Demand Justice for Darren Rainey

Demand Justice for Darren Rainey

Started
June 4, 2020
Signatures: 538,419Next Goal: 1,000,000
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Why this petition matters

Started by Jenny Illarramendi

The prior petition for Darren Rainey was closed due to insignificant coverage and attention. Help me resurface this case back up and demand justice for this man who was wrongly killed. 

We demand justice for Darren Rainey, a nonviolent offender who was locked in a boiling hot shower for 2 hours by prison guards, leading to his excruciatingly painful death. The prison guards responsible for torturing and killing Darren Rainey must be held accountable.

Taken from DailyKos article: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1/25/1375218/-Prisoner-060954

His name was Darren Rainey and on June 23, 2012, he was boiled alive. In our country. In our name. And paid for, by us.

His last known words were: “I can’t take it no more, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” According to reports, he screamed those words over and over and over again. And then he stopped screaming.

After being removed from the shower, staff administered CPR, with one a nurse registering Rainey’s internal temperature at 102 degrees, well above the normal temperature of 98.6.

The autopsy report states that 12 hours after his death, Rainey’s body still had a temperature of about 94 degrees.

Darren Rainey was a 50 year old, non-violent offender serving a two year sentence for cocaine possession in Florida’s Dade Correctional Institution. He was housed in the psychiatric ward because he was schizophrenic.

For reasons unknown, Rainey, a schizophrenic, had smeared feces on himself. When guards told him to clean it up, he refused.

He was then hauled off and handcuffed in “the shower”. Scalding water poured over him for up to two hours. While he screamed in agony and for his life, officers reportedly taunted “how do you like your shower?”. When ‘clean up’ was called in, chunks of skin that had separated from his body were part of what remained.

According to reporting, “The shower was just one tool the corrections officers used to torment prisoners in the ward, known as the transitional care unit.”

Two full years after his death, no-one had been held responsible. According to a June 2014 Miami Herald report:

A Herald investigation, first published in May, showed through public records and interviews by witnesses, including a nurse on duty at the time, that Rainey’s death was never properly investigated by the Department of Corrections or Miami-Dade police. Evidence also suggests that the Department of Corrections might have tried to cover up the incident.

Update To The Original Diary (Published Last Year)
According to the Miami Herald, four years after his death, the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office has officially ruled what happened to Darren Rainey’s “accidental”.

The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s autopsy report, completed this week, concluded that Rainey died from complications of schizophrenia, heart disease and “confinement” in the shower back in June 2012, according to multiple law enforcement sources.

Rainey, 50, did not suffer any burns anywhere on his body, and investigators could not conclude that the specially rigged shower was “excessively” hot the day he collapsed, the report said. Sources said the autopsy concluded that corrections officers had “no intent” to harm Rainey when they kept him in the shower for up to two hours.


 
Got that? A shower that was specifically rigged to scald human beings cannot be proven — years after the fact — to have contributed to Darren Rainey being boiled alive.
 

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office must now decide whether to charge corrections officers with committing a crime, such as manslaughter, for locking Rainey in the shower and leaving him. A spokesman declined to comment.

A federal criminal investigation is also continuing into Rainey’s death.

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Signatures: 538,419Next Goal: 1,000,000
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