Top of Form

The Maine Public Broadcasting Network

Maine State Prison Inmate's Death Under

Investigation
07/29/2010 05:35 PM ET Reported By: Susan Sharon

Learn More....
About Susan Sharon
Send Email

The Maine Attorney General's Office is investigating death of an inmate at the Maine State
Prison at Warren as a possible homicide

Audio Report: http://www.mpbn.net/DesktopModules/PDGNews/MediaPlayer.aspx?

PDGNewsStoryID=13057&PDGNewsMediaID=822&TabID=36&ModuleID=3478

The death of Victor Valdez last November was first brought to light by
reporter Lance Tapley who has closely followed prison issues and sheds
more light on the case in the latest edition of the Portland Phoenix. Most
of the details were provided in letters from inmates because of limited
access to the prison system.

Tapley describes Victor Valdez as a small, middle-aged immigrant from

the Dominican Republic who may have been hard of hearing and who
suffered from a range of health ailments including congestive heart
failure, lung problems, cirrhosis of the liver and severe kidney disease
that required dialysis several times a week. Valdez was serving four years
in prison for assault and though he had a history of petty crimes, Tapley
says he was not a violent person and he was well-liked by other inmates.

"They were trying to teach him English and they were also trying to find
somebody, at least they had talked about it, somebody to donate a
kidney to him within the prison. This was not some monster, maniac
criminal...", says Tapley.

But on November 19th of last year, Tapley says Valdez was heating up
some lunch in the day room's microwave when an alarm sounded and
corrections officers ordered inmates to their cells. When Valdez didn't
respond quickly enough... possibly, Tapley suggests, because he didn't
According to inmates who wrote to Tapley, Valdez was later told he was
being sent to solitary confinement in the Supermax Unit and taken away.
Tapley says later that day another inmate reportedly saw Valdez in the
infirmary. The inmate, Franklin Higgins, described what he saw in a letter
to prisoner advocate Judy Garvey, who shared it with Tapley.

"He saw, he said, Valdez being taken in by a couple of officers into this
medical section of the prison and "he had blood all over his left arm and
back which was very
Copyright fresh"
© Maine Public and Valdez
Broadcasting was 2010.
Network asking repeatedly:
All rights reserved. What did I
do? What did I do?", says Tapley.
{"__scdoff":"1"}
After that, Tapley says, another inmate in the Supermax
Bottom of Form wrote to say he
saw officers cover Valdez with pepper spray. Joel Rivera wrote his letter in
Spanish, which was later translated.

" I'm gonna paraphrase here", Tapley says.

"They put him back in the cell after they took his blood pressure without
cleaning the cell or him and when the officers put him back the pepper
spray was very strong. Victor fell on the floor and he stayed like that.
After ten minutes they called code blue which is life threatening
emergency code. When the medics came Victor was foaming at the
mouth which came from the pepper spray. They left the spray on him.
They didnt' clean it. I thought he was dead because he was a sick man
and the pepper spray made it difficult to breathe."

Judy Garvey of the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition says she and her
group were gathering testimony from inmates for a bill to limit solitary
confinement when she received two letters alerting her to the situation
involving Victor Valdez. Garvey says the letters were received just a
couple of days after Valdez was put in solitary confinement. At the time
she received them, she says Valdez was still alive.

"They basically said please send someone in here fast before he bleeds
to death like another prisoner did. Please do something. Send in disability
rights, send in somebody. You know, they were pleading with us to do
something because they're powerless in there", says Garvey.

Garvey says she tried going through all the proper, official channels,
emailing and calling state agencies including the Department of
Corrections.

"The response was our concerns were without merit. That was the
response we got from the Department of Corrections.""

But eight days after he was taken out of his unit and put in segregation,
Victor Valdez was dead. Garvey says she learned of the news in a letter
she received when she returned from her Thanksgiving holiday.

"It was extremely shocking", Garvey says. "It was pretty fast and it was
pretty sad."

Garvey says when she pressed for answers about where and how Valdez
died, she couldn't get any answers. Tapley was eventually able to find out
that no autopsy was performed and that Valdez's body was cremated.