Darren Rainey

On June 23rd, 2012, guards at Florida’s Dade Correctional Institution noted that 50-year-old inmate Darren Rainey was having a psychotic break. They moved him to a shower and left him there, and his body was found roughly two hours later. His fate continues to be mired in controversy…

The Dade Correctional Institution - oftentimes abbreviated to just "Dade C.I." - is a prison located in unincorporated Miami-Dade County, about 40 miles south of Miami itself. Dade C.I. is located next door to its counterpart, the Homestead Correctional Institution, which houses female inmates.

Opened in September of 1996, Dade C.I. houses about 1500 inmates, who have all been convicted in the state of Florida on several offenses. This includes inmates convicted of both violent and non-violent crimes, many of whom are often roomed together. However, some inmates are allowed to live in cells of their own; many of whom reside in the "Transitional Care Unit," which is the official name given to the prison's psychiatric ward.

Darren Rainey, an African American man born on January 12th, 1962, was one of the inmates that ended up in Dade''s TCU, due to his schizophrenia diagnosis, which had impaired his life for years (including some brief convictions early in his life for violent behavior). Rainey was serving out a two-year sentence for cocaine possession, which was set to expire in the summer months of 2012. Having started his sentence in August of 2011, Rainey was a mentally ill individual who often kept to himself, but whose untreated schizophrenia had manifested into odd behaviors for years.

For the entirety of his sentence, Rainey had been held in the Transitional Care Unit, where he could keep a cell of his own while receiving psychiatric assistance (primarily anti-psychotic medication). Here, guards could constantly observe Rainey through a glass window in his cell door, and for the entirety of his sentence, Rainey (known as D.O.C. #060954) was seen as a model prisoner who often kept to himself and his copy of the Koran. However, in June of 2012, his life would come to a sudden and tragic end, which remains clouded in doubt nearly a decade later.

This is the story of Darren Rainey.

June 23rd, 2012 was just a few weeks before 50-year-old Darren Rainey was set to be released from Dade Correctional, with his expected release date coming up in July.

That Saturday, six correctional officers (including one sergeant) were assigned to the 4:00 PM to 12:00 AM shift in the west wing of the Transitional Care Unit, where Darren was being held. These officers would split up their tasks and check in on inmates every half-hour, logging in their observations to the Security Control Desk (commonly known as the "Officer's Station"), which was manned by C.O. Edwina Williams that shift.

At around 6:30 PM, C.O. Cornelius Thompson, a three-year veteran of Dade C.I.) checked in on Darren in his cell, and noticed nothing unusual. It was a quiet summer evening thus far, and Thompson continued with his duties.

About an hour later - shortly after 7:30 - another C.O. named Roland Clarke made a round through the cell block that Darren Rainey resided in. A former football player with an imposing build, Clarke had been working at Dade C.I. for just over two years but was well-liked and respected by his fellow staff members.

Darren, whose copy of the Koran had been thrown away by guards days earlier, had been expressing some odd behaviors ever since. But now, it appeared like he had begun to smear feces all over himself and the walls of his cell, which was reported by C.O. Roland Clarke just after 7:30 PM. Sergeant John Fan Fan, the senior officer supervising this wing of the prison, who had been working at the facility for four years, happened to be in the vicinity at the time. He called for Darren to be escorted to the showers and also told an orderly to head to the soiled cell to begin cleaning it.

The shower that Darren Rainey was taken to was located in an adjacent building, which was accessible through a second story hallway. This shower was located right next to a janitor's closet, where a PVC pipe led up through the wall and guards could control the water flow and temperature from the other room. This kept inmates from being able to mishandle the pipes or machinery for their own purposes and allowed guards to control the water in case an inmate refused to clean themselves as requested.

It's worth noting that this was not the closest shower to Darren Rainey's cell. In his trip to this shower, correctional officer Clarke passed by two others but took Rainey to this more isolated shower, which was roughly 8 feet long and 3 feet wide. Once inside the shower, Darren's handcuffs were removed, and he was instructed to wash himself off as Clarke entered the adjacent janitor's closet and turned on the tap there.

Clarke, who claims to know that Darren had a history of refusing to clean himself in the past, then went to retrieve soap from a nearby cell (which belonged to an inmate named Harold Hempstead). He then returned to the shower, and handed off the soap to Darren, who took the soap and began to half-heartedly clean himself before saying:

"No, I don't want to do this."

Roland Clarke seems to have ignored Darren Rainey's comment, and returned to his duties, leaving Darren locked in the shower. This was at around 7:40 PM.

The guards were supposed to check on inmates every half-an-hour, but it appears that was not upheld on this evening in-question, with Darren being left behind and forgotten about in the shower for upwards of an hour.

It wasn't until roughly 9:00 PM that another security check was performed by C.O. Cornelius Thompson, which brought him to the J3 wing, after hearing what sounded like running water. Inmates usually only showered on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so hearing the water running on Saturday was unusual, and Thompson claims that he checked out the shower and observed Darren Rainey standing near the door, refusing to clean himself more than an hour later. Thompson claims that Darren still had feces on him, so he left him there in the shower to clean himself.

At 9:30 PM, Sergeant Fan Fan decided to remove Darren from the shower, regardless of if he was clean or not, and he ordered C.O. Clarke to return him to his cell. Roland Clarke made a return trip to the shower, turned off the tap from the adjacent janitor's closet, and then opened up the shower door. There, he found Darren Rainey lying face-up in the middle of the shower with his feet facing the door. His body, which was covering the shower drain, had a few inches of water pooled around him, but not enough to cover up his nose or mouth.

Clarke attempted to speak to Darren and claims that he even nudged him with his foot in an attempt to wake him. However, he quickly began to realize that the inmate was unresponsive, and called for medical assistance.

At this point, Darren was checked for a pulse and found to not be breathing. Sergeant Fan Fan would attempt (unsuccessfully) to perform CPR on the unconscious inmate, while correctional officers Roland Clarke and Cornelius Thompson would attempt to pick up Rainey's body and carry it to a stretcher at the bottom of a nearby stairwell. Their efforts were hindered by Rainey's skin, which the C.O.'s later recall felt "warm and slippery," detailing how it started to literally slip off as they physically picked him up.

The unconscious inmate was then taken to the prison's medical building, where lifesaving procedures were performed by the available staff for the next several minutes to no avail. At 10:07 PM, Darren Rainey was pronounced dead, a call would be made to the Miami-Dade Police Department just two minutes later (10:09 PM), informing them that an inmate had become unresponsive. Emergency personnel would come out to the prison in an attempt to resuscitate Rainey but would fail to do so. Within an hour, a police officer would arrive at the facility to collect a statement and evidence, who would be followed by a detective later that evening.

On the morning of June 24th, 2012, Detective Wilbert Sanchez with the Miami-Dade Police Department arrived at the Dade Correctional Institution to begin overseeing the investigation into inmate Darren Rainey's death.

Arriving at the facility at 12:03 AM, Detective Sanchez began interviewing those that had been there at the time of death: this included some of the correctional officers and nurses that had attempted to administer life-saving procedures. In total, Detective Sanchez would collect statements from four people that morning, none of whom were Rainey's fellow inmates.

Of the people that spoke to Detective Sanchez that morning, at least one pointed out the red areas of Darren Rainey's body, which indicated potential burns to his skin. It was impossible to ignore that, as images of the inmate's corpse would reveal that skin had started to slip off a large chunk of his body, including his face, torso, back, arms, and legs (basically, everywhere but his feet).

Despite that, though, the C.O.'s that had overseen that wing of the prison that evening told Detective Sanchez that Rainey had not screamed or given any kind of inclination that he was in pain while in the shower, having been left in there for roughly two hours with very minimal supervision. As a result, Detective Sanchez labeled Darren Rainey's death as "unclassified" pending a further investigation, which would necessitate a thorough autopsy to be held later that day.

David Lillard, a detective with the MDPD's Crime Scene Unit, arrived at Dade C.I. at around 12:45 AM and began to take photos of Darren's body; as well as the locations of the prison that he had been in that evening (shower, medical building, cell, etc.). Detective Lillard also began collecting reports of the available evidence which, unfortunately, did not include the water temperature of the shower Darren Rainey had died in. He didn't have a working thermometer with him at the time, so no official record of the water's temperature would be taken by authorities.

The autopsy of Darren Rainey would be held later that morning, by Dade County's Deputy Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Emma Lew. Despite the red marks on Darren's skin and the reports of his skin "slipping," Dr. Lew ruled that the deceased had no obvious external injuries; in particular, no burns to his skin that she could perceive. As such, she was unable to come to a consensus regarding his cause-of-death, and labeled his manner of death as inconclusive, pending further investigation.

Later that year, in October of 2012, an internal report written up by Florida's Inspector General for the Department of Corrections, Jeffery Beasley, would update the status of the case; announcing that there wasn't enough evidence to come to any distinct conclusion and that the case was still pending. It would remain in this static position for nearly two years, during which time there was almost no investigation into what had happened.

Most of this information would come out years later, but at the time of Darren Rainey's death, very little information was released by authorities. This story would quickly become a footnote in more broad articles that focused in on then-Florida Governor (and now Senator) Rick Scott's efforts to privatize the state's prisons; in particular, their health care providers (which included the nurses and mental health care workers that had interacted with Darren Rainey and other inmates at Dade C.I.).

One of the few newspaper articles published in 2012 got Darren's age wrong (listing him as being 47 years old instead of 50) and stated unceremoniously that he had died in a prison shower, reporting unconfirmed rumors that his death was onset by a psychotic outburst and a heart attack.

It wasn't until 2014 that details of Darren's death began to become public knowledge for the first time, by which point, several prison employees had moved on to new career opportunities (including two guards that had been working that night, who had since received promotions). No one had been punished or reprimanded for a prisoner dying under their watch - as you would expect from a just society - and the investigation had essentially stalled.

At the time, nobody cared about Darren Rainey. He had become just another statistic in Florida state's hundreds of prison deaths a year, and his case remained unexplained and unexplored for nearly two years.

Throughout 2013, numerous complaints were filed with the office of FDOC Inspector General Jeffery Beasley, alleging that guards working at Dade Correctional had subjected inmates to abuse that went far beyond the typical bounds of prison punishment. This included the long-term deprivation of food and water, regular physical and sexual abuse by the guards, and even attempts at torture.

The allegations that guards were abusing inmates was nothing unusual, but one complaint, in particular, would stand out later on. This complaint alleged that inmates were being locked inside of a shower, where guards could control the temperature of the water from an adjacent room. According to these complaints, the guards would often raise these temperatures to dangerous levels, and use this shower as a makeshift torture chamber to force inmates into compliance.

Many of these complaints were filed by a single inmate, Harold Hempstead, who alleged that he had insider knowledge about the death of Darren Rainey. But according to Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown, these complaints were returned by the FDOC IG's office "without action." This inactivity eventually led to the September 2013 suicide of 40-year-old inmate Richard Mair, who hung himself in his cell, but left behind a suicide note. In it, he claimed that:

"I'm in a mental health facility... I'm supposed to be getting help for my depression, suicidal tendencies and I was sexually assaulted."

Mair alleged that guards were not only complicit in much of the physical and sexual abuse that was rampant in the mental health facilities at Dade C.I., but that they were the main proponents of it, oftentimes forcing inmates to perform sexual acts on themselves and others, instigating violence between white and black inmates, stealing from and selling illicit substances to inmates, illegal gambling while working, and rampant misbehavior.

Unsurprisingly, a subsequent investigation by the FDOC Inspector General failed to find any evidence of this alleged misbehavior.

By April of 2014, Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown had started to dig into the Florida prison system for an upcoming series and had begun to look into the still-unexplained case of Darren Rainey, who had died nearly two years prior.

Since 2012, Dade County's Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Emma Lew had claimed that the autopsy was still not finalized, awaiting further investigation by the Miami-Dade Police Department; likewise, the MDPD would claim that they were awaiting autopsy results from the M.E.'s office before they could move their case forward. This discrepancy has never quite been worked out, and the only explanation seems to be that the case had stagnated by both departments shortly after it began, and it wasn't until reporters with the Miami Herald began looking into it - and asking questions that nobody had answers for - that the case finally kicked back into motion.

So it was in April of 2014, 22 months after the death of Darren Rainey, that MDPD Detective Wilbert Sanchez began to revisit the case. He then reached out to Dr. Lew, who had performed the original autopsy, and the decision was made to begin revisiting the case by collecting all of the available evidence. This would include statements from people that had not been questioned in the original investigation, and would also require those that had been questioned to be re-interviewed by investigators.

For the first time, many of those that had been avoided in the aftermath of Darren Rainey's death would be allowed to go on-the-record, and what they had to say wasn't pretty.

Harold Hempstead, an inmate at the Dade Correctional Institution, was one of the inmates that authorities turned to when they began their investigation. If you recall, Hempstead had already been tied to this case in two regards: he had been the inmate whose cell was located directly below the shower that Darren Rainey had been put in on the night of his death, and who the correctional officers turned to when they needed soap that evening. He had also written dozens of reports related to the rampant abuse from Dade C.I., many of which directly related to Darren Rainey and his death.

Hempstead, who was (and is) serving a projected life sentence of 175 years for a burglary spree, claimed in his testimony that guards had taken Darren Rainey and locked him in the showers for several minutes; during which time, Rainey was kicking the door and attempting to get the attention of guards by screaming:

"Please take me out!"

"I'm sorry!"

"I won't do it anymore!"

"I can't take it no more!"

Hempstead also described the guards noticing Rainey's deceased body at around 9:50 PM, and then frantically calling for medical assistance and a stretcher.

In his testimony, Hempstead described this as a semi-regular occurrence; claiming that, in the past, guards had put inmates into that particular shower for punishment reasons, so that they could control the temperature of the water from the adjacent closet. He alleged that other inmates had faced similar treatment (sometimes with cold water, and other times with hot) but that it had never been done to this extreme before. He also claimed that the size of the shower (8' by 3') was just large enough to avoid getting hit directly with the water, but that it would pool around at the inmate's feet. Meanwhile, the heat and steam would continue to build up, with the slots in the door providing very little ventilation for those inside.

Michael J. McLachlan, another inmate that was serving an extended sentence at Dade, was housed close to the shower Darren Rainey was in. During his testimony, he recalled Rainey being held in the shower for "one or two hours," with a small period of screaming near the end (right before the guards started responding and calling for medical assistance).

Brian Hernandez, an inmate that was released from custody in February of 2013, told investigators that he remembered the incident well. He recalled Rainey being taken to the shower early in the evening and then left there, followed by an extended period in which Rainey was screaming that he wanted out. This was approximately 30 minutes, according to Hernandez, who claimed that this screaming was ignored by the guards. Later, when Darren Rainey's body was being carried out of the cell by the guards, Hernandez recalled seeing pink flesh on the deceased inmate's legs, which stood out against his otherwise-dark skin.

Gary Bown, an inmate that was serving a life sentence for murder, also spoke to investigators about the night in question. He says that he recalled seeing Rainey taken to the shower and locked inside, right before the guard that escorted him there entered the adjacent closet and turned on the water. Bown then recalled seeing steam start to pour out of the vents in the shower door, which was followed by Rainey screaming for upwards of ten minutes before growing silent. According to Bown's memory, Rainey was left in there for an extended time, before guards returned to the shower and called for medical help.

Bown would later state that he witnessed the guards pulling Rainey out of the shower, describing the deceased as "burnt" and looking like a "boiled lobster."

Mark Joiner was another inmate serving a life sentence for murder and grand theft, who only agreed to speak to investigators after being moved to another prison (fearing reprisal from the guards that worked there). He claims to have witnessed Darren Rainey being taken to the showers, then locked inside while screaming that the water was too hot. The following morning, Joiner says that he was given cleaning supplies by prison staff and told to clean the showers. He recalled seeing bits of brownish-black stuff on the floor of the shower - which he mistakenly assumed was feces - but was, he claims, burnt skin.

Other inmates would recall that shower being used by guards as a means of abusing or punishing inmates for refusing to comply with their demands; with several inmates claiming to have been directly affected, receiving minor burns as a result. Others stated that they knew about the Darren Rainey case in particular, with him being killed after suffering through a similar treatment. These inmates would claim that Darren was screaming and begging for help throughout the roughly two hours he was locked in the shower, yelling out that he "wouldn't do it again" - pleas which were ignored by the guards.

In addition to statements from other inmates, certain officials would begin to tell their stories over the next few years, including some of the staff members that had worked at Dade Correctional.

George Mallinckrodt was a psychotherapist that worked in Dade's Transitional Care Unit, the same unit that Darren Rainey had been housed in at the time of his death. He worked there between 2008 and 2011 - leaving the year before Rainey's death - but later stated that he knew many of the guards there had a history of abuse.

In a letter written to the U.S. Department of Justice after leaving his position, Mallinckrodt wrote that guards in the TCU "taunted, tormented, abused, beat, and tortured chronically mentally ill inmates on a regular basis," and had attempted to file numerous complaints during his tenure there. He says that he even brought some of these concerns directly to the prison's warden, Jerry Cummings, but that never seemed to lead anywhere, with his complaints being ignored or denied outright.

Harriet Krzykowski, a psychiatric technician that worked at Dade C.I. between 2010 and 2013, spoke to the New Yorker in an interview that was published in 2016 and detailed a lot of the abuse that the inmates had had to endure (most of which was tantamount to torture), which she struggled to come to grips with as a staff member. While she didn't have any specific knowledge of Darren Rainey's death, much of what she saw and heard at the prison fit in with what inmates had been telling authorities for years, only to be ignored. She also claimed that authorities at the prison tampered with evidence, to prevent the truth of the case from coming to light, and had more than a year to do so without anyone asking questions.

Some of the staff members that were questioned by investigators included the personnel that had attempted to save Darren Rainey's life on the night of June 23rd, 2012. This included the nurses that had been working at the prison that evening, who claimed that his body had been warm to the touch by the time they saw him. One nurse, in particular, claimed that his body's temperature had exceeded 102 degrees (Fahrenheit), and another claimed that he was so warm that his temperature couldn't be measured by their thermometers.

Alexander Lopez, a paramedic that saw Rainey's body that evening, described him as sustaining "second- and third-degree burns on 30 percent of his body," while nurse Britney Wilson wrote in her report that Rainey had "1st degree burns to 90% of his body" (an observation she made just minutes after his discovery in the shower). While these two reports vary significantly, they do indicate that there were burn marks to Darren's body, which Dr. Lew denied entirely during the autopsy that she performed.

Prison officials would later test the temperature of the water from the shower where Darren Rainey died and found that it could reach upwards of 160 degrees (Fahrenheit), which was hot enough to cause burns; especially if someone were to be left in a confined space with that water and steam for an extended period. This test, which was performed just two days after Darren's death, was later rejected by the state because it had been performed with a meat thermometer, which is more than able to measure the temperature of water but not accepted by the state for some unknown reason.

A couple of well-known forensic experts also chimed in on the case: Drs. John Marraccini and Michael Baden, who spoke with journalists at the Miami Herald about the findings of the autopsy, which they were allowed to view. They both believed that the skin slippage observed in this case had to have been caused by "hot water trauma," and that there was more than enough evidence to assume that a large portion of his body had been burned. They also found it impossible to believe that decomposition would have begun so quickly after Rainey's death to explain away the skin slippage, which typically only happened in serious burn cases.

In December of 2015, Dr. Emma Lew would begin to finalize her report on the case of Darren Rainey's unexplained death, which had begun more than three years prior. Dr. Lew, who had been tasked with determining Rainey's cause/manner of death back in 2012, was finally prepared to report upon her findings, which would be published in January of 2016.

Based on medical records, toxicology reports, and the findings from her own autopsy, Dr. Lew ruled that Darren Rainey's cause-of-death was "accidental." In her report, she included information about Rainey's history of schizophrenia, which may or may not have impacted his nervous system and elevated his body temperature. She also noted that he had been prescribed the medication haloperidol during his incarceration, which might have triggered an undiagnosed heart condition that he had, and may have been further exacerbated by his confinement in the shower (even though he had been confined in a prison cell for several months leading up to his death).

Dr. Lew's conclusion seemed to ignore the skin slippage all over Darren's body, which she had noted in her prior autopsy as "visible trauma... throughout the decedent's body." But because Dr. Lew had found these to not be burns, she stated that Darren Rainey's skin - which was quite literally sliding off by the time his body was discovered - had been caused by "friction." She added that this had been made possible because of decomposition taking place quickly, aided by the hot and humid environment of the shower (it's worth pointing out that Drs. Marraccini and Baden both disagree with this conclusion).

Later, when asked why it had taken her nearly four years to come to this conclusion. Dr. Lew explained that there had been 174 deaths in local area prisons over the past decade, and each had required their own separate investigation. However, according to Dr. Lew, there had been no sign of abuse in any of these cases, which seems to be almost statistically impossible.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Lew recommended to not pursue any criminal charges against the correctional officers or staff members from Dade Correctional.

In 2017, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the State Attorney for Miami-Dade County, would follow this up by releasing a 101-page report that explained why none of the guards responsible for locking Darren Rainey in a shower for close to two hours - ultimately leading to his death - would be facing charges. The report, which was released late on a Friday afternoon (March 17th - St. Patrick's Day), included a lot of the witness statements that I've included in this episode.

While this report would end up becoming the official word on the case of Darren Rainey's death, it seems to go to great lengths to dispute a lot of the allegations made within it; primarily, by the inmates and staff that claimed that have witnessed or experienced abuse at the hands of the guards. In particular, the report seems hellbent on discrediting Harold Hempstead, the inmate whose numerous complaints ultimately led to the case being discovered by journalists with the Miami Herald. It also seems to place an incredible amount of weight on the autopsy performed by Dr. Lew, which took more than three years to come to fruition and seems to dispute itself quite often (such as the discrepancy over whether or not Darren Rainey's body had signs of any visible trauma - which it did).

As you can imagine, this report went over like a lead balloon and did nothing to explain away why Darren Rainey had died, why his skin was slipping away from his body, or why it had taken more than four years to come to this unceremonious conclusion. Over the next several months, activists would begin to picket outside of the office of State Attorney Kathy Rundle, petitioning for her to resign, for justice to be served, and for officials to finally recognize that Black Lives Matter.

Sadly, Darren Rainey's death remains just one of several from Florida's prison system throughout the last decade.

In 2010, Randall Jordan-Aparo, a 27-year-old serving a year-and-a-half sentence at Florida's Franklin Correctional Institution, was killed after he reportedly "disrespected a nurse." Officers responded by subjecting him to several canisters of tear gas, which triggered severe symptoms of Jordan-Aparo's blood disorder; and over the next several days, the young man would slowly choke to death. He reportedly told the guards on numerous occasions that he couldn't breathe, but they ignored his pleas, and he later died in his cell, still caked in the orange residue from the tear gas. His family settled a lawsuit with the state in 2019 for $850,000, but other than two C.O.'s being fired in 2014, nobody has ever been officially punished in his case.

In 2014, 31-year-old Jeremiah Tatum, who was incarcerated for drug dealing at the Northwest Florida Reception Center in Chipley, was gassed and beaten by six correctional officers while handcuffed. The six officers conspired to lie about the cause of the beating and were all later fired as a result. Despite being charged and convicted, all of the responsible officers were sentenced to probation and house arrest, while Tatum was later sent to serve out his sentence in solitary confinement... his punishment for having endured a vicious beating.

That same year (2014), 25-year-old Jessie Knight was singled out by a group of white guards, who decided to beat him for throwing a cookie on the ground. They lured him into the prison's barbershop and proceeded to choke and beat Knight, before forcing him to clean up his own blood from the floor of the shop.

In 2014, a black female inmate named Latandra Ellington died just days after writing letters to her family, expressing fears that guards were going to harm her. A couple of guards had reportedly threatened her, and her death - which was declared to have been caused by heart disease, ignoring the bruises that covered her body - continues to be mired in mystery and confusion today.

Another black inmate would pass away the following year, 2015. Vincent Gaines had served at least part of his sentence at Dade C.I., and within the first year-and-a-half of his five-year sentence, had lost nearly half of his body weight. He died weighing just 115 pounds, with the autopsy unable to identify his cause of death; however, loved ones believed that Gaines was starved by prison officials, who had reportedly used starvation as a punishment in the past.

The sad thing is, I could just keep listing examples of this vicious treatment of minority prisoners in the state of Florida. Since the year 2000, more than 2000 inmates have died in Florida prisons, and countless others have received cruel or inhumane treatment that continues to be ignored by the world-at-large and/or covered up by the authorities that are meant to uphold the integrity of our criminal justice system. Of the 2000 deaths I just mentioned, less than 100 have been labeled as homicides, with the other 1900 being ascribed to any number of natural or, as it was in this case, "accidental" causes.

In the eight years since Darren Rainey died, the fallout has continued to affect many of the individuals involved... but perhaps not in the way you'd think.

Jerry Cummings, the Dade Correctional Institution's warden at the time, was suspended by FDOC Secretary Mike Crews in 2014 after the Miami Herald began reporting about Rainey's unexplained death. This was part of a pushback against the allegations of corruption, which resulted in Cummings being suspended alongside dozens of other C.O.'s and officials from around the state. Shortly thereafter, Cummings and some others were asked to hand in their resignations, in a move meant to signify that the state was purging the "bad apples" from the state's Department of Corrections.

In an interview with the Miami Herald's Julie Brown, Cummings would claim that he attempted to implement changes during his tenure at Dade C.I., but faced resistance from the very staff members he supervised (many of whom he had inherited). This included some of the guards that had been working on the night of Darren Rainey's death.

"The biggest challenge a warden has is to change the culture of an institution. When I got to Dade, the inmates were not the problem. The real problem was that the inmates weren't treated like human beings."

Roland Clarke, the correctional officer that escorted Darren Rainey to the shower that he later died in - and the same person that discovered him unconscious in said shower two hours later - resigned from his position as a prison guard in July of 2014. This correlated to when the case was receiving local scrutiny, but Clarke wasn't out of work for long: he quickly latched on to the Miami Gardens Police Department as a police officer, where he would work for the next several years.

The Miami New Times would file a FOIA request for Clarke's Internal Affairs file in 2018 and found that - during his tenure as an MGPD patrolman - he had been investigated repeatedly for a number of infractions. This included at least two occasions where he had met up with women to have sex with while working (and being married to another woman), and ultimately led to him being suspended for a grand total of five days. The publication of these incidents would lead to Clarke resigning from this position, but then falling back into another position with the Florida Department of Corrections in 2019 (where he continues to work today).

Meanwhile, the other correctional officer that supervised Darren Rainey on the night of his death - Cornelius Thompson - has since gone on to work for the federal prison system.

Dr. Emma Lew, the Dade County Deputy Chief Medical Examiner that performed the autopsy of Darren Rainey's body (and recommending not pressing charges against anyone for his death), has since been promoted to the post of Director for Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's Department (a position she still holds today).

Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the State Attorney for Miami-Dade County, has continued to serve in that role and defend her work on this case; primarily her 2017 report, in which she explained why she wasn't pursuing charges against anyone for Darren Rainey's death. In the weeks after her announcement, she would candidly speak out against her critics - describing the Black Lives Matter protestors that picketed outside of her office as a "mob" - and blocked more than a hundred of her most vocal critics on social media.

In her nearly thirty-year career as the State Attorney for Miami-Dade County, Rundle has managed to avoid charging a single officer for killing anyone on-duty.

Meanwhile, Julie K. Brown, the journalist with the Miami Herald who broke this story back in 2014 during her extensive coverage of Florida's prison system, has received several accolades as a result. She earned the 2014 George Polk Award in justice reporting for her work in highlighting the stories of abuse and mistreatment in Florida's prisons and followed that up with a second winning of the award in 2018 for her reporting on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. She has been lauded for really kicking that story into the public consciousness, and Julie remains a beacon of great reporting in the 21st century.

In January of 2018, the family of Darren Rainey received a $4.5 million settlement from Florida's Department of Corrections; which, as always, was paid out through taxpayer money. To date, no one has been charged with his death, and despite the state of Florida paying out a seven-figure settlement to make the case from his family go away, his death remains listed as "accidental." An investigation was launched by the U.S. Department of Justice some time ago, which was reportedly looking into possible civil rights violations (tied into Dade C.I.), but there has been no word on this investigation since 2017.

As of this episode's recording, the story of Darren Rainey remains unresolved.

Episode Information

Writing, research, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

Published on on June 14th, 2020

Producers: Maggyjames, Roberta Janson, Ben Krokum, Peggy Belarde, Quil Carter, Victoria Reid, Gabriella Bromley, Laura Hannan, Damion Moore, Amy Hampton, Steven Wilson, Scott Meesey, Marie Vanglund, Scott Patzold, Astrid Kneier, Lori Rodriguez, Aimee McGregor, Danny Williams, Sydney Scotton, Sara Moscaritolo, Sue Kirk, Thomas Ahearn, Seth Morgan, Marion Welsh, Patrick Laakso, Kelly Jo Hapgood, Alyssa Lawton, Meadow Landry, Rebecca Miller, Tatum Bautista, Jared Midwood, Travis Scsepko, Erin Pyles, Jo Wong, Teunia Elzinga, Consuelo Moreno, Jacinda B., and Kelly Harris