This Man Died In His Cell Because The Guards Were Too Busy Watching Netflix

Hanging out on the internet when you’re supposed to be working doesn’t usually have quite such tragic consequences.

A man in St. Louis is dead after hanging himself in his prison cell – but he wasn’t found for nearly 10 hours.

The facility in question is the St. Louis Community Release Center, a sort of halfway house that holds inmates with limited freedoms. There are 550 beds on location, each of which is supposed to be under near-constant surveillance by security personnel.

Now you can see why a dead body sitting for 10 hours is a problem.

The man who committed suicide, David Garceau, had a history of mental illness and drug addiction, and had been considered suicidal in the past. He was supposedly on medication at the time of his death, but it seems that many staff members weren’t aware of the situation.

He hung himself with a bed sheet a little before 8pm, but surveillance video reveals that he was very clearly testing different ways to tie off the blanket almost 6 hours before that. So really, anyone checking his cell between 2 and 8:00pm would have seen what was going on and stopped him.

But despite guards filling out several different forms indicating that they were checking all the cells regularly, no one found him until almost 6:00am the next day.

An internal investigation of the facility revealed why the guards were being so lax: every single one of them was tooling around online. Most were using government computers to stream movies and Netflix – instead of watching the security cameras, which could have saved Garceau’s life.

Since that incident, at least 10 employees have been released from the facility. Not all of those were on duty during this particular incident, but it seems further investigation revealed that damn near every guard was seriously neglecting their duties to watch TV-reruns and stalk their exes on Facebook.

And when mentally ill lives are in your hands, that’s simply not OK.