By Paul Rubin Thursday, Sep 1 2011
Corrections officer Joel Valdovinos was on his rounds right before 1 p.m., delivering lunch and checking on inmates in the four isolation cells in Building A.
A minute or two before Valdovinos entered the area pushing a lunch cart, inmate Joel Hughes claims to have heard choking and gurgling sounds coming from A-26.
Hughes said in his recent interview that he heard about 20 to 25 loud bangs, as if someone was being "bounced off the wall."
Hughes hollered, "Is everything all right over there?" To which he said Rushing had replied, "Just a minute."
Within seconds, Officer Valdovinos opened up the trap on the door to deliver the lunch trays one at a time.
To his shock, Rushing popped his head out and told him, "I just killed my cellie."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" the officer replied, immediately shining his flashlight into the cell. He didn't see anything for a moment.
"It's pitch-black — you can't see in there," he later told investigators. "[The lights] had been out for a long time."
Then Valdovinos saw Shannon Palmer, unconscious on the bed and bleeding profusely from the neck, his left arm dangling.
Valdovinos didn't immediately notice that Palmer's penis had been ripped from his body and was on the floor.
The officer ordered Rushing to turn around and be cuffed through the trap door.
Rushing, he said, "was calm as day."
Rushing told him that the handcrafted shank was over at the sink, and he allowed Valdovinos to cuff him without resistance as a small army of other officers and medical personnel rushed into the wing.
I think one of them just have no appropriate resume.