Veteran with PTSD beaten into a coma by jail guards, suit alleges

WaPo

January 18, 2017 

 

"It was the overnight shift at the Montgomery County jail in Dayton, Ohio, and Joseph Guglielmo banged on the door of cell 114 again and again.

The 57-year-old veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder had been arrested at a homeless shelter earlier that night in January 2015. He’d struggled with a security guard at the shelter and against the officers who had come to arrest him. Now he was demanding some unspecified medicine and annoying his guards.

So, his civil rights complaint says, they decided to “teach him a lesson.”

Six guards gathered in front of cell 114, Guglielmo’s attorney said. They massed around the door, blocking the view of a hallway camera.

What happened next is the subject of a federal civil rights complaint from Guglielmo, who served as an operating room technician in the Air Force.

“Three of them went in and beat the crap out of him,” his attorney, Jennifer L. Branch, told The Washington Post.

One guard, Matthew Snyder, “beat Guglielmo repeatedly and threw him against the concrete wall,” the complaint says. Snyder reportedly “delivered closed-fist strikes to Mr. Guglielmo’s head, eye area and abdomen” while other guards watched.

Afterward, a nurse gave Guglielmo ice packs, and guards moved him to a holding cell where he could be closely observed.

But his condition worsened.

Just after midnight, Snyder noticed that although Guglielmo appeared asleep, his feet were twitching, the complaint says. Fifteen minutes later, when guards tried to reposition Guglielmo’s unconscious body to better see him through a window, the 57-year-old was unresponsive.

He was taken to a hospital, where he lay in a coma for four weeks. When he woke up, he was no longer able to walk, his attorney said.

The court documents say he is confined to a wheelchair. He lives in a nursing home and rehabilitation center, and receives round-the-clock care, his attorney said."