That’s how much Chong is suing them, because after interrogating him, they put him in a small windowless, bathroomless cell to await as they finished some paper work. After five days of waiting (they said they “forgot him”), Chong had gone from drinking his own urine to survive to screaming for help, to trying to set off the sprinkler system, to contorted his arms around to get his handcuffed hands free to break his glasses so he could carve “Sorry mom” on his forehead, and accept the death that seemed so inevitable.
“I pretty much lost my mind,” he told the press Wednesday.
And who wouldn’t? With no windows to indicate time of day, let alone a watch, and with nobody responding to his screams and cries, what more could he expect than that he would die a merciless death alone in a cell for no other reason than the cops forget they stuck him there.
Chong, 23, was discovered on the fifth day covered in his own feces, severely dehydrated — he lost 15 pounds — and suffering from renal failure. Some accident!
“Accidentally? He almost died!” said Chong’s lawyer, Gene Iredale. “It’s inexplicable….Even if they forget him for the weekend, there is no account for how they could have left him there for three full business days.”
The DEA’s San Diego office has offered him their “deepest apologies.” Nevertheless, he’s after reparations.
“He began hallucinating sometime around the end of the second or start of the third day,” said Iredale. “At some point, he wanted to kill himself because of the pain.”
His attorney is charging the federal agency with what he says constitutes torture under U.S. and international law.
