Daniel Chong |
A university
student in the US city of San Diego has received $4.1m (£2.7m) from
the US government after he was abandoned for
more than four days in a prison cell, his lawyer said.
Daniel Chong said he
drank his urine to stay alive, tried to carve a message to his mother on his
arm and hallucinated.
He was held in a drug
raid in 2012, but told he would not be charged. Nobody returned to his cell for
four days.
The justice department's
inspector is now investigating what happened.
Mr Chong, now 25, said
he slid a shoelace under the door and screamed to get attention before five or
six people found him covered in his faeces in the cell at the Drug
Enforcement Administration's (DEA) San Diegoheadquarters.
After Mr Chong was
rescued, he spent five days in hospital recovering from dehydration,
kidney
failure, cramps and a perforated oesophagus. He also lost 15lb
(7kg).
Mr Chong was one of nine
people detained in the raid in April 2012. Authorities determined that they
would not pursue charges
after questioning him.
One of Mr Chong's
lawyers said a police officer then put him in the holding cell and
told him: "We'll come
get you in a
minute."
Mr Chong said he thought
he was forgotten by mistake.
"It sounded like it
was an accident - a really, really bad, horrible accident," he said.
The 5ft by 10 ft (1.5m
by 3m) cell had no windows and Mr Chong had no food or water while he was
trapped inside for four-and-a-half days.
Mr Chong said he started
hallucinating on the third day.
He urinated on a metal
bench so he could have something to drink. He also unsuccessfully tried to set
off a fire
sprinkler to draw attention of the DEA authorities.
"I didn't just sit
there quietly. I was kicking the door yelling," he was quoted as saying by
the Associated Press news agency.
"I even put some
shoestrings, shoelaces through the crack of the door for visual signs. I didn't
stay
still, no, I was
screaming."
At one point, Mr Chong
admitted, he thought he was going to die. He broke his eyeglasses by
biting into them and tried to carve a "Sorry Mom" farewell message.
He managed to finish an "S".
DEA spokeswoman Allison
Price confirmed that the $4.1m settlementhad
been reached, without
providing further
details, according to the AP.
The incident prompted
the head of the DEA to issue a public apology last May, saying he was
"deeply troubled" by the incident.
Mr Chong's lawyer said
that as a result, the DEA had introduced new policies for detention, including
checking cells daily and installing cameras inside them.
Mr Chong, now an
economics student at the University of California, says he plans to buy his
parents a house.
Culled from BBC
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