Apparently as Epstein arrived or shortly before his death the guards were rotated and two with very little suicide watch experience were present. One was also caught sleeping?
Is a guard sleeping on duty during a night shift surprising to you? As 542458 said, the level of competency that people assume is hilarious. Prison staff are overworked, underpaid, and have miserable jobs.
It was two guards that both fell asleep. Okay that might be coincidence. What about the two cameras that failed at the same time? They should publish failure rates of cameras at that facility.
When was the last time two sets of electronics failed at the exact same time randomly? If there was a voltage spike or something that killed them both how come it didn't affect anything else at the facility? Maybe they were EMP'ed or something? Okay that sounds fantastical, but I hope they do answer questions. There is likely an innocent explanation to all this, but there should be a thorough investigation.
It was probably less a coincidence and more of SOP. The guards probably have to do rounds at set times (every hour, for example) and then post up somewhere between those times and most likely fall asleep, or do a crossword puzzle or whatever to pass the time.
As for electronic failure, I would say it's probably common as well. Just search for "Prison conditions in the united states" or "deterioration of prisons". Our prions are overcrowded and under funded. These things are usually reported in regards to the terrible conditions for prisoners (heating constantly failing, mice/bug infestations, leaking roofs, etc), but this also applies to equipment used by guards. We are talking about facilities running old facilities and equipment with minimum maintenance. Even if the camera's didn't fail (I am not up to date on the story, but I assume they both did?), I would be surprised if the quality of the footage was usable (or if it was even recorded).
If they had been broken for a long time before this, why would they put the highest-profile prisoner in the entire country in there without fixing them first, or moving him to a cell where the cameras do work?
-I don't know how the cameras were installed, but it wouldn't surprise me if the explanation was simply that they were on the same mains circuit - only to have that trip for some reason or the other.
Heck, possibly they were dumping their video onto a recorder in the prison guards' personnel room. Right next to the water boiler. With only one socket within easy reach. Go figure.
(The latter example not being as far-fetched as it may seem; our workshop pager system went down several times a day for this very reason until we cajoled an electrician into fitting another outlet...)
Do you think these low tech security cameras are hooked up to Pager Duty or something so their crack team of IT pros staffed 24x7 can jump into action and fix them?
24x7 no but 9-5 staff fixing broken cameras in a matter of weeks is probably more typical. Especially considering how many cameras are in this one location and how straightforward it is to keep track of if any cells don't have working cameras.
I'm not saying it's a movie where the moment a camera goes down a 250lb Russian goon comes down and investigates. However cameras not working for years? In the fucking suicide watch cell? You honestly think that's realistic? Honestly those would probably get replaced faster than most cameras...
Maybe there's a few cameras people just forgot were broken and get forgotten about for years but it wouldn't be a typical case if the IT and maintenance team was even half-competent.
Also the cameras just so happened to not have been recording at the time of the incident... doesn't seem coincidental considering his profile and potential to bring down some big name elites
This is the problem with conspiracy theories... Avoidable accidents and conspiracy theories have the same fact pattern, which is an overlap of failure modes that should have been preventable but weren't prevented.
Was the Titanic disaster a tragic accident borne of negligence... or a conspiracy to assassinate John Jacob Astor and make it look like an accident? A lot had to go wrong to make an unsinkable ship sink. Who paid off the watchmen that evening? Why was the captain going so fast? And did one of Astor's rivals gain a contract to sell the steel that... etc., etc.
Occam's razor is important to keep handy, and Occam's razor here should be factoring in that American prisons are designed-by-committee-and-cruelty shit that have needed a massive overhaul for decades.
Good post. I hope they do release the statistics of how often cameras fail at that facility. Two cameras failing in the same time widow feels very unlikely to me unless they're using some really bad ones, which won't surprise me. Would still like to know how that happened.
Sure, two cameras failing at the same time right before he incident seems very suspicious. But is that the case? Seems more likely both cameras were broken and had been for a long time and were never fixed.
How many other cameras in the facility were broken?
If cameras are broken, how would you ever learn that they are broken? Perhaps it would require an important event like a suicide to occur so that you would need to review the tapes and discover the broken cameras.
most likely the power line to the cameras were cut or interfered with. They should both be on the same network and it should not be difficult to disable if knowing about the security system before hand.
Not to mention, Epstein had pretty good reason to kill himself outside of anyone who might benefit from it. He was probably facing life in prison for despicable crimes. There's no coming back from that.
He had “come back from” one conviction before. And with what he knew he could probably have cut a deal, even gone into witness protection. The suicide theory just doesn’t hold water.
I thought the Titanic disaster was pretty well-explained as an accident caused by incompetence and hubris. The ship wasn't "unsinkable"; they just advertised it that way, but it was no match for a big iceberg. The ship was sailing through an area with icebergs, and going fast too, and it was nighttime. IIRC, the captain was in a rush to get to the destination (sorry, it's been a while since I watched Cameron's movie). Really, all it took was the decision to go full-speed through an area with icebergs at night to cause that disaster. Then other stuff afterwards was sheer incompetence and classism, like not fully filling the lifeboats.
Assassinating one person by sinking a whole ship is a pretty crazy way to kill someone; it's surely far easier to just hire someone to club him when he's walking the street somewhere. However, with Epstein, there's no such similarity: he was the only one to die, and since he was locked up in prison, anyone wanting to kill him really didn't have much choice, if they wanted to get him before he testified against someone. And there do seem to be a disturbing number of things that went "wrong" for this to happen.
Addendum: after watching an interesting YouTube video on the disaster, it seems that not filling the lifeboats actually wasn't all that incompetent. A lot of people didn't think the boat was really sinking, and there was another large ship within visual distance which could see them and their flares, and which they were radioing for help, so they thought help was going to be there very shortly if they needed it. Unfortunately, there was some very serious incompetence going on at that ship: the radio operator had gone to sleep for the night, and the captain, despite seeing many flares, decided not to bother investigating. After the disaster, apparently his story changed every time he was asked.
Anyway, I think my point stands: trying to murder someone by engineering a disaster at sea like this is pretty ridiculous; too many things have to go wrong all at the same time, which really aren't under control of any one person or small group. Getting the captain to speed through iceberg territory (and honestly, there weren't that many icebergs, they were just unlucky and happened across a big one), making sure a large iceberg was directly ahead, making sure just enough compartments flooded, making sure the radio operator on the other ship went to bed, making sure the captain of the nearby ship refused to investigate, and finally when help did arrive (and it did), making sure the assassination target somehow wasn't among the survivors. Killing someone in a prison cell where there's no witnesses except a camera or two (that "just happened" to be "malfunctioning") and a couple of guards to bribe is actually realistic and possible, especially if state-level operatives are involved.
You might be interested in the investigation into the death of Sandra Bland, which also found a disturbing number of things going wrong in the Texas jail system. Or probably any other investigation into any jail/prison in the US. A guy died of dehydration in a county jail in Washington. How ridiculous does that sound? (Keaton Farris, if you want to read more about it).
This could have been intentional, fyi.