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Locked up since the summer of 2020 for alleged assaults on police officers during a mental-health episode, he had spent the better part of a year in the downtown St. Louis jail, and he was deteriorating, according to his mother. In the month leading up to his arch beating, he’d subsisted on ramen from the commissary, forgoing entirely the meals served to him for fear the food was poisoned. He refused to let his mother come visit him, afraid that she’d put herself in harm’s way by setting foot in the J . he acute paranoia was a symptom of his mental illness, which various doctors have diagnosed as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, according to his mother.

Though Edward was in the section of the jail for inmates with mental-health needs, everything about his environment exacerbated his underlying mental illness. His phone calls home had gotten shorter and shorter. He asked his mother why he was locked up and when he could go home. He did not understand why he was incarcerated, she says.

And while many of his fears were rooted in delusion, he faced real, physical danger in the J . he RFT is using “Ed-

ward” in place of his real name, because his mother worries for his safety.) The jail, billed as the more modern and safer of two city-owned facilities, has been overrun with problems, punctuated by overdoses, allegations of retaliation by guards and fiery revolts. ayor ishaura Jones toured the jail shortly after taking office and said she was “disappointed, shocked and frustrated” by what she saw.

In that environment, Edward was an easy target.

A few minutes after p.m. on arch 22, Edward’s cell door suddenly opened. A barrel-chested detainee named Antonio Holt entered and began beating Edward, striking his neck and face, pushing Edward’s head back against the wall. The beating was captured on security camera footage from two angles. A few seconds into the attack, Edward appears to fall over the cell’s toilet. Holt pummels him while he’s down, picks him up and slams him against the wall. About 30 seconds later, another inmate, evin oore, enters Edward’s cell and joins in the assault. Edward falls into the middle of his cell, and the two men kick him as he lays on the ground.

The gruesome security camera footage made the news both in St. Louis and in This story was sponsored in part by a Fund for Investigative Journalism grant.

places as far away as Finland. Just as shocking as what happened in the cell was the behavior of Corrections fficer emeria homas outside of it. n the moments before the attack, she is seen chatting with Holt and Moore at her guard station. Authorities say she pressed a button to open Edward’s door and watched as Holt walked into the cell and began punching the smaller man. At one point, another inmate ran toward the fight, but homas yelled for him to stop and stay where he was.

“ he video in my opinion shows not only a single act of incredible violence, orchestrated by a CO; it is a re ection of the culture of the jail,” says Mark Pedroli, a civil rights lawyer who has been in contact with dward’s family and expects to bring a suit against the city on his behalf in the coming weeks. “ his isn’t a one-off incident, but represents a pattern of behavior that has gone ignored by supervisors.”

Holt, the first man who appears to assault Edward in the footage, wound up in the City Justice Center after being arrested five times in three months in late and early . hree of the arrests were for criminal property damage, the other two for an assortment of charges including burglary and tampering with a motor vehicle. He is now facing an additional felony assault charge for the jailhouse attack. he other alleged assailant, Moore, was being held on a series of felony charges related to a robbery at Behrmann’s avern in south city. A security camera video of that incident had gone viral thanks to footage showing an unfazed bar patron smoking a cigarette and nonchalantly rebuffing oore from his bar stool, even as oore pointed a gun at him and other customers hit the oor. he patron was later dubbed “the world’s chillest man, and oore was arrested within hours. He eventually pleaded guilty to federal robbery and firearms charges but remains in the J on an assault charge for his alleged involvement in the attack on Edward.

In addition to Moore and Holt, the corrections officer, homas, has also been charged with felony assault and is accused of facilitating the attack.

A full minute into the beating of dward, homas walks toward his open cell door and slowly puts an end to the attack. “He’s dead,”

someone yells. n his way out, Moore calls Edward a “bitch.” n the minutes after, homas calmly returns to her guard station and acts as if nothing has happened, even as wails of agony from dward’s cell ring out through the housing unit. She never reported the attack, and Edward was only able to get medical attention after another staff member saw his bruised and bloodied face.

Edward suffered a concussion and severe injuries to his neck and face. His jaw could not open and he didn’t receive medical care until three days later, when he was taken to the emergency room. here, his mother says, a doctor simply touched his cheek and pronounced that it had healed.

Edward’s mother, who asked the RFT to refer to her only as Louise, says her son has long struggled to manage mentalhealth issues, which came to the fore when as a teenager he began smoking and inhaling air duster. n , dward completed a two-year program in construction trades and moved to the t. ouis area where he found a job. But what seemed like progress uickly collapsed. he weekend before he was to start his new job, he suffered a psychotic episode, his mother says. He suddenly began to worry that his mom’s life was in danger, that the police were trying to kill him and her. He called ouise late one night while driving and spoke to her in a frantic, barely coherent manner. he later learned he had been arrested hours later after a clash with police and charged with assault, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon. he declined to comment on the allegations against her son for fear it could hurt any upcoming civil lawsuit or identify him and put him in more danger. hen dward first got to the City Justice Center, he wore only a hospital gown. And Louise says he was the victim of numerous incidents inside, even before the beating. Another inmate struck him in the face. espite being on suicide watch, his mother says, a thick strip of bedsheet dangled from the light fi ture in his cell. At one point, dward was maced and placed in handcuffs. Hands behind his back, he was unable to wipe the pepper spray from his eyes.

“He doesn’t understand why he’s there,” Louise says. “He truly has trouble comprehending why he’s locked up.” She says it uickly became clear that her son, already in bad shape, was “deteriorating” in the CJC. He called her often in those early weeks, though the calls gradually got shorter and shorter, with Edward’s voice growing weaker and his words sliding further from reality. ouise called a social worker employed at the CJC who checked on Edward and found he hadn’t eaten even one of the meals served to him in a month.

At the time, issues at the jail were often overshadowed by a fight to close the city’s other jail, the Medium ecurity nstitution, known as the Workhouse. Generations of detainees had reported horrific conditions at , but problems were mounting at the J . n ovember , -year-old evin avins died shortly after being taken into custody at the CJC on a probation violation. He was going through detox and, according to a police report, detainees near Cavins said he alerted jail staff multiple times that he was having a negative reaction to the medication he’d been given as part of his detox.

In the police report, CJC staff say they conducted a wellness check on avins by confirming signs of respiration via the security camera. Pedroli, the lawyer who intends to represent Edward, is currently representing avins’ family in a civil suit against the city. He tells the RFT he has obtained the security camera footage, and in it Cavins shows no signs of breathing.

“ f we can’t see him breathing on video, how can they?” Pedroli says.

A month after avins’ death, three detainees in the CJC overdosed on the same night. All were taken to the hospital and recovered.

A former corrections officer at

the CJC who worked at the jail for two years before leaving this June tells the RFT, “There are so many drugs coming in by some crooked staff members and a lot of drugs coming through the mail.”

The former guard, who asked we not use her name, says that K2, a synthetic marijuana, was the drug most commonly smuggled in, often after it had been soaked into “regular paper.” Sometimes, she adds, it even comes in on obituaries, birthday cards — you name it. “The inmates could smoke K2 all day long to where it was nothing you could do about it, because it was paper they were smoking and we didn’t know exactly what to look for.”

In addition to the felony assault charges brought by the Circuit Attorney’s ffice, the federal epartment of Justice filed charges against Thomas in July, stating in the indictment that she violated Edward’s constitutional rights and “knowingly permitted two other inmates, A.H. and K.M., to physically assault” him.

A source with knowledge of the feds’ case against Thomas says there is reason to believe the J may be looking at more widespread abuses of power by corrections officers at the J , such as offering drugs to motivate or reward detainees for doing the bidding of guards, including attacking or punishing other detainees on behalf of the corrections officers.

Most of the issues at the jail have played out in relative obscurity, but that changed on February 6. At about 2:30 a.m. that day, more than 100 detainees took over the fourth oor of the J , breaking windows and throwing toilet paper and other debris — including the electronic controls for the cell-door locks and an elliptical machine — through the openings toward Tucker Boulevard. The revolt began with a fight between a detainee and a guard, then escalated when men from two different units on the fourth oor left their cells en masse, said then-Public afety irector Jimmie dwards at a press conference later that morning. Asked how the men were able to escape their cells, Edwards explained that “the locks don’t necessarily lock.” The revolt lasted six hours and was only quelled with the help of city sheriff’s deputies and police deploying mace.

The events of February 6 made nationwide news. To those advocating jail reform, the CJC uprising was a sign of how inhumane daily life had become for those in the jail during the pandemic.

Michael Milton, then the advocacy and policy manager for the Bail Project in Missouri, told the RFT at the time that he had heard reports of detainees being forced to share cells with others who were “visibly sick” and that when detainees raised concerns about this they were retaliated against.

Others characterized what happened as a riot rather than an uprising. “These were just very angry, defiant, very violent people that we house at the justice center,” Edwards said at the February 6 press conference.

Whatever the proper name for what happened, two months later, in April, it happened again, this time on the third oor. Again, inmates broke windows and threw debris on the street. Again, the revolt made national news. ick esideri, communications director for the mayor’s office says that the ublic afety ivision has requested $20 million from the city to repair CJC after decades of neglect. The intent of the money is to fi locks and other “security infrastructure” that has been long neglected.

The city’s ultimate goal is to better help detainees leaving incarceration avoid coming back, he says. he mayor’s office is focused on “reducing the city’s jail population and addressing crime at the root cause” to prevent people from ending up at the CJC in the first place. hey hope to do this, according to esideri, “through youth programming, through direct financial assistance from the American Rescue Plan, and all sorts of other things.”

In August, Jones announced the hiring of Jennifer Clemons-Abdullah as the new corrections commissioner to replace ale lass who resigned in May under criticism over jail conditions and the revolts.

A former corrections officer who was employed at the CJC during both revolts says of the aftermath, “Some inmates were in the same clothes with mace on them for days before they allowed them to get in the shower.” n ay, a lawsuit filed by three men who’d been locked up at the jail alleged that corrections officers regularly abused detainees, including arbitrarily forcing some into rooms and filling the rooms with pepper spray, a practice one supervisor referred to as letting people “marinate.”

In August, video emerged of detainees sparring with and beating one another in a recreation room

for more than three hours as corrections officers and other detainees looked on from an adjoining area.

Edward’s lawyer, Pedroli, says of the CJC, “Much like a failed state, it is a failed jail. … The violations are across the board.”

As bad as the past year has been, the two former guards who spoke to the RFT say that many of the problems are nothing new.

Jimmie Edwards’ comment that “the jail’s locks don’t necessarily lock” came as a shock to most, but one former corrections officer, who worked there for more than a decade before leaving in 2019, says, “The locks were a problem when I got there [more than ten years ago].”

Problems at the jail were even worse than reported and included additional uprisings that didn’t make the news, according to one former guard who left the CJC in June. he e -corrections officer who left in 2019 says the jail administration bears much of the blame for the dysfunction. “We’d know that a number of cells all have messed-up locks, that other cells had messed-up toilets. o you think anybody is coming in and fi ing that stuff on a daily basis The answer is very much no. So what’s the point of me filling out that paperwork, if the administration isn’t going to have maintenance come and fi it

The other former guard, who left in June, says, “Administration was a complete joke. They would always find fault in the officers and write them up no matter what the situation was.” She says corrections officers tried to alert the administration to large, looming issues in the jail, but “they never listened to the officers’ inputs on certain things when it came to the inmates, and that’s why riots broke out.”

Both former guards describe the job as incredibly stressful. They say that the majority of corrections officers were women, and verbal harassment from the majoritymale inmates was common.

And the anxieties of the job didn’t end with their shift.

“This one person that you just released may be your next-door neighbor,” says one of the former guards. “ ne of my very first inmates I put in solitary was one of my next-door neighbors. He was like, ‘Hey, aren’t you that chick who lived on [the name of her street and had the red car live next door to you.’”

There were also infestations, the guards say. he corrections officer who left in 2019 says the jail had a “fierce gnat problem as well as a colony of bats on the little-used si th oor who gradually migrated down. “One night I walked in, and there was a bat down in the main lobby,” she says. “I’m like,

you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Both former corrections officers described staffing shortages as a consistent, underlying problem. The former guard who quit in June says that the issue had gotten worse in recent months.

Records obtained through sunshine requests by the RFT show that from 2016 to 2020, the City of St. Louis Division of Corrections was routinely at just 60 to 80 percent of full staffing capacity, due to vacancies and officers out on family and medical leave. That was worse than in past years. In 2017 and , staffing outages were and 25 percent, respectively. But in January 2019, it rose to 26 percent, and by January 2020, slightly more than one third of the department’s staff positions were unfilled or held by employees out on leave. This was before the full force of the pandemic made its way to St. Louis. By the end of 2020, a full 40 percent of the city’s Corrections Division staff positions were vacant or held by people out on leave.

“People do abuse medical leave,” says the former guard who left in 2019. “I abused it.”

“Honestly, we would wait to earn our eight hours of sick time just to call off to get some type of break from that place,” says the other former corrections officer. “ he two off days we got wasn’t enough.” esideri says staffing hasn’t changed much in 2021, but the mayor is pushing to hire for open positions. he former corrections officer who left in 2019 hadn’t planned to quit the day she did. “I walked in one night, and between the gnats, bats and rats, I was just like, ‘You know what, I’m good. I’ve had enough,’” she says.

The felony assault cases against Thomas, Moore and Holt are slowly working their way through the courts. One month after the attack, despite the pending felony charge, the court allowed Thomas to take a planned four-day vacation to Puerto Rico. Pedroli was incensed.

“My client is in his cell, languishing, unable to go back and see the doctor, which is what the ER doctors ordered him to do, and, meanwhile, the person who’s responsible for the attack on him gets to go on vacation?!” Pedroli told Fox 2’s Chris Hayes when news of the court’s leniency broke.

A few months later, in July, Thomas was again allowed by the courts to travel on vacation, this time to Orlando.

Louise says that her son is still suffering the lingering effects of the attack. “Every time the door clicks, he panics because he thinks someone is coming in,” she says. “After months of not being able to open his jaw, it will open now, but it pops and clicks. He wakes up shaking uncontrollably. He’s in pain.”

The motivations for the attack on Edward remain unknown. he former corrections officer who left the City Justice Center after working there for more than a decade says that she knew Thomas well and was surprised by the allegations against her. The ex-guard says she looked up to Thomas as a veteran of the jail and knew her as someone who treated detainees fairly. As an example, she tells the story of Thomas being carjacked while off-duty with her baby in the back seat. According to the police report from the incident, the carjacker had been armed and told Thomas to “get the fucking baby out of the backseat.” The man who stole Thomas’ car later ended up at the CJC, the former corrections officer says, but Thomas hadn’t mistreated him. The video of Thomas seeming to abet an attack on an inmate confounded the ex-guard. At the very least, she says, Thomas would have known there was a camera pointed right at her.

“When you needed help, Demeria was the one to call on. I believe there had to be something that happened in order for her to do that,” she says.

Thomas and Edward have at least one thing in common: They both have court dates later this month. With the judicial system still working through the backlog of cases that piled up in the first year of the pandemic, it’s unclear how much longer Edward will be in the CJC, or where he will be headed when he does leave.

“I’d like my son to get some mental-health help,” Louise says. “And I would like a clean sweep to go through the city jail and so the stuff that’s hidden can be exposed. There’s a lot more going on in that place than we know.”

Ryan Krull is a freelance journalist and assistant teaching professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.