‘Every day we’re fighting this evil disease’
HARRIS COUNTY JAIL: How inmates, guards, health workers have confronted COVID-19
Raul Razo and three buddies were knocking out their daily situps and pushups in their 72-man tank at the Harris County Jail in late March when they were overcome. All four were gasping for air.
“Uno por uno. Uno por uno,” Razo told his wife in a phone call punctuated by dry coughs. One by one they’d abandoned their workout and slogged off to their bunks.
The next day they lay within arms’ reach of one another in their tight fortress of metal-frame beds, shaking with chills and passing up meals. They had crushing headaches, achy bones, sore muscles, chest pain, nausea, diarrhea and unrelenting fever.
“I can’t taste. … I can’t smell. My eyes can’t cry,” Razo, 48, recalled.
He counted more than 10 men on the pod who came down with symptoms and were transferred to “hot” tanks, where they spent weeks battling the illness in solitary cells.
Most of the sick inmates never visited the clinic. Clinic staff came to them instead, listening to their breathing and doling out Tylenol while wearing face shields, booties and full protective suits.
“All we could see was their eyes,” said Razo, a father of four, who ran the maintenance department at a condominium complex in Bellaire.
Sheriff Ed Gonzalez had been bracing for this grim scenario since he first heard of the strange new illness sweeping the globe — the virus would race through the jail, infecting inmates and workers. With nearly 9,000 people packed together, sharing sinks, showers and phones, social distancing would be impossible.
As officials argued over plans to reduce jail population, frightened inmates tried to set mattresses on fire, employees bought thermometers at local drugstores, whole clusters of cells became makeshift sick tanks, and the medical staff struggled to contain a virus that no walls or guards could keep at bay. By mid-May, more than 1,000 inmates and jail staff had contracted COVID-19.
The infections at the jail made up more than 10 percent of all the county’s confirmed cases. Jails and prisons soon would make up some of the biggest clusters of sick people across the country.
Word of the new disease
Dr. Naomi Lockett was sitting in her office in the jail’s main clinic March 11 when her phone buzzed. Her stomach lurched when she saw the notification: The first case of community spread had hit Houston.
She crossed the hall to the medical director’s office.
“We’re in trouble,” she said to Dr. Laxman Sunder.
Nearby, Dariel Newman, a head nurse, got a call from his wife asking if he’d seen the news. Officials had canceled the rodeo.
“She just kept repeating it, ‘This is bad,’ ” said Newman, an ordained Methodist elder who had worked previously as a flight nurse and in hospital ICU wards. “That’s a marker, I think, to all Houstonians, in that we all look forward to the rodeo. … So that was like, this is real.”
The sheriff and the jail’s medical staff had begun planning for the pandemic’s arrival in early February as the first cases began appearing in the U.S.
This virus was highly contagious, and there was no vaccine. It would make its way into the highsecurity lockup, carried by new arrestees, jail guards and cafeteria workers. And the virus was so new that many of its symptoms were unknown.
Inmates heard about the disease from newspapers, TV news and word-of-mouth. It really hit when they saw fear on the faces of their guards.
Gearing up, locking down
Gonzalez and his team of doctors, nurses, deputies and detention officers drastically curtailed movement through the warren of concrete and cinder-block hallways in the jail complex that sits a block north of downtown, overhanging Buffalo Bayou. The three buildings — the 1200 Baker St. jail, the 701 N. San Jacinto jail and the Joint Processing Center — comprise the second-largest jail in the U.S., staffed by more than 2,000 employees.
The plan was harsh but practical: Keep everyone put.
People housed with a symptomatic inmate were presumed likely to catch the virus, but for the foreseeable future, the germs would stop there. The sickest inmates would be moved to solitary cells; the rest of their pod (barracks-like rooms with multiple bunks or groups of cells) would be placed on observational quarantine.
Jail life would be tank life, pod life, cell life — unless an inmate got sick enough to merit a transfer to one of the jail’s 168 infirmary beds or a hospital.
Shortly after the rodeo shut down, Gonzalez called off jail visits. Inmates would get five free calls per week and free stamps and envelopes.
Courtrooms closed. The law library closed. The rec area closed. Classes, recovery groups and religious gatherings were canceled. Contact with lawyers and judges would happen by phone or computer.
“We don’t get to see the outside at all,” said inmate Jeremiah Jones, who was booked on a car theft charge and held for a parole violation of a prior theft charge. “We’re confined to our pod unless we have to go to triage or the clinic. All day. No window. No sunlight.”
People who did enter the jail would have their temperature checked and walk the halls with a mask.
At the Joint Processing Center, staff began asking incoming arrestees a series of questions, hoping to identify sick patients.
“The very first question on there was, have you traveled or had contact with anyone who’s traveled and returned from Wuhan, China, in the past 14 days?” recalled Newman, the nurse. “Within a week, it says, Wuhan, China, plus Northern California, plus Washington state. And within two weeks, there were like seven different states and nations that were listed. And so we just turned it into ‘Have you left Houston?’ ”
Jail staff also tried to find ways to quarantine new inmates. Sunder asked the department’s classification deputies to house new arrivals together for seven days.
Inmates weren’t issued masks at the start, and the commissary wasn’t selling personal protective equipment. (Eventually, they’d be issued one monthly for use in the hallways, then replacements came every other week.) But many did not follow the rules.
Others worried about infection when guards entered their cellblocks. Four guards came into Jason Carter’s unit a week into the shutdown, but only one had a mask, which was hanging down around the officer’s neck.
“They’re coming and feeding us. They’re passing the germs around,” said Robert Payan, who by late April was complaining of aches, coughing, cramps, diarrhea and fever.
When fresh uniforms came, the guards told the men on Andrew Pete’s unit to line up and strip down to their boxers.
“They put about 15 of us in an 8by-5-foot space,” he said during a call to his ex-wife. “I mean we are literally jammed up and shoved in. Hooo!”
The jail stepped up cleaning regimens, wiping down surfaces and spreading more soap and other cleaning supplies to the tanks that house inmates.
The sheriff’s supply-chain deputies started ordering more masks, cleaning solution, mops — anything they could find. Capt. Ronny Taylor remembers walking into his local Kroger and gulping at the barren toilet-paper aisles.
“We’re going to have to provide toilet paper for 8,000 inmates,” he thought. “And I, as a citizen, can’t even buy it off the shelf.”
He and his deputies eventually started going to local Walgreens strores for thermometers and other supplies.
Inmate Justin Morris remembers a laminated notice went up in a third-floor window at the 1200 Baker jail. A printed sheet of paper said to wash your hands and warned about the spread of COVID-19. There were no announcements about positive cases at the jail.
First cases
The first deputies began to fall ill in mid-March. Gonzalez updated staff about fellow employees.
“No one wants a jail outbreak to overwhelm our local hospitals,” he said in an email thanking staff for their work and urging them to be careful.
It would be one of many such emails as he sought to bolster morale of an anxious, tired workforce.
Deputy Jeffrey Barnes started feeling sick that same month. Barnes, 51, who was suffering from leukemia, was manning the metal detector at Baker Street.
What seemed like allergies at first soon felt like a 300-pound man sitting on his chest. Breathing was almost impossible, tiny sips of air. He called in sick on March 27, fighting a cough, fevers and body aches that felt like someone kicking him in the back.
His wife woke him at night, thumping his back and bringing him water to try to help.
“I thought I was going to die,” he said. It would be nearly a month before the 29-year veteran of the sheriff’s office recovered enough to return to work.
About the same time, Razo and his podmates across the street were down with the virus, shivering in their bunks. The jail had announced March 29 that testing showed the virus had spread to inmates.
Razo fainted one day during headcount, banging his head on a metal table.
An affable, decisive man, he hoped in his fevered state that someone would just let him out and deport him to his village in Tamaulipas, Mexico.
One week into the ordeal, a nurse clocked his temperature at 103.
“Oh my God, another one,” she said. “Get your things, they’re going to move you.”
His legs gave out on the walk through the jail’s tunnel to his sick pod. Razo, who has hypertension, spent the next three weeks in a 24man hot tank jail with infected people in solo cells.
“I thought I would die in my sleep and no one would notice,” said Razo, who was awaiting trial on charges he had $38,000 of cocaine.
Inside the tank, Razo got tested — a swab up his nose that was processed off-site.
When medical staff entered, Razo asked a doctor suited up in full body protective gear if he could get oxygen. The doctor listened with a stethoscope and said Razo had fluid and phlegm filling his lungs.
“The pain in my chest was so strong,” Razo said. He couldn’t
draw a complete breath.
A futile call for compassion
Weeks before the virus was detected at the facility, the soft-spoken Gonzalez mounted a full-out campaign for compassionate releases of medically at-risk inmates.
Letting out nonviolent elderly, pregnant and immuno-compromised inmates with ankle monitors would reduce the strain on local emergency rooms and make it feasible to space out the remaining inmates.
“An outbreak in our jail would spread like wildfire,” he tweeted. He argued his case persistently via social media posts, news conferences, conversations and legal pleadings.
“My nightmare scenario is that an outbreak happens at the county jail.”
The ensuing courtroom battle pitted criminal justice reformers against law enforcement hardliners, with the governor, county executive and local, state, federal and appellate judges hurling heavy rhetoric and issuing contradictory orders.
The result: The compassionate release effort faltered. Only about 300 inmates left the jail under competing orders, and soon the population crept back up. With a public health crisis at work and 26 inmates and staff in the hospital, some tethered to ventilators, the sheriff was on his own.
The virus spreads
The afternoon after Barnes started feeling sick, Sunder got a call. He had a new patient, from cellblock 6C1, who was feverish and weak.
When Sunder walked in, he found a 40-year-old African-American man, “built like a tank,” laid low by a fever and a weak, “thready” heartbeat.
A bald 62-year-old born in Kerala, India, Sunder has worked at the jail for 16 years. He’d been drawn by the chance to work in public health and as an assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston.
“It’s one thing to learn about a disease, another to see it in a person,” he said. “This thing had come from Wuhan, through the double steel doors, into the jail.”
Day after day, the illness spread. By April 4, three inmates and six jail staff had tested positive. Less than three weeks later, 116 inmates and 151 jail workers had tested positive. By the time a month had passed, 593 inmates and 220 staff had tested positive.
Newman remembered one particularly grim morning late in March. It was 4:30 a.m., and as he walked along, a colleague waved him in and let him know that a detention officer who had fallen ill on duty was on her way down to the clinic.
The officer had a fever and a cough and could barely speak. Moments later, two inmates walked into the clinic.
“It really stuck out to me,” Newman said. “It was a wake-up call. This virus was nondiscriminatory.”
Foreboding on the cellblock
Cleaning products were in short supply. There was no hand sanitizer, and body wash came in a 2ounce bottle that had to last a week.
With the thousands of inmates and employees and surfaces needing to be kept clean, the jail couldn’t keep up. The sheriff talked to his staff about how to make it work and continued to find ways to get the supplies out.
Joshua Troxell filed a handwritten civil rights complaint May 7 on behalf of 17 men in pod 3A2B on Baker Street saying that for six days they had been asking jail staff for a broom and mop.
“We’ve been cleaning using our personal towels and rags to prevent the spread,” he wrote.
Grievances said mattresses had gotten mixed up during shakedowns — which spread panic. One person worried after a fight on the cellblock when an inmate’s spattered blood globbed up like jelly and would not dilute when the officers sprayed chemicals on it.
“This jail is like a small city, and when you go into tanks, people are scared and anxious,” said Zachary Cook, who was moved away from a quarantined pod. Cook saw people “putting socks and sheets over their face” to avoid germs.
There were accounts of guards and inmates fake coughing on people and cracking jokes about the disease. Gais Eyounalsoud witnessed podmates spit and pour urine from a bottle onto another inmate. Matthew Cole saw people dash the guards with urine. Inmates upset over conditions tried to set mattresses on fire. They thought they should be released.
Some weren’t panicky, though. Fifty-three-year-old Lionel Newman had some health concerns making him vulnerable. He saw people get sick. But he said in early May, “I’ve been blessed to be on a tank where we are governing ourselves about cleanliness and social
How we got this story
This account spanning three months at the Harris County Jail before and during the coronavirus pandemic is the result of on-site reporting, interviews and correspondence with nearly 100 inmates and employees at the jail complex in downtown Houston.
We spoke to and exchanged correspondence with members of the jail’s medical team, detention staff and front office employees along with lawyers, city public health staff and pretrial services personnel at the Joint Processing Center. Reporters obtained internal emails and jail records and spoke with past employees to get a behind-the-scenes look at daily jail operations.
The sheriff, who often touts the power of data, granted access to his internal records and multiple interviews. We also spoke with moonlighting doctors and labor representatives.
We interviewed inmates and their relatives, reviewed letters and recordings, spoke with advocates for the incarcerated, including the Texas Jail Project and the Texas Organizing Project, and reviewed dozens of civil rights lawsuits filed by inmates. We also sent a survey to about 100 inmates that generated a ripple of calls and letters from pods where the letters arrived.
distancing.”
No peak yet
On April 1, Gonzalez emailed his officers. “We still have a long way to go in our fight, and the experts tell us the peak of the pandemic is still weeks away for us in Harris County.”
Hundreds more employees and inmates would sicken in the coming weeks. On April 17, 247 jail employees called in sick. Every day for the next month, more than 100 staffers stayed home sick with the virus.
Gonzalez sent emails hinting at the strain.
“While reports of massive outbreaks in jails in New York City and Chicago have made national headlines, our collective efforts so far have kept our numbers lower,” Gonzalez wrote on April 14. “The COVID-19 pandemic is far from under control. Each day, more of our teammates are confirmed to be infected, and all of them are in our prayers. I am cautiously optimistic that together, we are slowing the spread.”
One guard afraid of retaliation for speaking said three work buddies got sick.
“I’m scared for them,” she said, through tears. “I’m scared for me.”
Despite the sheriff ’s efforts, she said, some detention officers felt scared, overworked and unprotected.
Testing picked up by late April, and the number of inmates confirmed to have the virus was leaping up by 100 or more each week.
As guards fell ill, others began having to pull extra overtime shifts — sometimes working three 16hour days in a week.
“We’re coming in earlier, and we’re staying later,” Dariel Newman said. “It’s like the alligator is eating us from both ends.”
Inmates, who could not separate themselves at night from the onslaught, also were unraveling.
Several wrote panicked letters from a dark place, worried these could be their “last days on earth.”
James Walter Gandy, housed with fellow military veterans in a group called Brothers in Arms, said, “There are those of us that are trapped here in what soon could be Houston’s largest death camp, just for being accused, just for being an addict.”
Sunder began mass testing on hundreds of inmates he’d placed in observational quarantine. (Eventually, the jail would announce it could test all inmates.)
His strategy centered on removing sick inmates and isolating infected tanks to keep the spread as slow as possible, as long as possible.
“If I don’t remove (them), it keeps spreading,” he said.
But as many as 30 percent of inmates were testing positive but not displaying symptoms, Sunder discovered.
The sickened inmates created another serious problem for the jail as well — about 900 inmates worked as “trusties,” helping fulfill vital jail operations, including cooking, meal service and laundry. But as inmates sickened, whole pods were ordered into quarantine — including many trusties.
To fill the gap, the sheriff’s office brought in Aramark contract employees. Meal service was downgraded to two cold sandwich bags and a single hot meal.
One trusty not on the job was Razo, who after three weeks in the hot tank had graduated to a recovery pod.
The virus claims victims
On May 6, District 2 Patrol Sgt. Raymond Scholwinksi died after a five-week stint at Memorial Hermann hospital in the Woodlands on a ventilator. That same afternoon, the first inmate with COVID-19 also died.
Arnold Hall had arrived in jail in October, suffering from a host of medical problems — but his lungs were clean, Dariel Newman recalled.
The 55-year-old had been booked on a family violence charge and had a long history of drug addiction, mental illness and other medical issues.
Weeks before, he’d gone to the hospital for other problems. Nurses there tested him for COVID-19. The results came back positive.
Soon after Hall’s death, Newman and Sunder were able to review chest X-rays hospital staff had performed.
“He’d gone from nothing ominous to whited-out,” Newman said.
Two others died with the infection the next week.
‘This evil disease’
Months in, the uncertainties have given way to a grim triage.
“It’s a beast — every day we’re fighting this evil disease,” Sunder said.
Razo is feeling better. He’s still coughing up phlegm, but he can breathe.
What he doesn’t understand, what he and his podmates in recovery worry aloud about, is whether they can catch it again from newly arriving but not retested recovering inmates. He has no idea.
Across the jail, the numbers of sick inmates continue to rise. A report from Gonzalez filed May 15 in federal court raised the question of what will happen if judges refuse to allow anyone who had tested positive to appear in court.
“What is to become of them if the felony courts refuse to handle their cases? Is COVID-19 to be a de facto life sentence? For now, at least, they languish in jail.”
In the meantime, the sheriff still has to juggle the safety of his guards, the health of his inmates, the ebb and flow of new arrestees and employees shuttling the virus through the jail.
“We’ve held it off as much as we could. … What we can we do now,” he said, before hustling off to another meeting. “I can’t sit here and whine about it; I’ve got to keep moving.”