislike Comeaux. Everyone in N5 called him “Ernie.” He did not fit into the general prison profile of a sex offender. But beyond a doubt that is precisely what he was: “serial rapist” who stalked the community he was sworn to “protect and serve” in search of vulnerable women to rape.

Local law enforcement efforts to apprehend the “serial rapist” were criticized by victims as being inept. Some of the victims early on theorized the “serial rapist” was a cop. They conveyed to investigators that the rapist knew the right entry points into a residence, carried a .38 special, a flashlight, and had an air of authority about him.

The serial rapist “task force” did bring in a Canadian expert in “geographic profiling” to see if he could pinpoint a “red zone,” the area of the city in which the rapist lived. The expert in fact provided the task force with a “red zone” in which Comeaux actually lived. The task force was either unable or unwilling to do anything with that information.

With all the reports circulating about the serial rapist being a cop, it would seem logical that the task force would determine how many cops lived in the identified “red zone” area. The failure to investigate the “cop involvement” angle legitimized the criticism that local law enforcement never really explored that line of investigation because they didn’t want to “catch a cop.”

The “cop” criticism was fueled by other high profile episodes in the 1990s of cops being involved in violent sexual assaults in Louisiana’s Acadiana parishes. The police eventually solved the Comeaux “serial rapist” case, as they do in most cases, only after getting a lucky break: the anonymous caller suggesting the serial rapist was “Randy Comeaux.”

Comeaux told me that he had confided in only two people about the rapes – a local priest and a New Orleans attorney. One of those two was the anonymous tipster who violated a “privileged communication” to finger him as the “serial rapist.” I tend to believe it was probably the attorney.

Of course, Comeaux’s arrest inevitably triggered political recriminations. The task force was accused of a “cover up” because Comeaux had been one of their own. Victims of the sexual assaults filed civil lawsuits against the sheriff’s department as well as against Comeaux.

In the criminal case, the court appointed a public defender to represent him – and in a stunning, bizarre development, the ex-cop pled guilty within weeks of his 1998 arrest to the six counts of aggravated rape. He would later testify under oath that the decision to plead guilty was based on the legal advice given to him by his attorney.

Why would a man, especially an ex-cop with extensive experience in dealing with the criminal justice system, so quickly accept six life sentences to be served without the benefit of probation, parole or suspension of sentence?

The question begs scrutiny.

The appointed attorney initially advised Ernie to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. He then requested that the trial court appoint a lunacy commission to examine his client to determine his mental competency – not only at the time of the commission of the crimes but also his ability to understand the criminal proceedings being carried out against him at that time.

The attorney then abruptly abandoned the insanity strategy in mid-stream. Without getting a sanity determination, he advised Comeaux to plead guilty. That advice, and Comeaux’s decision to accept it, was influenced by a local criminal justice professor. An aspiring author and a friend of the attorney, the professor met with Comeaux in the local parish jail to discuss the guilty plea option. Comeaux later testified that this meeting had been arranged by his attorney.

“The professor told me,” Comeaux explained, “that I would serve twenty years on the life sentences. He led me to believe – and I did trust his advice – that I would receive sex offender counseling while incarcerated. The advice [the professor] gave me in no way matches the reality of what I faced once I got into the prison system. Life means just that – you spend the rest of your life in prison; you die in prison.”

“That professor lied to me,” Comeaux continued. “He did exactly what my attorney wanted him to do – paint a rosy picture that would entice me to plead guilty. I was in a terribly depressed state of mind. I had scarred and ruined the lives of my victims – not to mention what I had done to my own family, career, and life.”

Emotion seemed to grip Comeaux in the throat.

“I felt this compelling need to express remorse,” he resumed, struggling with the enormity of the situation. “I needed some sense of personal atonement – some way to say I was sorry to my victims, their families, my family, my daughter, my father, my mom. I was so wretched and guilt-ridden – and it was professionally unconscionable for my attorney to waltz that professor into the jail to induce me to plead guilty.”

Whether or not Comeaux was in a legally competent state of mind to understand all the ramifications and consequences of pleading guilty is subject to debate.

However, whether he was in his “right mind” when he committed the series of rapes is not matter of debate. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Some criminal justice “experts,” especially those particularly sympathetic to victims, stress that rape is a crime of violence rooted in the perpetrator’s need to have power over his victim. They minimize the role sexual desire plays in crimes of sexual violence.

That’s not what I learned from Comeaux.

He confided in me more readily than he would anyone else, even his family. I often questioned him about the rapes, probing his psyche in an effort to understand the crimes. He did not possess the common traits associated with other rapists. He was not egotistical, overly macho, or angry at women. He could be an intelligent, seemingly caring, and distinctly moral individual.

Comeaux, I believe, raped women for no other reason than sexual desire – and while the rapes may offer some evidence into his unusual, kinky sexual inclinations, they do not reveal an inclination toward the kind of violence exhibited by many rapists.

Most men, I think, will satisfy their sexual desires, no matter how unusual or kinky, with a willing female partner or a prostitute. But these relationships were too personal to provide Comeaux with a safe venue for his “different desires.”

He learned that after his girlfriend reported him to Internal Affairs.

In addition to his fear of being reported again to Internal Affairs, Comeaux’s self-image and his intense psychological concern about what others thought of him would not let him reveal his strange sexual desires in an intimate relationship. He could, however, release, or express, them through the crime of “rape” – a controlled situation in which he possessed complete anonymity.

How could a man stick a gun in woman’s mouth, and instruct her to tell him how good a lover he was?

“I was good,” Comeaux said. “Some of the women told me I was good. They even asked me to come back – and some didn’t even report the rapes.”

If some of the women he raped did not report the crime, it had nothing to do with their assailant. It was a byproduct of their own shame and embarrassment that forced them into silence.

“You sound as though you liked the sex of rape,” I said.

“I did,” Comeaux replied. “I raped for the sex. I needed the sex. I never raped when I was involved in a relationship with a woman. My sexual desires were, you know, basically met in those relationships.”

Unlike most rapists (who uniformly say, “the bitch asked for it”), Comeaux offered no excuses. His rapes were about satisfying his sexual desires.

“The one thing I am proud of,” Comeaux said, trying to put the best face on his crimes, “I never used my position in law enforcement to find a victim or to case a house. All my victims were randomly selected.”

To commit the kind of crimes Comeaux committed required a particularly disturbed psyche. He drove around neighborhoods he was familiar with. He was comfortable in the “red zone” in which he lived. He surveyed residences and apartment complexes, basing his decision to strike on both instinct and any vulnerability he detected about the dwelling.

“But you never knew who, or what, awaited you behind those locked doors,” I said.

“I really didn’t,” he agreed, “but there is a certain look to a ‘woman alone’ apartment. One of the first signs is the vehicle – most women drive smaller, foreign-made models. Once I was satisfied that it was a ‘woman alone’ residence, I then looked for the best point of entry – and after entry, you take what’s there.”

I understand the social influences of drugs, child abuse, housing projects, street violence, failed educational/religious institutions, and other socio-economic factors that populate prisons with all sorts of offenders.

But I did not understand the likes of Ernest Randall Comeaux – an ex-cop of education, career, social standing, and opportunity who threw it away because of sexual perversity.

He was similar to most of  the other ex-cops in the protection unit—men convicted of violent crimes of passion: sexually abusing children (including their own), raping women, or killing their wives and girlfriends. They could not come to terms with the fact that they were “criminal.” As a group, they believed their criminal conduct was simply a momentary aberration from their duty to protect and serve. They were really “good guys” with guns who protected everyone else from the “bad guys” with guns.

 “Why do you think he did it,” my wife once asked me about Comeaux.

“Fuck if I know,” I replied.

And I still don’t know. What I do know is that his perception of the rape was off the psychosis chart

“I really didn’t hurt any of my victims,” he said, as if that somehow lessened the gravity of the offenses. “And I did not rape any of them while I was on duty, and I did not use law enforcement resources in any way to accomplish those rapes.”

Comeaux found a peculiar honor in these distinctions, frequently expressing an intense dislike for other “corrupt” cops.

“I served my profession honorably,” he said. “I was a good, decent cop for almost twenty years. I worked with compassion and gave dignity to children who were victims of rape and sexual abuse. At least my victims were women – not children. I know what I did was wrong, but I never molested a child.”

That was the Comeaux I knew—a man who could never comprehended the physical degradation and psychological terror his crimes produced.

Two things I am certain about: the Virgin Mary cannot, or will not, save Comeaux from a prison death; and that he will die believing he was a “good cop.”

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The Angola Two

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They started out as the “Angola Four.”

The year was 1972. The Spring. The March breeze had given way to April’s swamp like humidity at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as “Angola.”

The sprawling 18,000-acre prison plantation’s two main crops, cotton and sugarcane, did not sit well with the increasing “black militancy” fomenting among the prison’s African-American inmates—most of whom had graduated out of New Orleans “housing projects” to the city’s notorious Parish Prison in the first leg of their journey to Angola. The prison had the well-deserved reputation of being “the bloodiest prison in America.”

A militant political stew had come to a quick boil in the nation’s prison system after the Attica Prison Riot that occurred the previous September—an uprising that left 33 inmates and 10 prison personnel dead in its wake. The riot found its seeds in the death of “black militant” writer/activist George Jackson who was killed during a bloody escape attempt from San Quentin Prison on August 21, 1971.

Attica was emblematic of prisons across the nation that had become cauldrons of violent political unrest as African-American inmates—interchangeably referred to as “black militants” or “Black Panthers”—began to demand better living conditions and more humane personal treatment.

That spring of ’72, I was a 27-year-old inmate housed on Louisiana death row waiting for an almost certain trip to the state’s electric chair. I kept up with the black militancy at a distance: television, books, magazines, and underground information channels. There were 46 of us on death row living in anticipation of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia—a decision that in June 1972 declared the death penalty nationwide to be unconstitutional as it was then being applied. Louisiana death row inmates were eventually resentenced to life imprisonment.

Twelve days after the start of the Attica riot, a U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge decided Sinclair v. Henderson—the first prisoners’ rights legal decision in Louisiana. Under the legal direction of a young civil rights attorney, Richard Hand, the lawsuit got the federal court to declare long term solitary cell confinement, such as death row, cruel and unusual punishment. The federal court decision also afforded procedural due process requirements in the prison’s disciplinary process: right to a rule book, right to a written disciplinary report, right to a disciplinary hearing, and right to appeal any adverse decision.

In 1971 that was landmark litigation. The “Sinclair Decision,” as it became known, would ultimately open the door to other “reforms” at Angola cementing my jailhouse lawyer reputation both in the prison community and the state’s judicial system. The decision also played a role in one of Angola’s most infamous incidents—the April 1972 killing of Angola prison guard Brent Miller.

In the months after the Attica riot, New Orleans Rep. Dorothy Mae Taylor, the first African-American elected to the Louisiana Legislature since Reconstruction, had become a “radical” voice in the state’s political system. The outspoken lawmaker set her reform sights on Angola. Her interest in Angola ignited the budding, though spirited “black militancy” at the prison. The prison white redneck security regime reacted by locking up scores of African-American inmates in a brutal maximum security unit known as “CCR” [Close Custody Restriction]. One of the three tiers in the unit was designated the “Panther Tier.”

That tier was located directly above death row. In compliance with the Sinclair Decision, prison officials had constructed an “exercise yard” outside the death row cellblocks. The yard was below the Panther Tier allowing communications between the militants and death row inmates.

Several of the militants wanted a copy of the 52-page legal memorandum Richard Hand had prepared in connection with my lawsuit. That memorandum had been declared “contraband” by prison officials because they believed the legal information in it posed a “threat to prison security.” They would only allow it in my possession because it was “legal mail.” I was warned not to share it with other inmates.

Nonetheless, I got a mimeograph copy made of the memorandum and smuggled it into the Panther Tier. Several of the militants used the memorandum as a guide to craft their own lawsuit challenging the conditions on the Panther Tier.

Fearing a second Sinclair Decision and continued prison involvement by Rep. Taylor, Warden C. Murray Henderson instructed his Deputy Warden Lloyd W. Hoyle to release all the militants off the Panther Tier. This action infuriated the prison’s white security staff.

I was hailed a hero by some of the released militants who sent me a lot of “right on, comrade” messages. Henderson and Hoyle, however, saw me in a different light. I was the “trouble-making motherfucker” who had backed them into a corner by distributing the “contraband” memorandum.

Then it happened.

A young white prison guard named Brent Miller was stabbed to death on April 17, 1972 in Pine One, an all-black dormitory on the prison’s Big Yard.

The prison’s redneck regime went crazy. They deputized dozens of local Ku Klux Klan farmers and brought them into the prison. Hundreds of African-American inmates, all designated with the “black militant” label, were locked up in various maximum security cellblocks with as many as five inmates to a cell. There were wholesale beatings and torture inflicted on the “militants” in an effort to find out who killed Miller, and why.

Within weeks four African-American inmates were named the killers: Herman “Hooks” Wallace, Albert Woodfox, Gilbert Montegut, and Charles “Noxzema Black” Jackson.

They quickly became known as “The Angola Four.” 

The prison’s security staff believed Miller’s killing happened for several reasons: Hoyle’s release of the militants from the Panther Tier, the Sinclair Decision, and Rep. Taylor’s activism. Several days after Miller’s killing, one of his brothers, who was also employed at the prison, threw Hoyle through an office plate glass window in the prison’s administration building disfiguring him for life. He would later win a large civil judgment against the state for the attack.

The “Angola Four” quickly dwindled.

Noxzema Black became a state witness against the others. Gilbert Montegut, who was mentally challenged, was found guilty of manslaughter and eventually released from Angola. Woodfox and Wallace were convicted and received life sentences. They would ultimately become “The Angola Two.”

In October 2013, a federal judge freed the 71-year-old terminally ill Wallace into hospice care in New Orleans where he died less than a week later. He had spent the previous 41 years in solitary confinement.  Woodfox was released nearly three years later in February 2016 after having his conviction reversed and ordered released by a federal court. He had spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement.

In 2001, after the publication of my prison memoir, “A Life in the Balance,” I was contacted by a New York supporter of The Angola Two. After reading the memoir, the supporter had a “gut feeling,” as he described it to me, that I had information about the Brent Miller killing.  I told him that I did have some information about the case (namely, the name of an African American inmate who told me in 1973 that he stabbed Miller to death and chronicled to me all the events leading up to the killing) but I did not know how valuable it would be to the Angola Two case.

The supporter arranged a meeting between me and Scott Fleming, an Oakland-based attorney representing The Angola Two. I described to Fleming the 1973 conversation I had with the close friend who gave me a detailed account of how and why the Brent Miller killing took place. The information exonerated Wallace and Woodfox. I had no way of verifying the veracity of the account. It was simply prison information I stored away in the recesses of my brain for 30 years.

Certain aspects of the information intrigued Fleming because it either corroborated or fit into a chronology of other information he had developed about the case. I provided him with a sworn affidavit to use as he saw fit in his effort to free “The Angola Two.”

There are times when each of us, including those in prison, must make choices that are not in our best interests. Our moral compass demands that we make those choices. I had no allegiance with The Angola Two. I had several conversations with Wallace in 1974 but nothing that made us “comrades.”

In 2001, with Scott Fleming at my doorstep, I was embroiled in an all out war with the Louisiana prison system—the impact of my memoir was sending backlash ripples throughout the system. The memoir war came on the heels of my exposure to an investigative, Peabody awarding winning journalist/friend about the relationship between the chief judge of a federal appeals court, a serial pedophile priest, and the corrections secretary of the Louisiana prison system. Those revelations had spawned two criminal investigations, a state legislative investigation, and a judicial ethics investigation—not to mention the national and international media attention it generated in other venues.

The last thing I needed at that juncture was to become involved in the political war the state’s prison system was waging against The Angola Two. Fleming recognized the inherent danger of my position and assured me he would provide me with as much protection as he could. But he wanted the information I had. I gave it to him.

That’s the thing about choices. Make them and be prepared to accept their consequences. In that context, the two black lives of The Angola Two mattered more than my own self-interests.

Two months later I was denied parole for the fifth time. The politics of my case, the official hostility generated by my memoir, and the fallout from the judge/priest pedophilia disclosure all factored into the denial. Then a few weeks later an assistant warden whispered to me, “you should have stayed out of The Angola Two case.”

You don’t always get a chance to pick your battles in prison. Sometimes they get right up in your face and slap the fuck out of you, forcing you to respond back twice as hard.

But the battles leave indelible scars on the spirit, deep within the basin of the soul. There’s no denying it.

Two years before my 2006 release from the Louisiana prison system, my wife saw and knew what battle scar tissue had done to my soul.

“It’s time for you to get on the back of the wagon and let me drive it the rest of the way home,’ she said to me one day as she held my hand during a visit.

And she did – like a warrior giant.

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That white boy called Mark

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Prison is an ugly place. Its physical structures are designed to reinforce a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness.

Casual cruelty is a fixture in these ugly places. It occurs on a daily basis among the kept and too often between the keeper and the kept.

The medical cage was cruel. It was nothing more than an inmate holding pen located one floor below the basement in the New Orleans Charity Hospital before the hospital was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. It would accommodate about two dozen shackled inmates who had been transported to the hospital from prisons across the state for medical treatment not available in the prison setting. Inmates waited for hours manacled in the cage to “see the doctor.”

The medical cage was filthy, which personified the entire hospital. The sub-basement area reeked from odors of filth, infection, and disease. The floor of the medical cage was seldom, if ever, mopped. Dirt and grime were etched both into the floor and walls – a common characteristic of inmate holding pens. A urinal was located in the common area of the cage while a toilet was encased in a separate screened cage. Inmates needing to use the toilet were locked in the screened cage before their restraints were removed. The smell of human defecation often filled the medical cage, overwhelming all the other odors.

The inmates in the medical cage were the most sick in the state’s prison system. They were infected with cancers that needed chemotherapy and radiation; weakened and debilitated by heart disease; or handicapped with paralysis, severed limbs, or physical deformities. As their vital organs failed, they were assigned to “go to Charity for treatment.” By the time they arrived, most had become “dead men walking.”

Diseased inmates were handled and processed like hazardous waste. Each inmate had a medical horror story that generally began in the prison health care delivery system and was perpetuated by the Charity Hospital system.

It was in these system that I learned about a white boy called Mark.

I was sitting in the medical cage six months before the Katrina destroyed the facility. It was December 2004. I was waiting for an EMT – a test ordered to determine the strength of my muscles. I suffered from a severe case of ptosis – a condition so acute that I was legally blind. I had to tape my eyes open each day so I could see. Preliminary diagnosis at Charity led doctors to believe I suffered from either myasthenia gravis or Kearns Sayre Syndrome. I hoped not. I did not want to die old, weak, and crippled in prison. I would have preferred a knife in the back. There was no dignity dying old and wretched in a prison infirmary.

Sitting a few feet from me was the skeletal of what was once a man – forever bound to a wheel chair. His skinny body, nothing more than flesh over bone, was balled up into a grotesque knot in the chair. He peered at the outside world from under a soiled prison jacket that covered his entire body. His eyes were sunken into darkened holes, but amazingly his brain still functioned with clarity.

“They don’t know what I have,” he said. “I’ve begged them to cut off my right leg. It hurts so bad – the pain never stops, always throbbing, just throbbing pain. The leg’s useless now. Cut it off – stop the pain. I’ve begged them. Instead, they put me in diapers and strapped a bag on me for my piss. Just cut off the leg – give me some relief. I asked them what’s wrong with me. They say, ‘you tell us.’ They don’t even know what’s happening to me. At least they could cut off the leg.”

I was a prison reporter, much like the old “crime beat” reporters. My brain was my recorder. It was always ready to click on; to record and preserve some prison moment that would otherwise go unnoticed.

“A Buick Roadmaster was the finest car ever made,” the skeleton voice said. “My father owned one, a 1955 Roadmaster. That’s when a car really was a car – made of steel and heavy metal. The cars today are fiber glass junk – nothing but fiber glass. You can wreck one with a foot. They are as useless as my legs. But a Roadmaster – that was one fine automobile. It would take you anywhere in this country, without complaint.”

The man’s brain was still alive. It processed information and recalled memories. Now it was trapped in the shell of a body. I could only imagine the fear and pain he must have endured watching the physical body shrivel up, life gradually wasting away from its limb. Many times that brain must have recoiled in utter disbelief, horror, and, finally, hopelessness.

“You know that crazy white boy Mark at WCI,” the skeleton voice said. “You know what he did? He castrated himself! Cut his nuts out with a razor blade. He’s a crazy motherfucker. He tried to hang himself, but it didn’t work. He was in lockdown. He kept asking the freeman for a razor blade. Freeman said, ‘bitch, you ain’t gonna do shit, you just fakin’ yoah ass off.’ So the free man finally gave Mark a razor blade – and, you know, that crazy motherfucker cut his balls out. I mean he cut the whole sack off. Then he cut his throat and then he cut himself all over. There was blood everywhere in that cellblock – it took them hours to clean it all up.”

What would make a man sever his own testicles before cutting his throat?

Prison cellblocks are bastions of human madness. They are designed to punish misbehavior and confine mental health problems. The worst prison guards are assigned to supervise these cellblocks, known in the Louisiana prison system as “extended lockdown.” The guards that supervised the state’s lockdown system when I was there were brutal, ignorant, mean-spirited, sadistic, and quite often homosexual predators. They relished their positions of absolute power that allowed them to torment, harass, and agitate the inmates held captive in those man-made cages.

Extended lockdown inmates overwhelmingly suffered from a litany of mental health disorders, including retardation. The “block” was a place where they could get lost in the noise, disease, and deprivation imposed by this punitive system. Throwing feces and urine on each other was a natural dispute resolution mechanism. Every aspect of life in extended lockdown was restricted – hygiene, sleep, food, reading, writing, and faith. Something as simple as a roll of toilet tissue or a sharpened pencil became a precious commodity.

The mind and body deteriorates in that lockdown world, consumed by the monotony and the continual activity of punishment. Most lockdown inmates do not have the love of family to keep them alive with hope. They slowly suffocate from human neglect. Madness becomes preferable to reality; suicide a natural choice over life. The brutal realities of daily life in a cell can so depletes one of hope and purpose that it can force the mind to accept the hand severing the testicles.

“His balls were as useless as my legs,” the skeleton voice continued. “God, I wish I could cut off my leg. My right leg hurts so bad – and these white-coat motherfuckers don’t even know what’s wrong with me.”

Silence suddenly stilled the holding pen. Each man was quietly assessing his own life situation.

A prayer formed on my lips: “God, please do not let me die such a death.” The prayer was consumed by the silence of the moment.

“What did they do to the free man who gave Mark that razor blade?” another voice asked.

“Nothing. The bitch is still working the ‘block.’ You know they gonna protect their own. Everybody knows he gave Mark that razor blade. I mean, who really cares?”

The mixture of anger and defeat in that voice explained the kind of hopelessness that provoked Mark’s self-mutilated suicide. Life in a cellblock is so hopeless with utter despair that it can warp rational thought and cripple the heart with primitive rage. Suicide becomes a natural selection, much like choosing the best apple in the bunch.

I can only assume that is what happened to the white boy called Mark. He felt as useless as skeleton’s legs.

These are the stories my prison reporter mind recalls. They visit me every so often, a reminder of what was and a reminder of how lucky life now is.

2

Kevin Coleman

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In 2001, Coleman was an inmate housed at the David Wade Correctional Center located in North Louisiana. The African American inmate was killed by a prison security one hot July morning that year.

“This is why we love our jobs,” the tall, lanky prison Colonel shouted as he stormed up and down the disciplinary cellblock tier.

“This is why we love our jobs,” the Colonel repeated as he stopped and menacingly stared into each cell at the sullen inmates, daring each to challenge his authority.

None did.

The Colonel was leading a “cell extraction team” that morning. The team was comprised of other ranking security personnel at the prison. The team had just “extracted” Coleman from his cell.

Armed with an electronic “stun shield”—a device that administers a 50,000-volt electrical charge—the extraction team had hit Coleman with three charges. The team then beat, kicked and stomped him into a submissive, fetal position before dragging him out of the cell. One of the lower ranking guards—probably trying to impress his supervisors—then jumped up and down on Coleman’s head while another guard used a water hose to wash away the feces produced by the electrical charges.

As the Colonel continued to walk up and down the tier, the two lower ranking guards continued to kick and beat Coleman’s unconscious body. This extraction process was called “non-lethal force”—a process that too often allows some out-of-control guards to inflict as much pain and physical damage to the inmate as possible.

Once the physical abuse was over, the extraction team dragged Coleman’s limp body into a cell equipped with a “restraint chair.” This torture device completely immobilizes the inmate. His head, arms, legs, and chest are tightly restrained by leather straps. The “chair,” as it is known in the prison lexicon, is supposed to be used only in extreme circumstances when an inmate is in an uncontrollable state of violence posing a serious risk to himself or others.

Kevin Coleman was found dead in the restraint chair the following day from what prison officials described as an “apparent heart attack.” Based on the detailed information that had been given to me by inmate witnesses, I suspect Coleman was dead or near complete respiratory failure when he was strapped in the chair. The three electrical charges were enough to stop his heart, not to mention the brutal beating that was more than enough to kill a mule.

There is no doubt that Coleman was a problem, even a dangerous inmate. He had been transferred from a parish jail to the Wade facility because jail officials could no longer deal with him. The paranoid schizophrenic inmate immediately became a disciplinary problem at the Wade facility, accumulating a record of disruptive and assaultive behavior. He had attacked guards and other inmates alike, refusing to cooperate with prison authority at any level and refusing to acclimate to the prison peer pressure system. Large doses of psychotropic medications could not quiet the demons that tormented him.

On the day of the cell extraction, Coleman was scheduled for a hearing in a local courtroom on an assault charge against a prison guard. He refused to put on an orange jumpsuit given to him by the security escort team assigned to take him to court. All inmates were required to wear “jumps” to the local courthouse – a practice that reflected the racism, hostility, and contempt the local officials harbored against inmates in general.

No one will ever truly know who, or what, precipitated the confrontation that morning between Coleman and the “trip officers.” Those officers were a privileged, and corrupt, group—arrogant, quick to curse and humiliate inmates being escorted to court. They would routinely lie to “get an inmate” with a disciplinary report if he refused to cooperate with their way of handling “court trips.”

Whatever motivated him that fateful morning Coleman refused to put on the jumpsuit as he instructed to do by the trip officers. Wade officials said every non-lethal measure available was used to get Coleman to cooperate and put on the jumpsuit. It was only after these non-lethal efforts failed, they said, that the cell extraction team entered the inmate’s cell with the electronic stun shield. Prison officials said only one electrical charge was inflicted, and that Coleman was still fighting and resisting after it was administered. At that point, officials said, a decision was made to put Coleman in the restraint chair.

Inmate witnesses, however, vehemently disputed that official account. They said Coleman was “hit three times” with the stun shield, brutally beaten inside his cell, and dragged out of the cell where the beating continued before he was placed in the restraint chair.

I gave my wife the details I had about Coleman’s death. She alerted the Associated Press in New Orleans about the death. They ran a story about the death that would have otherwise gone unnoticed by the public.

Wade officials rushed to do “damage control” by putting their official “spin” on Coleman’s death. They contacted officials with the American Correctional Association – a group with whom the Louisiana corrections system maintained an incestuous relationship through the ACA accreditation process – who defended the use of the restraint chair.

The local sheriff’s department said it would “investigate” the matter. That was like the fox, feathers hanging out its mouth, saying it would investigate the disappearance of the hen. Detectives interviewed several inmate witnesses who were then quickly transferred to other state penal facilities on trumped up disciplinary charges.

Kevin Coleman’s death ultimately melted away into an official black hole.

There are scores of Coleman-like deaths each year in the nation’s prison system. They are official murders that rarely garner media attention. Coleman’s death would have gone unrecorded had my wife not called the Associated Press. That media attention at least forced Wade officials to explain, or cover up, what happened.

No one should face death like Coleman faced it. His death would be “murder” in any society – except in prison disciplinary units, military torture chambers, and renegade police interrogation rooms.

There are situations in prison when force, both lethal and non-lethal, are necessary to control a violent situation, but a mentally disturbed inmate refusing to put on a jumpsuit is not one of those situations.

Official crimes are committed routinely in the world of prison – and there is no official accountability for them. No one was, or ever will be, held accountable for Kevin Coleman’s death.

And, indeed, that as why the tall, lanky Colonel loved his job.

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A Pandemic fear.

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If I should die before you wake,

Forgive

My every mistake

My every harsh word

My every disappointment

My every frailty

If I should die before you wake,

Remember

Our love began on the dark side of the mountain

We crawled through every ravine

We scaled every jagged cliff

And we reached the top together

Hand in hand

If I should die before you wake,

Know

That every moment spent with you gave me joy

That every breath I took was for and because of you

That you gave me courage in the darkness

That your every touch and grace gave my soul meaning

If I should die before you wake

Keep close

To your heart that each morning

I awaken you was precious

To the very fiber of your being

That you were my moral compass

To your soul

That my whole life was defined by your grace

If I should die before you wake

Take care

Of my boys

They were more than dogs to me

Their undying love and devotion gave life meaning

They gave me peace, protection, and purpose

They were friends in the foxhole

If I should die before you wake

Do not

Mourn for me because I will be fine

On the other side

Recall all our precious moments

The pleasures, the happiness, the gestures, the kindness

The wonderful love and life we shared

If I should die before you wake

Never

Put me in the ground

Cremate my remains

With your small hands throw them in the breeze

On our favorite cliff

And let the winds scatter them across the valley

We love

If I should die before you wake

Hold dear

To your heart that I will sit at the creek’s edge

Until you pass out of the tunnel of life

That you will cross the creek to me, I promise

And that, together, hand in hand

We will walk down the new path

God has given us

If I should die before you wake

I always loved you

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Copyright © 2019 Jodie Sinclair| Author