FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – A Broward Sheriff’s Office employee has been placed on administrative leave following the death of an inmate.
When Alvin Modeste was booked into the Broward County Jail in October, his family thought the 43-year old would finally get the mental health help he needed.
As a diagnosed schizophrenic, Modeste was being held in a special wing of the jail for inmates with acute mental illness, but his sister was told last week her brother died from injuries he sustained from a suicide attempt. The cause was asphyxiation.
“They didn’t give me any answers,” said Corine Modeste, Alvin’s sister. “They tell me he tried to kill himself, but that’s not him, he wouldn’t do that.”
Broward County public defender Gordon Weekes said the deaths of two inmates just days apart highlights a broken culture within the jail system run by the Broward Sheriff’s Office.
“How did they have the time, and more importantly, access to the means to commit self harm,” he said.
Earlier this week, the family of Janard Geffard spoke out about his brutal death.
The victim was also a Broward jail inmate who was choked for two minutes by his cellmate and stomped on for another 10 minutes. Roughly 21 minutes had gone by before a deputy noticed anything wrong. Geffard later died.
“They need to bring in some outside help to fix this, maybe from an organization with some tried and true proven practices,” Weekes said.
Corine Modeste just wants answers as to what happened to her brother.
“If they were truly monitoring him then it would be on video, so I want to see it,” she said.