Jailers failed to preserve security video linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s 1st suicide attempt: Officials – By Aaron Katersky and Bill Hutchinson (ABC News) / Jan 9 2020
The millionaire financier died by suicide on Aug. 10.
Security video purportedly showing the outside of millionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s New York jail cell at the time of his attempted suicide in July has been lost, federal prosecutors claim.
The five hours of footage taken by a camera outside of Epstein’s cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan between 11 p.m. on July 22 and 4 a.m. on July 23 was mistakenly not preserved, federal prosecutor Geoffrey S. Berman wrote in a letter sent Thursday to U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth M. Karas.
Epstein was discovered unresponsive in his cell and with injuries to his neck in the early morning hours of July 23.
U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein appears in a photograph taken for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ sex offender registry, March 28, 2017, and obtained by Reuters, July 10, 2019.
New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services via Reuters
He was taken to a hospital and survived the attempted suicide, only to be found dead from suicide in his MCC cell less than a month later.
Attorneys for Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer charged in a triple slaying, had requested the video, prompting Kraus to ask for an update from prosecutors on the whereabouts of the footage. Tartaglione was sharing a cell with Epstein at the time of the financier’s failed suicide attempt.
It’s unclear why the video was requested.
“The Government has learned that the MCC inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC, and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 (i.e. the requested video) no longer exists,” Berman wrote in the letter to Karas, which has been obtained by ABC News.
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