University Student Abandoned in Jail Receives $1M Per Day Locked In Jail
Daniel Chong was held after being caught in a drug raid back in 2012. He's one of the nine people detained. After questioning, he was told that no charges would be filed against him. A police officer even promised to get him out in a minute.
The most bizarre thing happened after however. For four days, he lost all contact to the outside world.
His ordeal, which consisted of drinking his own urine, carving a message on his arm for his mother and hallucinating constantly ended when people heard him screaming for attention. By then, he was already covered in his own waste and sounded incoherent.
Apart from the horrifying human rights abuses he suffered during the four days he was detained for no real reason, he also suffered from dehydration, kidney failure, cramps and perforated oesophagus when he came out. He also lost significant weight of 7kg.
The justice department's inspector is currently carrying out an investigation on what went wrong at the Drug Enforcement Administration's San Diego Headquarters.
As of now, the only angle that seems logical is that everything was just an accident - a very scary and bad accident, of course. Considering that the jail cell had no windows and that Daniel Chong had nothing to eat nor drink inside for four days, he was very lucky to get out of there alive.
The head of the DEA already apologized profusely for the incident last May, stating how troubled he is that such had taken place.
Aside from the $4m in damages received by Daniel Chong, another "good" thing that has resulted from this weird incident is that the DEA now has new policies regarding detention. In particular, daily cell checks have become mandatory and each cell has a camera installed within.