‘THERE ARE NO WORDS’
Woman says she was subjected to beatings, racism at Western Tidewater Regional Jail
By the time a corrections officer shoved his finger into the spot where her big toe used to be, Carmen Miranda already had been subjected to racism, medical malpractice and a vicious beating at the Western Tidewater Regional jail.
As other women looked on, she screamed in pain.
The corrections officers were sick of her, Miranda and three witnesses say.
Sick of her complaining about getting the wrong medications. Sick of treating her diabetes. Sick of not being able to understand her Spanish. Moments later, a swarm of guards dragged her out of the pod, slamming her face into metal near a doorway.
She was dumped in a cell and left in a puddle of her urine.
Jail officials deny the allegations. The U.S. Marshals Service, which contracts with the jail to house federal inmates, did not respond to requests for comment.
“There are no words, no explanation,” Miranda said through a family member who served as an interpreter. “I would scream and cry every day.”
Miranda, whose story was previously reported in the Spanish language publication Noticias DMV, says she’s never been convicted of a crime. Earlier this year, she was arrested and charged in federal court in a massive drug case that includes about 50 defendants. She’s accused of distributing heroin and cocaine, and of controlling a Newport News trailer park with an “iron fist,” according to documents filed by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
But bringing charges against someone does not mean you give them the
wrong medications, beat them or mistreat them.
“When someone is detained and they are sick and have an underlying medical condition, that should not allow any facility to deny them proper treatment,” said John Cano, an advocacy specialist with the immigrantrights organization CASA, which has offices in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
After reviewing Miranda’s allegations, he called for an investigation into Western Tidewater Regional Jail and its practices. He said it was appalling that Miranda and others were subjected to racial taunts for speaking Spanish.
“The administration gave the wrong medications to this woman,” he said. “Clearly this shows that the facility doesn’t care about those in their custody.”
Sadly, he said, that’s not new for jails.
“These are deeply disturbing allegations that are consistent with issues being raised at prisons and jails across Virginia about the conditions of incarceration, including inadequate medical care, discrimination against Black people and non-Black people of color, inhumane use of solitary confinement and physical abuse,” said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia. “We’ve seen them magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated by overcrowding.”
Miranda came to Hampton Roads from Puerto Rico in 2012. For a time, she owned and ran the Alvarado Cafe in Newport News. She had to close it when her toe was amputated because of diabetes.
“I just don’t understand why it happened,” she said of her treatment by the jail. “I am an American citizen.”
Regional jails in Virginia have a long history of abuse.
While most jails in the state are run by an elected official, regional jails are overseen by a superintendent and a board made up of officials from multiple cities. The jails compete for money with cash-strapped cities and jails run by politically powerful sheriffs.
That’s led to a history of lawsuits and federal oversight.
The Central Virginia Regional Jail settled a class action complaint over medical care in 2018.
The Hampton Roads Regional Jail settled the lawsuit of one inmate who died there for $3 million and remains under federal scrutiny after a report from the Justice Department found its treatment of inmates to be cruel and unusual punishment.
The family of an inmate housed at Western Tidewater sued the jail for $10 million after he died from an ulcer leaking into his abdomen.
Col. William Smith, Western Tidewater’s jail superintendent, said in an email that on April 10, Miranda “was involved in an incident with staff because she refused to move to a different housing unit after staff asked her several times. She was charged with violations of the jails rules and regulations and given a disciplinary sanction.”
Miranda claims she filled out complaint forms about the beating, copies of which were provided to The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press.
“When around 3:15 pm I’m on my bed and approximately more than 8 officers arrive, grab me by the arms and legs and pull me out of my bed. … I started getting kicked on the right side of my body I felt like I was going to die so much pain my body could not handle it,” she wrote. “I tell them ‘Don’t kick me’ (sic) that came from my heart (sic) when the ones by my legs start to fold them as if I was a doll. I scream and my cellmates scream.”
The Pilot provided to jail officials copies of Miranda’s statements and other material, as well as a detailed description of what the three women said happened. Smith said the complaints were never filed and that the jail adamantly denies the allegations.
When The Pilot requested video of the incident, Smith said there was none. But three days after the incident, some of Miranda’s family members got on a call with Deputy Superintendent Lt. Colonel E. Bower and recorded the conversation.
On it, Bower clearly states that video exists.
When asked about this, Smith said the video was copied over, which routinely happens after several weeks.
“The video was not saved because there was no complaint in reference to any misconduct until recently, which is almost three months later,” he said.
But on the audio of the April 13 conversation, Hector Carrasco, the boyfriend of Miranda’s sister, clearly complains about her treatment and questions the officer’s actions on April 10.
“I don’t have her in a camera cell, I have cameras inside the block,” Bower said in the recording. “I have cameras everywhere.”
“There was an officer where she grabbed her from the feet, right? Where she got the amputation?” Carrasco asks. “That’s not … on the video either?”
“No,” Bower said. “Because of the way the video is, see, you can’t see every little thing. … I do have some officers assaulted, you know.
And that’s not a good thing. … That’s just one of those things. We try to be as lenient as we can on that.”
Wrong medication
Miranda was taken to Western Tidewater on Feb. 26. Immediately, caring for her diabetes was a problem.
“She was followed by the medical team and the medical doctor very closely due to several preexisting conditions,” Smith said.
Another inmate and Miranda both say she was given the wrong medications from the time she was arrested.
Vanessa Garcia’s bed was beside Miranda’s in an open area with about 40 others. She says she later discovered that she had been given Miranda’s medication for diabetic nerve damage, a condition Garcia doesn’t have. In turn, Miranda was given Garcia’s medication.
“We both had Hispanic last
names, that’s where the confusion came from, the nurses said,” Garcia said in a video interview from the jail. “I don’t know how you confuse Garcia with Miranda.”
Miranda says she was also given the medication of other inmates, which caused severe constipation.
Both say they were subjected to racism, particularly from one corrections officer who mocked them when they spoke Spanish.
Garcia said the officer would taunt them, making fun of their Spanish speaking, as they stood in a line to get medication. She filed a grievance against the officer, who was moved out of the pod.
The two tried to get a glucose machine moved to the pod because of frequent spikes and drops in Miranda’s blood sugar, but officers refused.
In the audio, Bower tells Miranda’s family that before the April 10 incident, they were struggling to control Miranda’s blood sugar. She was on a restrictive diet and she was eating food sent to her from outside the prison, which was causing the problems, he said. That’s why they came to move her on April 10 to a separate cell and away from the open pod with other inmates. They needed to monitor her diabetes closer.
Bower said she “refused, refused, refused,” on the recorded conversation.
“They explained to her, look this is just for a couple of days. This is a medical observation. But still she refused, so at some point we … had to move her,” he said.
“Yeah move her, that’s fine. I totally understand that you are going to have to … move her, but, like, hitting her, beating her — that’s something different,” Carrasco said.
“We’re not trying to do anything that’s outside of what we’re supposed to do in our policies and our procedures, we don’t do that,” Bower said. “We try to avoid this type of thing altogether. But sometimes we just don’t have a choice. Her situation, we’re concerned about her health.”
On April 10, Miranda was taken to see a doctor inside the prison, who told her she’d been on the wrong medications, which had made her sick.
When corrections officers came that afternoon, she said she asked for an explanation as to why she was being moved. She said she refused to move until she got one. She suspected it was punishment for complaining about her medication being wrong.
“Why? I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told them, according to both Miranda and Garcia, who was sitting on the bed beside Miranda and interpreting for her. “I will move, but I want to know why before.”
They threatened her with pepper spray, and when she said she had asthma, an officer told her “That’s not my problem,” the two women said.
Eventually there were nine officers, both men and women, surrounding her. Four stood to each side and one stood at her feet. Miranda provided the last names of the female officers, whom she was familiar with. Jail officials did not provide full names.
The women in the pod were ordered to move up to its second level, where they could still see most of what was happening, Garcia said.
Then the officers tried to move Miranda, grabbing her clothes. She fell to the floor, and one officer started kicking her. Another grabbed her feet and pulled them towards her back, jamming a finger into the place where her big toe was amputated.
“That’s when she started screaming,” said Garcia, who remained downstairs to interpret. “They picked her up after that. She looked like she was going to faint.”
The officers dragged her from the pod, purposefully slamming her face into a part of the door, Garcia and Miranda said.
Abina Branch, an inmate at Western Tidewater at the time, saw it happen.
“Everybody saw that,” she said. “They hit her head on that steel.”
They moved her to a cell by herself.
“They throw me on the ground like trash I feel everyone laughing at me mockingly,” Miranda wrote in a complaint. “Suddenly my mind starts going blank a bunch of vomit comes out.”
When asked about the beating investigation on the April 13 phone call, Bower denied learning of or seeing anything suspicious.
“The biggest problem with her was … us having to lift her up, you know, instead of walking on her own,” Bower said. “When you drop all your weight and then we have to pretty much carry you. That might cause some bruises. I’m not saying it did. I haven’t saw her, I haven’t talked to her.”
Lying in urine
Branch and Carla Hall lived in the same area as Miranda. The two were trustees and it was their job to drop off and pick up food trays inside Western Tidewater.
When Hall got to Miranda’s isolation cell after the beating, she says she found the woman unable to move and lying on the floor in a puddle of urine.
“She said she couldn’t move, couldn’t feel the bottom of her legs,” Hall said.
Branch says a nurse taunted Miranda and refused to let her help the woman up.
“You can get up, you can get up,” the nurse yelled at Miranda, according to Hall.
Later, an officer gave Branch and Hall permission to clean Miranda up.
“Some of the guards were really nice to her,” Branch said. “Some were nasty.”
By the time they were allowed to help, Miranda had laid in her own urine for hours.
“We changed her clothes, made sure she was OK,” Hall said.”We did the best we could by her situation. We couldn’t do much about her pain, being inmates ourselves.”
Miranda calls Hall and Branch her angels.
“They picked me up, they showered me, they helped me,” she said.
The first couple of days, Miranda wasn’t really eating, Hall said. She was bruised on the face, back, arms and legs.
“I just tried to help her as best I could,” Hall said. “There’s not a lot of times we are able to help each other in here.”
Miranda’s sister Yahaira Alvarado said she soon got a video call from another inmate explaining what had happened, but for the first few days after the beating, the family could not get in touch with her sister or get anyone running the jail to give them information.
When Bower talked to the family on April 13, he told them he might let them see Miranda despite a ban on visitors because of the coronavirus pandemic. He said Miranda had to realize that the actions officers took were for her protection and health.
“As far as mistreating her. … We’re doing totally the opposite of that. … The situation with her where she got moved could have been a whole lot worse,” he said. “You just gotta follow orders, just do what we ask, and everything will be alright.”
Smith said that Miranda refused to write an inmate statement after the incident and that she was seen by medical after it happened. He said when Bower met with Miranda’s family on April 13, their main concerns involved her medical condition and whether she could return to the part of the jail she had been in before.
“They appeared to be satisfied with the response from the Deputy Superintendent,” he wrote in an email.
He also met with another of Miranda’s attorneys that day.
“I do not recall any discussion relating to the use of force. Her attorney thanked the Superintendent and the Deputy Superintendent and was satisfied with the responses from both,” he said. “We do not have any complaints or grievances from Ms. Miranda in reference to racism or excessive use of force while at the facility.”
Alvarado, Miranda’s sister, said the lawyer told her to keep quiet, that if she said anything it could harm Miranda. She said for days she begged to see Miranda.
“We still don’t understand why the lawyer suggested keeping quiet,” she said. “They kept her hidden away from her family so we couldn’t document her wounds.”
Alvarado got to see Miranda April 15. She was using a walker and had a hard time sitting.
“I felt like I was dying,” Alvarado said. “Having to see my sister with so many blows to her face, her back, her hands, and her feet; it was horrible.”
Ben Mason, Miranda’s lawyer in the criminal case, didn’t speak to the jail about the beating. He said he was focused on getting her out because of her medical problems. He said she was not given a bond shortly after her arrest because of concerns she didn’t have a place to stay with a person the court was comfortable with.
In May, Mason filed a motion to get Miranda released from custody, arguing that her complex medical problems made her a good candidate for release on bond. She was granted a $2,000 bond, ordered to wear a tracking bracelet on her ankle and to stay at a family home in Suffolk.
Mason said he was aware of Miranda’s allegations but didn’t want to bring up something not provable in a bond hearing. He said he hasn’t been retained as her lawyer in regards to the beating allegations.
“I focused on the diabetic condition that had already resulted in amputation,” he said.
Miranda was released in early June. The next day, she had to pick up her belongings from the jail.
Included in those were a pill bottle with a prescription for a male inmate still incarcerated at Western Tidewater. The drug on the label and inside was clonazepam, a psychotropic drug used to treat seizures and panic disorder — conditions Miranda doesn’t have.
“The biggest pain was the discrimination against her for being Hispanic,” Alvarado said in an email. “We have the medicine bottle and witnesses. We want justice. They were killing her little by little and nobody wanted to help us.”
Miranda said she intends to file a lawsuit against Western Tidewater. She said her foot had healed from the amputation surgery, but that after the corrections officer prodded the spot, she’s had infections that require constant attention.
“There’s just no words for it,” Miranda said. “No explanation.”