Prison-reform advocates call for an investigation after Chicago Tribune finds what prison experts call a fatal mistake
By Gary Marx | Chicago Tribune reporter
May 5, 2009
Joshua Daczewitz was a first-time inmate at a minimum-security prison when he tested positive for cocaine.
So corrections officials transferred the pudgy, bespectacled Daczewitz to one of the state's toughest prisons as punishment and put him in a cell with Corey Fox, a lifer in for murder. That turned out to be a fatal mistake.
With a history of violence even behind bars, Fox had been locked up alone for a year not long after pummeling and threatening to kill a cellmate and confessing to his desire to kill again. Yet after Fox was transferred to Menard Correctional Center in late 2003, several staffers at the maximum-security prison cleared him to share a cell with Daczewitz.
On Feb. 27, 2004, Fox says he passed a note to a corrections officer threatening to "erase" Daczewitz if he wasn't moved out. Daczewitz repeatedly kicked and beat on the cell door, begging to be removed, according to Fox.
By late morning, Fox knocked Daczewitz to the floor with a single punch, grabbed a makeshift rope hidden under his mattress and began choking him, according to the records. When the rope slipped off, he strangled Daczewitz, 22, with his hands.
Confronted by a Tribune reporter with the evidence of negligence, one top corrections official admitted that staffers erred by putting Daczewitz in the same cell with Fox.
Also, two other former high-ranking prison officials insisted a low-security inmate such as Daczewitz should never have been moved to a maximum-security prison for a drug violation in the first place.
But folks, this is THE line from the killer's mouth:
"Daczewitz was like a mouse in a maze of lions," Fox, 34, said in a chilling letter to the Tribune in February. "He should have never been in the cell to begin with. ... Daczewitz was given to me, like the blood of a lamb."
Like, Whoa!
One prison expert, after reviewing documents about the case provided by the Tribune, called for an independent probe into whether prison staffers should be disciplined for housing Fox and Daczewitz together.
Charles Fasano of the John Howard Association, a prison watchdog group in Chicago, said prison officials also should re-examine their practice of transferring inmates from minimum- to maximum-security prisons for nonviolent rules violations. "Daczewitz was a lightweight who should not have come anywhere near Menard," Fasano said. "It's overkill to send Daczewitz to a maximum-security prison. And Fox shouldn't have had a cellmate, period. The guy was a ticking time bomb."
Daczewitz's murder was not just the result of a misguided policy or the misjudgment of a few corrections staffers, Fasano said, but also a tragic consequence of an overcrowded prison system in which officials are under intense pressure to "double-cell" even the most violent offenders, sometimes leading to deadly results.
The Illinois Department of Corrections defended its safety record, saying only nine inmates have been killed in the last 12 years for a system that holds some 45,500 offenders. "These things can and will happen," said Sergio Molina, the corrections department's executive chief. "We try to work diligently to make sure that these incidents don't happen, and I think the numbers reflect that we do a very good job."
Well, that's reassuring.
In court papers, Daczewitz's aunt and adoptive mother, Sherree, said she remains devastated by his murder. She declined to talk to the Tribune because of her continuing grief. "Joshua was a gentle person, and for him to have been so violently killed makes me feel overwhelmed with a deep feeling of sadness and loss," she wrote before the state settled her wrongful-death lawsuit for $150,000 last December. - And that's all she got? Her lawyers suck - a child could have convinced a jury to award $1 million with this amount of negligence evidence.
Just three weeks after beginning a 7-year sentence for arson and robbery, Daczewitz failed a drug test at the minimum-security Vienna Correctional Center and was shipped to Menard on the same day.
Several top corrections officials said it was common to transfer low-security inmates to maximum-security prisons for drug violations, but others disputed that. Salvador Godinez, the former chief of operations for state prisons at the time of Daczewitz's murder, said it usually took an egregious offense such as an attack on an officer for that big of a jump.
Eugene McAdory Jr., then Menard's warden, said he urged a superior not to send Daczewitz to Menard because of his fears that he would be preyed on. McAdory said the official, Richard Bard, ignored his warning.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Bard, now corrections chief of operations, denied ever talking to McAdory about the matter but defended the transfer, saying smoking crack cocaine in prison constitutes a major threat to safety and security.
Fox, a reputed white supremacist gang member, has spent most of his adult life in prison for burglary, theft, armed robbery and murder. His violence continued behind bars, with numerous assaults and death threats, according to the records.
Once in 2002, he repeatedly punched his cellmate, leading him to cower under the bunk. "On my son's name, if you come out from under that bed, I will kill you," records show the cellmate quoted Fox as telling him.
Daczewitz had difficulty adjusting to the maximum-security prison, though for a time he got along with Fox, playing cards and chess and sharing books. In writing to his mother and other relatives, Daczewitz said he cried every day and bitterly complained about some corrections officers. "A few of them saw me crying the other day and asked me if I wanted one of them to tuck me in," he wrote.
In the days before the murder, several inmates said they heard Fox bullying and threatening Daczewitz, according to prison records and the lawsuit. Fox told the Tribune that he and Daczewitz repeatedly spoke to guards and even wrote corrections officials demanding to be separated. Fox said he passed a note to Christopher Fleming, a guard, the morning of the murder telling him to "move my cellie or I'm going to erase him," according to the records.
In sworn statements in the lawsuit, several guards either couldn't recall being warned of problems between the cellmates or denied any problems existed.
Fleming said it was not his duty to protect inmates. "It's our job to see he ... doesn't escape," Fleming said in his deposition. "As long as they're in the cell ... that's our job."
On the morning of the murder, Daczewitz spent almost three hours "kicking and beating on the cell door, crying, begging, pleading to be taken out," Fox wrote the Tribune. "Each officer that passed by ignored him or walked off the gallery laughing, as if it were all a joke."
Fed up with the inaction, Fox said he jumped off the top bunk and punched Daczewitz in the mouth, knocking him to the floor, according to the records. Before Daczewitz could rise, Fox pulled Dazcewitz's head back by the hair and strangled him.
Fox is now locked up at least 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, in a cell at "super-max" Tamms Correctional Center after receiving a life sentence for Daczewitz's murder. His head shaved and goatee braided, Fox declined to give a reason for killing Daczewitz but said he felt no remorse. "If I felt like it, I'd take another life," he boasted.
Like brotha Snoop-Dogg always said, "Why ask why?"
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