After my arrest, I spent the first nineteen months locked up in a two-tiered pod on the fourth floor of the Fresno County Jail.
If memory serves me correctly, the pod housed seventy-five inmates who were either awaiting trial or transfer to a state or Federal prison.
The crimes of my fellow inmates ran the gamut from murder and rape to multiple DUI's, but most of them were there on drug charges.
I was bunked next to a man who had been arrested for drunk driving, with an injury-involved accident.
The inured person was him. He was having trouble breathing. He said his ribs hurt.
We opened his jail-issued orange jumpsuit and could plainly see the lumps in his rib cage where his ribs were broken and pushing against his skin, and probably against his lungs.
About a dozen inmates began yelling, "man down," over and over. Finally, after about ten minutes, a guard (also called a correctional officer, or CO) came into the pod to take a look.
He at first pronounced the man to be okay and said he was probably faking it.
A dozen inmates immediately closed in around the guard and began screaming at him to look at the man's ribs.
The guard finally relented and called in Health Services, who took the inured man away on a stretcher.
(to be continued)
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