Federal Prison Guards Admit To Filing False Records During Jeffrey Epstein’s Suicide
The two guards were accused of napping and shopping online rather than checking Epstein’s cell every 30 minutes -- and then falsifying records afterwards.
www.forbes.com
Two guarding Epstein night he killed himself will avoid jail time
The prison workers were accused of sleeping and browsing the internet instead of monitoring Jeffrey Epstein when he died in 2019
www.nbcnews.com
Quotes from the sources
Two former prison guards who were on duty the morning Jeffrey Epstein killed himself admitted Friday to falsely claiming they’d performed rounds in his section of the Manhattan federal detention center where he was being held, according to an agreement filed in federal court Friday afternoon, almost two years after the accused sex trafficker hanged himself and jail staff were blamed for failing to check in on him regularly.
The prison workers, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were accused of sleeping and browsing the internet instead of monitoring Epstein the night he took his own life in August 2019.
Both officers who were guarding Epstein were working overtime because of staffing shortages. One of the guards, who did not primarily work as a correctional officer, was working a fifth straight day of overtime. The other guard was working mandatory overtime, meaning a second eight-hour shift of the day.
The two guards — Michael Thomas and Tova Noel — struck a deferred prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors, in which they admitted they’d “willfully and knowingly completed materially false count and round slips” for the Metropolitan Correctional Center’s special housing unit, where Epstein’s cell was supposed to be checked every 30 minutes.
In exchange for admitting they’d falsified records, Thomas and Noel agreed to complete 100 hours of community service and cooperate with a DOJ investigation into the matter — but they’ll avoid jail time.
The deal still needs to be approved by a federal judge.