Real-Life Barney Fife Leaves Immigrant in Cell for Days

Posted on Mar 12, 2008

guardian.co.uk

With no bathroom and only her shoe for a pillow, 38-year-old Mexican undocumented immigrant Adriana Torres-Flores was “apparently forgotten” in a Fayetteville, Ark., courthouse holding cell for four days.

The incident, which raises questions about the state’s treatment of immigrants, will lead to an official state investigation.

The New York Times:

A woman was locked for four days in a tiny holding cell in a northern Arkansas courthouse, forgotten by the authorities and left without food or water, the local Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.

The woman, Adriana Torres-Flores, 38, a longtime illegal immigrant from Mexico, slept on the floor with only a shoe for a pillow, and with nothing to drink except her own urine, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. There was no bathroom in the cell.

A bailiff had apparently forgotten that he placed Ms. Torres-Flores, a mother of three, in the cell last Thursday, and simply left her in the empty courthouse, in Fayetteville, over the weekend, said the chief deputy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Department, Jay Cantrell. A snowstorm meant that there were far fewer people than usual working at the courthouse on Friday.

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