Shopping and Napping, Guards Ignored Epstein’s Cell, Officials Say

NEW YORK — The night that Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in a Manhattan jail, one of the guards on duty was catching up on sports news and looking at motorcycle sales on a government computer. The other spent time shopping online for furniture. For about two hours, they appeared to be asleep at a desk just 15 feet away from Epstein’s cell.

Those details were revealed in an indictment unsealed Tuesday against the two jail employees. The indictment said neither guard made the required rounds every 30 minutes to check on inmates. Yet they filed paperwork claiming they had.

The entire night, from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., security cameras showed that nobody entered the wing where Epstein had been left alone in his cell, the indictment said. The guards, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, only discovered Epstein was dead when they went in to give him breakfast.

“I messed up,” Thomas reportedly told a supervisor just minutes later, according to the indictment.

On Tuesday, Thomas, 41, and Noel, 31, became the first people to face charges stemming from a criminal investigation into the death of Epstein, the disgraced financier who authorities say killed himself at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan where he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

The indictment against the two guards laid out, for the first time, a detailed, official narrative of what happened inside the high-security unit where Epstein died. Prosecutors painted a picture of two experienced correctional officers who failed to perform basic duties.

“The defendants had a duty to ensure the safety and security of federal inmates in their care at the Metropolitan Correctional Center,” Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “Instead, they repeatedly failed to conduct mandated checks on inmates and lied on official forms to hide their dereliction.”

Noel and Thomas were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and with making false records. They both surrendered to the FBI on Tuesday morning and pleaded not guilty at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in the afternoon. Bail was set at $100,000 each.

Epstein, 66, had been in custody for more than a month when he was found dead on Aug. 10, having hanged himself from a bunk bed with a strip of bedsheet.

The financier was awaiting trial on charges that he had sexually abused scores of teenage girls, an accusation that had swirled around him for years even as he avoided prosecution and cultivated an elite circle of high-profile acquaintances.

New York City’s chief medical examiner ruled the death a suicide. Lawyers for Epstein have challenged that finding, and a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s family has claimed that broken bones and cartilage in Epstein’s neck “points to homicide.”

But the indictment appeared to back up the medical examiner’s finding. It said that correction officers on duty were the only people who would have had access to the ninth-floor “special housing unit” where Epstein had been held.

Security camera video showed two other officers entered the unit’s common area during the night and spoke to the guards, but no one entered the locked block of eight cells where Epstein was housed. The two other guards, who were not named, also falsified records on earlier shifts, the indictment said.

Epstein had apparently tried to kill himself three weeks earlier. He had been found injured on the floor of his cell with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck. Thomas was one of the officers who found him, according to the indictment.

Epstein was placed on a 24-hour suicide watch in a hospital wing until July 30. He was subsequently required to have a cellmate, and was assigned to the cell closest to the correction officers’ desk in the special housing unit.

But on Aug. 9, the day before Epstein was found dead, his cellmate was transferred out in a “routine, prearranged transfer,” the indictment said.

That evening, Noel and Thomas were both working overtime shifts. Noel had been working as a correction officer in the Manhattan jail since 2016. Thomas started there as a correction officer in 2007, and though he was assigned to another position within the jail in 2013, he frequently worked overtime shifts as an officer, the indictment said.

Epstein was escorted into his cell by Noel and another guard shortly before 8 p.m., according to the indictment. By 10 p.m., inmates were locked in their cells for the night. At around 10:30 p.m., surveillance footage showed Noel walking up to the only door to the cluster of cells where Epstein was housed, the indictment said. Over the next few hours, nobody approached the wing, including Noel and Thomas. They were supposed to check in on Epstein and other inmates every half-hour.

But instead of monitoring detainees, the two “sat at their desk, browsed the internet and moved around the common area,” the indictment said. They then signed “count sheets” saying they had checked on inmates multiple times overnight when they had not.

The next morning, when Noel and Thomas entered Epstein’s cell, they found him unresponsive “with a noose around his neck,” according to the indictment. When a supervisor arrived, the guards admitted they had not properly performed their duties.

“We did not complete the 3 a.m. nor 5 a.m. rounds,” Noel said, according to the indictment.

Thomas said, “She’s not to blame, we didn’t do any rounds.”

The director of the Bureau of Prisons, Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, said in a statement that the agency was taking the allegations of misconduct “very seriously” and that they “will be responded to appropriately.”

The Bureau of Prisons has completed its own internal audit of whether procedures were followed at the Manhattan jail and the conduct of its staff, but the results are not expected to be publicly released, according to people familiar with the audit.

In recent weeks, federal prosecutors in Manhattan had offered both of the employees plea deals but could not reach an agreement with them, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.

After the arraignment, Jason E. Foy, a lawyer for Noel, said: “It is our hope that we will be able to reach a reasonable agreement in this case. If we cannot, after we review the evidence, we will be prepared to defend them in this case moving forward.”

Thomas’ lawyer, Montell Figgins, said his client had been singled out for blame while senior officials at the Bureau of Prisons were not being held accountable for “systemic failures” in the agency stemming from mismanagement and staff shortages. “My client feels that there was a rush to judgment in this matter and that he’s being scapegoated,” Figgins said. He added: “This case is going to ruin his life.”

Jose Rojas, an official in the prison workers’ union and a teacher at the Coleman prison complex in Sumter County, Florida, said that missing rounds and doctoring records were not generally treated as a criminal matter in the bureau. And, he said, there was blame to go around, pointing to the jail’s failure to assign Epstein another cellmate the day he died.

“There’s culpability at the top,” Rojas said. “They always try to blame the lowest person on the totem pole.”

The Manhattan jail had been short staffed for quite some time, reflecting a larger shortage of correctional officers in federal facilities across the country. On the night when Epstein died, Noel had been scheduled to work a 16-hour double shift. Thomas had volunteered to work, having already done several tours of overtime that week.

“Simply assigning blame will not correct the staff shortages that put this chain of events in place,” said Tyrone Covington, president of the local union that represents employees at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He called the indictment “a mask to cover up the true issues” and said it was meant “to create a narrative that government has taken action.”

Around the same time Thomas and Noel were giving themselves up to authorities, Sawyer was in Washington testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her management of the Bureau of Prisons.

She told lawmakers that her agency was trying to identify problem employees and monitoring cameras to make sure staff members were doing their jobs.

When asked if there was a widespread problem of Bureau of Prisons workers sleeping on the job, she said that there were “a few.”