Much has already been disclosed about the Metropolitan Correctional Center’s embarrassing failures to keep Jeffrey Epstein alive while he was in federal custody in 2019 — obvious shortcomings like pulling him off suicide watch too early or the guards on watch the night of his death falling asleep on the job. But on Tuesday, as another round of Epstein reporting trickles in via unrelated court cases, a new Justice Department inspector-general report details just how poorly the notoriously mismanaged MCC botched the job of keeping Epstein safe in jail. Below are the key revelations from the inspector general’s report.
Epstein was given every “opportunity to take his own life” — including extra sheets
Inspector General Michael Horowitz writes that the “negligence, misconduct, and outright job-performance failures” at the Manhattan jail allowed Epstein the “opportunity” to kill himself in his cell. Not only was he taken off suicide watch too soon after his first attempt to take his own life, he was left alone in his cell for 24 hours after his cellmate was transferred. The report states that one Bureau of Prisons official emailed 70 staffers warning them that leaving Epstein alone was against protocol and dangerous for his health. The report found that three MCC employees violated policy by giving Epstein “an excess amount of” linen and blankets — which he then used to create a makeshift noose.
The DOJ recommended two more jail employees face charges — which prosecutors ignored
In the year after Epstein’s death, two guards were charged for failing to conduct over 75 mandatory checks on their infamous ward and allegedly covering up the evidence of their negligence after the fact. The charges were eventually dropped after the pair admitted to falsifying records.
The new report reveals that Horowitz also recommended charging two MCC supervisors for falsifying records claiming that they had “completed the mandatory rounds and inmate counts” on the night of Epstein’s death. But prosecutors in New York never charged the managers.
The inspector general says there’s no evidence of homicide
The report states that the Justice Department “did not uncover evidence” that cast doubt on the FBI’s determination that Epstein had strangled himself from his bunk. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy informed the inspector general that there was no “debris under Epstein’s fingernails, marks on his hands, contusions to his knuckles, or bruises on his body that evidenced Epstein had been in a struggle.” The report also states that Epstein had hemorrhaging and bruising from his neck up, and says that in homicidal strangulation, “these conditions are normally found only in the eyes and mouth, and in a different pattern.”
