Accountability lacking in beating of inmate
As jail episode fades, woman is now dead
This much is clear about Bonita Bolden's first minutes in the Erie County Holding Center: She annoyed the booking deputies.
She either moved too slowly or she would not hold still for a pat-down search. So she was ushered down a hallway and into an isolation room with no security camera.
Bolden — 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighing just 106 pounds — was surrounded by as many as four deputies, male and female.
She took a series of blows. The next night, hospital doctors recorded her injuries: A bruise to her temple. Fractures to the eighth and ninth ribs. A collapsed lung. Excess fluid building in the pleural cavity, the space surrounding the lungs.
Deputies did not immediately rush Bolden to a hospital because, they later told a criminal detective, she did not complain of injuries. She had stood for her booking photo and then walked to a holding room that evening, Oct. 14, 2005.
But soon the pain began. She found it difficult to breathe and wrapped a garbage bag around her midsection because it seemed to support her ribs. She lingered in the holding pen for 24 more hours, while other women came and went.
Finally, an inmate who seemed to be on good terms with a higher-ranking officer got her taken to a nurse and, eventually, to Millard Fillmore Hospital.
Family members said she never forgot the attack. She died this May, at age 55, from an unrelated condition.
Bolden cooperated with an internal investigation, which produced no charges against any deputy. But when she did not cooperate with the sheriff's criminal detectives, they dropped their criminal probe, said Brian D. Doyle, the sheriff's chief of administrative services.
So no jail deputy was ever charged or disciplined.
Her survivors said Bolden was torn between pursuing the matter or letting it go. She had moved away and feared that nothing good would come from further contact with Buffalo.
Sheriff Timothy B. Howard has complained that the federal investigation into his Holding Center downtown and Correctional Facility in Alden recited stories of beatings that are so vague they cannot be verified.
But the attack on Bolden was examined by his own internal affairs unit, which recommended a criminal investigation, according to officials familiar with the matter.
"This incident was well-known. Everybody in that booking area knew. This got turned over to the Detective Bureau for criminal investigation," said a now-retired sheriff's officer who asked to remain unidentified because he still has some loyalty to Howard.
"Maybe she did mouth off to them," he said, "but she didn't deserve the beating she got."
For reasons that remain unclear, the Sheriff's Office never reported the incident to the State Commission of Correction even though one of its inmates had suffered an injury that required medical attention.
Doyle explained that the injuries could have been inflicted during Bolden's struggle with Buffalo police or the fight with her husband that led to charges of assault, harassment and resisting arrest.
County Attorney Cheryl A. Green, in moving to dismiss the recent Justice Department lawsuit, said the federal agency cannot show that jail managers condone isolated abuses, therefore the federal government cannot prove that Erie County engages in a pattern or practice to deny civil rights.
But what if those in charge know about abuse but, for whatever reason, do not discipline those responsible? Does inaction create a pattern?
"Sure," said Roger Krieger, who retired as the assistant chief of operations for the Erie County Sheriff's Office in 1988. He went on to serve as police chief in the Florida community of Crystal River and then as assistant superintendent of a multicounty detention center there.
"You are the boss. You are the one being held accountable," he said of a sheriff or any top law enforcement official. "You are the one the voters put in there or, in my case, the City Council put in there. If I have something that is wrong, if my officers are stopping cars without cause and that gets brought to my attention, if I fail to respond, I am condoning it."
One veteran Holding Center deputy said disciplinary actions stemming from abuse or beatings are rare.
Doyle counters that in this decade, the department has fired an average of one deputy a year for "inappropriate conduct," which may involve abuses against inmates.
"If we have information that one of our deputies did something wrong, we will take action," Doyle said. "But if we have a witness who does not cooperate and we have no corroboration, it is impossible for us to proceed in criminal court and/or a disciplinary hearing."
Bolden moved to Florida after the attack to live with a daughter, and then to Georgia, to live with a son when the Air Force stationed the daughter in South Korea. By the time the criminal detectives wanted to talk with his mother, she wanted to be left alone, said Bolden's son in Atlanta, Jerry Ragland.
"She went downtown and tried to pursue it," Ragland said. "And nothing ever came of it. The way she told me was that she was in fear that something would happen to her. She felt that she didn't feel safe in Buffalo anymore. She didn't feel comfortable in Buffalo anymore. She had a cellmate who was telling her about a couple of bad things that had happened."
"It is a common phenomenon," said Karima Amin, founder of the group Prisoners are People Too, whose members watched Howard explain his budget for 2010 to a County Legislature committee Tuesday.
Amin said she knows of inmates who say they have been threatened if they speak out.
"They fear retaliation," she said. "They fear reprisals."
The Buffalo Police Department's Professional Standards Division was the first to investigate, concerned that city police might have inflicted Bolden's injuries.
Lt. Carl A. Terranova and Capt. Harold M. McLellan talked with her in the hospital, according to a transcript of the conversation.
Terranova: "OK. Were you ever kicked or punched or struck or ... or hurt by the Buffalo police officers?"
Bolden: "Not at all."
After learning Bolden had suffered a collapsed lung and broken ribs while in the Holding Center, the city investigators seemed surprised that it took so long for jail personnel to get her to a hospital.
McLellan: "You said you asked to go to the hospital. Did you ask immediately ... ?"
Bolden: "When I noticed the ... the hurting. But I didn't notice it immediately cause I was crying."
McLellan: "Well, hold on one second. You had a confrontation with them ... a physical struggle with them in the Holding Center. How long after that did you ask to go to the hospital?"
Bolden: "Probably about a half an hour later."
McLellan: "And then when were you ... when did they let you go to the hospital ... how long?
Bolden: "About a day later."
Terranova: "A day later?"
When the Buffalo internal affairs officers determined they had no case against any Buffalo police officers, they sent the Bolden transcript to the sheriff's Professional Standards Division.
The sheriff's internal investigators questioned jail deputies but did not get a clear picture of what occurred. Still, the criminal inquiry began.
Detective Sharon A. Savannah, now retired, began probing the matter as a felony-level assault. Records indicate that she talked to at least four jail deputies who should have known what happened.
They described a loud, highly agitated Bolden, who was complaining that police should have arrested her husband, not her. They described behaviors that seemed odd for a woman who, under one theory, had arrived at their door with broken ribs.
The deputies said they brought her to Isolation Room One only to calm her so they could continue the pat search.
No security cameras capture what goes on inside isolation rooms, out of concern for inmate privacy.
One deputy told the detective that she had heard screaming from the room and entered to join in the effort to calm Bolden. She said at one point that she shook a fist in Bolden's face but did not strike her.
Another said Bolden slipped off a bench to the floor.
A third deputy said he never entered Isolation Room One.
Another said that when she was on the floor, he grabbed Bolden's legs, but only to restrain her.
Bolden gave an account of the event, too — to the Buffalo professional standards investigators and a fuller description to a daughter in Buffalo, Delois Starks.
She insisted that Starks write it down:
"I am forced on my back. I was looking up at all four officers. They were in a kneeling position holding me down with their arms and knees. At this time I was hit with a blunt object on the right side of my forehead. I blacked out but I could still hear and feel what was going on around me. After that I was hit or kicked on my left side of the midsection.
"As of coming to, I sat ... with my back towards the door ... talking out loud to myself. Why did this happen?"
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