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Cross City prison officers led inmate from cameras, beat him, then covered it up, report says

 
Published May 17, 2019

What happened to inmate William Brooks one night in 2017 at a remote Florida prison took about 15 minutes. The coverup lasted longer.

Surveillance footage from August 2017 inside the East Unit of Cross City Correctional Institution shows Brooks being escorted out in handcuffs by Officer Ronald Hendricks at 8:59 p.m. At 9:15, he returned through a side door, still cuffed, but with his face battered and a boot tread marking his head.

His fellow inmates noticed, and a ruckus erupted. Officers moved to quell the disturbance, and conducted "hand and face" checks of the inmates.

"It is what it is," the prisoners were told.

The incident yielded criminal charges this year against three former Department of Corrections officers, the latest in a series of allegations about inmate abuse and misconduct in the state's prisons. Details of the Cross City incident are revealed in an Inspector General's report the department released last week.

"The Florida Department of Corrections has zero tolerance for officer misconduct of any kind," spokeswoman Michelle Glady said in a statement to the Tampa Bay Times. "The actions of these former staff are absolutely no representation of the thousands of corrections officers who serve this state with respect and integrity each and every day."

Cross City is a small town in rural Dixie County along Florida's Nature Coast. The prison, one of the town's main employers, holds roughly 1,300 inmates. The East Unit sits a few hundred yards away and houses another 400.

The name of the inmate identified as the victim is redacted from the report but he is identified in a court document as William Brooks.

The cameras in the inmate housing center known as "M-dormitory" recorded him lying on his bunk when Officer Hendricks approached and called him to the laundry room. He was cuffed and taken out.

Court documents say he was taken to an office, out of the view of cameras, and told he was being punished for being disrespectful. Corrections Sgt. James MacArthur hit him in the face, then yanked him by the handcuffs, making him fall to the floor, according to an arrest affidavit. Brooks was kicked and punched repeatedly. He was told to hide his face upon returning to the dorm.

More than 50 inmates were in the dorm when he returned through a side door. The videos show them gathering around, looking at his injuries. Some of them banged on the glass of an officer's station, telling an on-duty guard that something was wrong.

Witnesses would later describe the scene as chaotic. The inmates told the investigators what Brooks told them. They said he claimed the officers gave him three choices: Take a beating, go to confinement, or go to confinement with a charge of assaulting an officer. He said he chose the beating.

As the dorm descended into a state of alarm, another corrections officer is seen on video confronting Hendricks and MacArthur, according to the report. The pair then told the inmates to line up so their hands and faces could be for injuries. The third officer indicated to the other two that "they had to make it look good," according to the report.

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"The inmates believed that the officers checked their hands so that on camera it would appear they were investigating an inmate-on-inmate altercation," an investigator wrote in the report. More than a dozen inmates reported that the officers' hands appeared as though they had been in a fight.

One inmate got on a dorm telephone and dialed an anonymous TIPS line. He reported that the officers had taken another inmate out of the dorm and beaten him and that the inmate returned with "stuff all over his face." Another called his mother. As an officer told him to hang up, he said that if she didn't hear from him again she would know what happened.

Corrections Lt. Klinton Cooper wrote in a report that Brooks was brought to his office that night to be questioned about the discovery of an anonymous "kite." A kite is a handwritten note that prisoners use to communicate with each other. The kite said Brooks needed protection from the Latin Kings gang.

Also included with Cooper's report was a written statement from Brooks. "Inmates in bathroom jumped on me last week inmates made big deal about it and I got to go to jail."

The documents were a fraud, investigators concluded. They compared the handwriting on the kite with writing samples from the prison staff members. They noted similarities with the signature of a female corrections officer.

When interviewed, she admitted she had written the kite at the request of MacArthur, according to the report. She said didn't question the request but had a bad feeling about it. She was not accused of any misconduct.

The officers took Brooks out of the dorm to transfer him to the main prison. While they awaited a transport van, MacArthur took pictures of Brooks' injuries. A surveillance camera caught him blowing on the camera lens, according to report. Investigators surmised he was intentionally trying to distort the images.

Within a few days, the incident came to the attention of the Department of Corrections' office of the Inspector General after an officer reported receiving a written account of the beating from an inmate. An investigator was sent to the prison and later ordered Brooks transferred to another prison.

MacArthur, Hendricks and Cooper were arrested in February on charges that include official misconduct and perjury. All three have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

Contact Dan Sullivan at dsullivan@tampabay.com. Follow @TimesDan.