CAUGHT OFF GUARD
Left unattended by short-staffed jailers on overtime, no cameras in cell
Guards at the lower Manhattan federal pen where Jeffrey Epstein was being held were working extreme overtime the morning he died, with one on his fifth straight day of OT and another on forced overtime because of staff shortages. And compounding the mystery, there’s no video of what happened — because no cameras were focused inside his cell.
The two Manhattan jail guards who allegedly failed to monitor Jeffrey Epstein before he died had been working “extreme” overtime shifts amid a severe staffing shortage, reports said Sunday.
The unidentified jailers at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center violated procedure by failing to check on Epstein every 30 minutes before he apparently committed suicide in his cell, sources told Reuters.
One guard was working his fifth straight day of overtime and the other was toiling under mandatory overtime, a person familiar with operations at the lower Manhattan lockup told The Associated Press.
“Some were forced to work, which is never an ideal situation,” a source told The Post.
The guards also violated procedure by leaving the convicted pedophile without a cellmate, The New York Times reported.
There’s no surveillance video of Epstein’s death, which apparently occurred when the 66-year-old pervert appeared to hang himself Saturday morning, law-enforcement officials told The Post.
Although there are cameras in the 9 South wing at the MCC, they are trained on areas outside the cells and not inside, according to officials familiar with the setup.
An autopsy was performed on Sunday, but a determination on the cause and manner of Epstein’s death “is pending further information at this time,” city Chief Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson said in a statement.
Dr. Michael Baden, a former city chief medical examiner and host of the HBO series “Autopsy,” observed the postmortem examination at “the request of those representing the decedent, and with the awareness of the federal prosecutor,” Sampson said.
Epstein’s autopsy was conducted in an isolated, rarely used room in the Manhattan branch of the Medical Examiner’s Office and was also overseen by the FBI, according to a source with knowledge of the procedure.
Both the FBI and the federal Justice Department are investigating Epstein’s death.
A city official told the Times that the ME believes the cause of death is suicide by hanging but that she needs more information before releasing her official determination.
Sources told The Post that a determination will likely come by early next week.
Elected officials demanded answers on Epstein’s death.
“Something doesn’t smell right, and it’s not [Epstein’s] dead body,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
Adams noted a July 23 incident in which Epstein was found nearly unconscious in his cell with marks on his neck, as well as blockbuster court papers released Friday that contained the names of powerful men — including Prince Andrew, former Democratic Sen. George Mitchell of Maine and New Mexico’s exDemocratic Gov. Bill Richardson — accused of sleeping with an Epstein teenage “sex slave.”
“Something is really troubling about that, and I think it needs to be investigated extremely and very thoroughly,” Adams said.
State Attorney General Letitia James said she had toured the MCC and found it “very difficult to understand how something like this could have happened.”
“My understanding is that he should have been on suicide watch and the people on suicide watch are placed in a type of jumpsuit that wouldn’t allow them to hurt themselves,” she said.
Mayor de Blasio, who was at the Iowa State Fair while campaigning for the presidency, told The Post that Epstein had “a huge amount of information, potentially, about some of the richest and most powerful people in the country, and it was clear that he had either been attacked or tried to commit suicide previously.”
“And then, you know, suddenly they’re not putting him on suicide watch? I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t understand how those facts fit together,” he said.
Meanwhile, two men spent about 30 minutes inside Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse on Sunday afternoon, with one carrying out a large tote bag filled with unknown items. Neither would comment before leaving in a late-model SUV.
Epstein had formerly shared a cell in the MCC with a hulking exWestchester cop, Nicholas Tartaglione, who denied any wrongdoing in the July 23 incident.
Tartaglione’s lawyer, Bruce Barket, expressed hope for a “thorough investigation into how this occurred despite the Bureau of Prisons being on notice that Mr. Epstein had already attempted suicide at least once.”