The assignment was to watch a folder of videos on the firm’s FTP site and write a time coded description and summary of each file. What the files depicted was not disclosed to me. It was need to know, and it seemed like I didn’t need to know in order to accomplish the assignment. They said: “Be sure to note the time on the clock visible on Feed #2 whenever you see law enforcement. REMEMBER: Victim’s family will see these.”
There were three subfolders of video files on the FTP site. Each folder corresponded to one of the three motion activated security cameras in a holding cell.
I did not need to know what happened in that cell or to whom. It was a 17 year old girl dying from heroin withdrawals alone in a rural holding cell after being arrested for drunk driving.
I did not know what someone dying from heroin withdrawals looked like. Her prison jumpsuit is soaked in shit within a few hours. She spends the rest of her life naked. She runs out of toilet paper and then overwhelms the toilet.
She takes the holding bedsheets-too papery to facilitate a hanging-and arranges them into a shitting nest beneath the unforgiving fluorescence.
Every 15 minutes from 10pm until she dies a little after 7am a guard comes and peeks their head in the little hole to make sure she’s okay. They talk sometimes but there’s no audio.
She lays down next to the concrete around 5am and stops moving. She dies naked on the concrete 2 hours later.
Never is her face more distinct than a pink blue blur, with wild red hair.
Lawyers don’t work much the whole month of December, and when they’re all OOO is when the shit picks up steam on its downhill roll.
It was December 23 and even the paralegals were gone, which is how this fell to the temp. It was almost a joke of a Minnesota winter, snow piling up as I typed.
How do you describe to a child’s horrifying lonely death to their parents? Information has to be conveyed and sentiment eliminated.
“The deceased vomits”
“The deceased wraps herself in her sheets”
“The cell’s toilet is full; the deceased defecates on the floor”
They laid me off the next month. They said they’d be happy to put in a good word for me at the Phoenix office if I was interested.
— Alex Kies graduated from Metropolitan State University, and aspires to overtake Derek Chauvin as its most notable alumnus, because surpassing General Alfred Gruenther, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO from 1953-1956 as his high school’s seems, at this point, unlikely. Would you like to know more? Please visit www.alexkies.net