mobanmarketNEW YORK — Guards at the Manhattan jail holding Jeffrey Epstein slept while they should have been checking on the pedophile financier — then covered up their mistake, news reports say.
Two guards assigned to the section of the Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein was locked up went about three hours without looking in on him even though he was supposed to be checked every 30 minutes, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
The jail staffers were sleeping for at least some of those three hours, the Times reported, citing three senior law-enforcement and prison officials.
Guards also falsely recorded that they had checked on Epstein every half-hour even though surveillance video showed they had not, according to the Associated Press. Such bogus entries could qualify as a federal crime, the Times reported.
Epstein, 66, was found dead Saturday morning in an apparent suicide as he awaited trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan had accused him sexually abused dozens of girls in his luxurious homes on the Upper East Side and in Palm Beach, Florida.
Revelations of the guards’ alleged oversights came as the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general investigate the circumstances of Epstein’s death. The Brooklyn native had been taken off suicide watch despite making a possible attempt at killing himself fewer than three weeks before he died.
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The Lower Manhattan jail’s warden has been reassigned and two of its guards placed on administrative leave as the probe proceeds, according to the AP. Both the guards overseeing Epstein leading up to his death had been working overtime and one of them was not a correctional officer, The Wall Street Journal reported.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr pledged Monday that investigators would find out the truth about Epstein’s death, saying that “serious irregularities” had been uncovered at the Manhattan jail.
“We will get to the bottom of what happened and there will be accountability,” Barr said Monday.