DEA Leaves Man in Cell for Five Days Instead of Releasing Him-No Food, Water, or Toilet

Horace Boothroyd III for Police Accountability Group

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Wednesday May 02, 2012 · 7:47 AM PDT

2012/05/02 · 07:47

Again I'm reminded of passages from Kafka's The Trial such as this one:

Perhaps there was a little more space in there than usual today, but if so it was not immediately obvious, especially as the main difference was the presence of a man sitting by the open window with a book from which he now looked up. "You should have stayed in your room! Didn't Franz tell you?" "And what is it you want, then?" said K., looking back and forth between this new acquaintance and the one named Franz, who had remained in the doorway. Through the open window he noticed the old woman again, who had come close to the window opposite so that she could continue to see everything. She was showing an inquisitiveness that really made it seem like she was going senile. "I want to see Mrs. Grubach ... ," said K., making a movement as if tearing himself away from the two men - even though they were standing well away from him - and wanted to go. "No," said the man at the window, who threw his book down on a coffee table and stood up. "You can't go away when you're under arrest." "That's how it seems," said K. "And why am I under arrest?" he then asked. "That's something we're not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you'll learn about everything all in good time.

Where responsibility is obscured by a miasma of secrecy, accountability is no longer possible.

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Daniel Chong, 24, a UC San Diego senior, said he was swept up in a Drug Enforcement Administration raid near campus and was taken to the Kearny Mesa facility. After questioning, he was told he would be released.
Then the DEA left him locked inside a five-by-10-foot windowless cell.

He screamed. He kicked madly at the door. He cried like a baby.

Soon, Chong said, nothing made sense. He could hear agents chatting among themselves on the other side of the heavy door, and other detainees coming and going from holding tanks nearby.

Days crawled by. No food. No water. No bathroom. He remembers biting his eyeglasses and using the broken shards to scrawl a note onto his left arm.

“Sorry Mom,” he tried to write.

The DEA acknowledged, in a statement to The Watchdog on Monday, that agents left someone in a cell after a raid on April 21 — until they found him and had to call paramedics. San Diego Fire-Rescue Department said that medical call came on April 25.

Let me reiterate this: The man did NOTHING wrong. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time just like any of us could have been. He could have died.

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