In 2015 Brandon St. Pierre committed suicide while in custody at Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s Bristol County prison. St. Pierre’s suicide was one of a growing number of suicides at the facility — one of fourteen county jails in the state that accounts for a quarter of all suicides. St. Pierre’s name was mentioned in a number of articles published by the New Bedford Standard Times, the Boston Globe, WGBH, the Huffington Post, and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, which won an award last fall for its reporting.
On February 28th Tom Hodgson bent the ear of a reporter at Dartmouth Week, patting himself on the back for all the positive changes that have supposedly been made at his facilities. But the Dartmouth Week piece was mainly a report on Hodgson’s own investigation of himself — in which the sheriff cast blame on the inmates’ mental health and drug issues for their own deaths.
It was another piece of a pre-emptive public relations campaign from the wily politician — pre-emptive because, once again, Tom Hodgson is being sued for violating prisoners’ Constitutional rights. A new lawsuit against the Bristol County sheriff joins two others within the last year.
On February 21st Barbara Kice, Brendan St. Pierre’s mother, filed suit in Massachusetts Superior Court [docket number 18CV00189]. Kice’s lawsuit alleges that Sheriff Hodgson, Corrections Officer Dylan Bedard, and an unspecified “Jane Doe” violated St. Pierre’s Fourteenth Amendment rights by improperly caring for a person known to be suicidal.
Click here to view the lawsuit in PDF format.
We especially appreciate the ongonig reporting from the Globe and NECIR. And there is a lot more for journalists to cover than a whiskered personality who thinks xenophobia is his day job. It is more critical than ever that the public is informed about the ongoing suicides in our community and the systemic abuses behind them.
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