When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at the high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering into a brotherhood of correctional officers. What he found was the opposite.
Five years later, Rodriguez’s sudden death would raise questions from the FBI and his family. KQED reporters Sukey Lewis and Julie Small trace his story in their series On Our Watch.
This episode opens with Lewis and her reporting team meeting Rodriguez’s parents and his widow, Mimy. They talk through the early days of Rodriguez’s career and early milestones, like when he got an opportunity to join an elite unit investigating crimes in the prison. But it’s there where his fellow officers in the unit began to undermine and harass him.
Eventually, consumed with stress and fed up with how he was being treated, Rodriguez reached a breaking point at work. But even after he left the prison, his experiences there still haunted him. So he went in for a meeting with the warden of New Folsom. He didn’t know it would be his last.
After his son’s death, Valentino Rodriguez Sr. began to look for answers and found his son’s story was part of something larger.
In the final segment, Reveal host Al Letson sits down with Lewis and Small to discuss what this correctional officer’s story shows about how the second-largest prison system in the country is failing to protect the people who live and work inside of it.
Dig Deeper
Listen: Season 2 of On Our Watch
Read: Exclusive: Correctional officer’s death exposes hazing, toxic culture at California prison (The Sacramento Bee)
Read: Inside California’s Most Dangerous Prison and the Quest to Expose Its Secrets (KQED)
Read: Use of Force Incidents Ring the Alarm at California’s Most Dangerous Prison (KQED)
Credits
Reporters: Sukey Lewis and Julie Small | Producer: Steven Rascón | Editor: Jenny Casas | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs, Fernando Arruda and Ramtin Arabloui | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks to Chris Egusa, Victoria Mauleon, Tarek Fouda and Jen Chien
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| Speaker 2: | So it is my privilege to introduce to you Mr. And Mrs. Valentino and Irma Rodriguez. You may kiss the bride. [foreign language 00:00:14] |
| Al Letson: | On a hot day in early October 2020, Valentino and Irma, who goes by Mimy, became Mr. And Mrs. Rodriguez. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | I wore this big white ball gown. It had a cream undertone and then it had white lace and it sparkled. It was really nice. |
| Al Letson: | They were married in a cathedral in downtown Sacramento. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | The church was beautiful. I mean so many people showed up. My parents, they both walked me down the aisle, and then at the end of the aisle I got to see his parents and it was just nice. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I have a great partner in life. I couldn’t ask for anything different. This whole wedding, I felt it strange that I wasn’t nervous or I wasn’t dreading the day. I was excited and I wanted it to happen. And it clicked with me when I was standing up there on the altar today that I’m right where I’m supposed to be in life. |
| Al Letson: | Earlier that year, Valentino had taken a leave from his job at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or CDCR. He was a correctional officer at New Folsom Prison. And it was a job that Mimy and the rest of Valentino’s family saw was changing him. But at the wedding, it seemed like the start of a new chapter. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | It was a perfect day. For a long time he was so stuck on the prison and I think for that day specifically, it just kind of brought him into a place of like, “I am getting married. I’m moving forward with my life.” |
| Al Letson: | And then tragically, about three weeks after the wedding, Mimy came home to find Valentino not breathing. She called an ambulance and tried to revive him, but Valentino was already gone. He was 30 years old when he died. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | And then we had a celebration of life after, but we had that celebration of life at the same place where we had our wedding. I just remember just sitting there, with my arms crossed, just looking into the crowd, like I was dancing right there with him. I was like, “What are we celebrating?” And I was just so hurt and I just went home and just screamed. |
| Al Letson: | But Valentino wasn’t just a correctional officer. He was also a whistleblower. He’d spoken up about corruption and abuse by his fellow officers just days before he died. It’s how his story got on the radar of KQED reporter Sukey Lewis. This week we’re partnering with Sukey and her reporting team who’ve just released a new season of the podcast On Our Watch. In it, they follow Valentino’s experience at New Folsom and look into how this prison works and what’s getting covered up. |
| Just to note, this hour includes discussions of substance use disorder and graphic descriptions of violence. Sukey starts the story on a drive up to Valentino’s parents’ house. | |
| Speaker 6: | Go past these lights, then at the next set, turn left. Stay in the second. |
| Sukey Lewis: | A little more than two years after Officer Valentino Rodriguez died, in December 2022, our reporting team went to go see his family. |
| Speaker 6: | In half a mile, turn right. |
| Sukey Lewis: | We’re driving from the Bay Area through rice paddies and apple orchards to West Sacramento, a city on the outskirts of the state capitol. |
| Julie Small: | It’s just everything about this case just raises questions. |
| Sukey Lewis: | That’s my co-reporter, Julie Small. The official cause of Valentino’s death was fentanyl intoxication. But his family, and especially his father, Val Senior, still aren’t satisfied with how it was investigated. |
| Julie Small: | It makes you think the worst or certainly Val keeps going over and over it in his head, Val Senior, trying to tie up the loose ends. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Yeah. |
| We also think there might be more to the story of Valentino’s death. | |
| But they said no signs of- | |
| Julie Small: | No signs of foul play. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Julie’s been talking to Val Senior For the past few months. It’s taken a while to gain his trust. Today, Steven Rascon, our producer, is along to record. |
| Steven Rascon: | So today is like an icebreaker. |
| Julie Small: | I think so. |
| Sukey Lewis: | It’s my first chance to meet Valentino’s parents, Valentino Rodriguez Senior, and his wife, Irma. |
| Inside the walls are covered with photos. They’ve got a good-looking family. Five grandchildren, at the time, and their four adult kids. | |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | And one thing about them all four of them just sat there and talked and made fun of each other and laughed. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | The kids were really close. We were blessed with close kids. |
| Sukey Lewis: | For his dad, Valentino’s death started him on this search to find answers, from the police, the FBI, the prison. He wants to understand what happened to his son and why and who’s responsible. But instead of finding answers, Val Senior just keeps finding more questions. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | This thing is just all tangled. I’m just trying to untangle it. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Now, Val Senior says he feels like a stereotype out of a true crime series on TV, the grieving parent on a quest for justice. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | And here I am in the driver’s seat. And I couldn’t do it any other way. But I never wanted to be that person on TV, just consumed with it. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Yeah. Would you be able to tell us your favorite story of your son? |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | With him there’s a lot. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Irma points out Valentino in a little league team photo. He looks about 11 or 12. She says he wasn’t any good at baseball. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He wasn’t very good at soccer either. And I went to all his games. I had all four kids playing. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I remember when I used to watch him go wrestle, he would always lose. But after he was done, he’d be talking to the guy that beat him up. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | Yeah. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | Making friends and things. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | Yeah, sit there talking to him. |
| Sukey Lewis: | They tell us this was typical Valentino, goofy, dreamy, smart, eager to turn enemies into friends. After college when he told them he was going to train to be a correctional officer, his parents were kind of surprised. They weren’t a law enforcement family. But he’d have job security and good benefits. |
| One of Valentino’s first assignments was working on death row at San Quentin State Prison, the oldest prison in California. He’d often carpool to work with a bunch of other correctional officers and on the way back they’d get dropped off at In-N-Out Burger. | |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | I was a cashier and he’d come in, in his little green suit. He’s so cute, in his little boots. |
| Sukey Lewis: | That’s Mimy again. Talking to my colleague Julie. She calls him cute, but Valentino was not a little man. He was five foot seven and at least 200 pounds, clean shaven with dark hair and big brown eyes. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | So his order was a three by three, ketchup only, no salt, with a cheese fry, no salt, and then a large 7UP. So I knew his order from the moment because of course, the cute guy comes in, I’m going to memorize his order. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Mimy recognized Valentino from a party she’d gone to at his house, thrown by his brother Greg. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | But he started coming to In-N-Out more often and I would give him free burgers or shakes when my manager wasn’t looking. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Mimy says they fell hard for each other, and just two months after they started dating, her roommate moved out and she needed to find a new place to live. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | I was going to move into my brother’s house, but he was like, “No, I think you should move in with me.” And I’m like, “No, this is kind of soon.” And he’s like, “Come on, think about it.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | Mimy moved in. And it was right around this time that Valentino got what he saw as a big break, an opportunity to work in a different prison. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He specifically chose Folsom. |
| Sukey Lewis: | The official name of New Folsom is California State Prison, Sacramento or CSP SAC. It’s a high security prison that the state set up to accommodate people with risky medical conditions and mental health needs. It also houses active gang members and people who’ve been convicted of some of the most serious crimes. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He said he wanted to go there because he said it was the most dangerous prison in California and he just wanted to be in there. |
| Sukey Lewis: | There are a lot of infamous prisons in this country and a fair number here in California. There’s San Quentin, with its death row, the state’s first supermax, Pelican Bay, Corcoran, where in the ’90s officers allegedly set up gladiator style fights between rival gangs and then shot incarcerated people to stop the fights. But as we dug through a bunch of data and public records, we realized in the past decade, New Folsom has been the most violent prison in the state. And that violence is committed by people who are locked up and officers. We found that in the six years after 2014, New Folsom officers used serious force, meaning they either badly injured someone or used deadly force, at a rate three times higher than any other prison in the state. |
| CDCR declined our multiple requests to comment on this finding. I’ve done quite a bit of reporting on prisons and Julie’s been reporting on prisons for even longer. New Folsom just wasn’t on our radar in the same way. But for now, it’s important to know that with just a year of experience as a correctional officer, this is the environment Valentino was walking into. | |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He was excited to go into this prison. He was excited for the work. He was excited for what he was going to learn. |
| Sukey Lewis: | He wanted to be an investigator in this elite squad called the ISU or the Investigative Services Unit. |
| A prison is like its own city, and the ISU squad are like the police force of the prison. They’ve got a canine unit, a gang investigation unit, a prosecution division, and one for internal affairs, to look into complaints of excessive force or allegations of officer corruption. Walking through New Folsom, the squad stood out. They had special black and green patches on their uniforms. They could also go anywhere in the prison they wanted, total access. Valentino’s goal was to earn his patch and get into that squad. But first he had to pay his dues. | |
| Officer Valentino Rodriguez’s first assignment was working in the prison’s psychiatric unit guarding one of the most vulnerable and difficult parts of the population, people with severe mental illnesses. I’ve talked to a number of people incarcerated in this unit and it sounds like a really tough place to be. It can be very loud and chaotic. Sometimes the people in this unit are angry and confrontational, while others are simply terrified or heavily medicated. And officers like Valentino are required to get training in how to prevent incarcerated people from hurting each other and themselves. | |
| Mimy Rodriguez told my colleague Julie and me that working in the psychiatric unit really took a toll on Valentino. | |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He would talk about how draining it was and he would come home drained. |
| Sukey Lewis: | He worked double shifts so he could get more days off in a row to recharge. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | That’s when he would talk more about work and be like, “Yeah, it was a little stressful and I’m dealing with this or I’m talking about this, but I’m happy to go in.” And he was always very enthusiastic. |
| Sukey Lewis: | About two and a half years after he’d gotten to New Folsom, Valentino’s hard work looked like it was paying off. Remember the squad, that detective unit Valentino was aiming for? An officer there went on leave for PTSD and there was a vacancy on the team. One of the supervisors who knew Valentino thought he’d be good at the job and gave him the chance to fill in, but on a temporary basis. To get the position permanently, he’d have to impress the right people. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He’s like, “Yes, of course. I’ll do it.” I mean, he was ready. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Valentino called to let his parents know he got promoted. He told them it was a really good position, one that a lot of other people wanted and that he was the youngest on the team. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I asked him, “How was your first day?” “Yeah,” he goes, “It’s a bunch of older guys, Dad, had been there.” He called them OGs. I said, “Well, how’d it go?” He goes, “They asked who the (censored) are you?” |
| Sukey Lewis: | So from the very beginning there was tension on the team. Some of the people he worked with felt like he’d skipped the line, that he hadn’t done enough to prove himself. At first, he tried to earn their acceptance by just working really hard, trying to prove that he was up to the job. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He just continued to just put his head down and work. And I think that’s what really bothered him, that he would just try to do the right thing and it just didn’t seem like it was enough. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Valentino was making busts and working cases, but to some of his coworkers, this might’ve made him seem even more of a threat because higher ups were noticing his work. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | Sometimes he would text the guys for help and they’d have their own group texts and they didn’t want to help him. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Some of these group texts are pretty awful. They mock his weight and call him half patch to remind him he’s still just a temporary member of the squad. |
| But these messages would escalate even further before they stopped. | |
| Valentino Rodri…: | And he used to go in on weekends to work because some of the team wasn’t there to harass him. Nobody was calling him names or anything or intimidating him in any way so he liked going there on Saturdays. I know that. He told me. |
| Sukey Lewis: | An attorney for these officers declined our request to interview her clients, but she said that any allegations that any of them bullied, hazed, or harassed Valentino are false. Val Senior says he wouldn’t understand until much later the full scope of what his son was going through or of the things he was being asked to do in the name of this team. But he did notice a change come over his son. He wasn’t sleeping and he gained 60 pounds over the course of the year he was in the ISU squad. Sometimes when they were hanging out, he’d get this blank look on his face. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I could tell that he was starting to build this mental mechanism where he knew to turn things off. Because I used to see him stare into space and then he’d snap out of it. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Val Senior says he was at the family Christmas party. Valentino showed up late, straight from work, around 10 o’clock at night. And as soon as he walked in the door, Val Senior knew something was wrong |
| Valentino Rodri…: | And I could just see his face. Just like something really bothering him. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Val Senior asked him what was going on |
| Valentino Rodri…: | And that’s when he took his phone out and he showed me the video. |
| Sukey Lewis: | The scene that Val Senior saw on his son’s cell phone was incredibly violent, a video taken by surveillance cameras in one of the most high security housing units in New Folsom. The camera angle is from inside the control booth, which looks out on two tiers of cells. Right in front of the booth there’s an open area on the ground floor called a day room. In this day room there are these metal desks in a semicircle, with clear dividers in between them. In the video, Val Senior saw a man shackled to one of these chairs with two other guys standing over him. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | This guy, this kid’s being stabbed over and over and over. And he literally would shrug his shoulders and cover his neck while they were trying to stab in the neck and then they would go back down to the chest and then he would try to cover his chest by concaving his chest inward and then they’d go back to his neck and it was just back and forth till finally the kid threw himself on the floor and they proceeded to just stab him. |
| Sukey Lewis: | The man on the floor was now lifeless. Val Senior watched as two attackers painted his blood across their faces, but Valentino wanted his dad to notice something else. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | He had said, “Look it, Dad. The guy in the tower is not even aiming. And they’re using rubber bullets.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | Valentino was pointing out to his dad that the officer in the control booth didn’t use his rifle to immediately stop the deadly threat. He fired his less lethal weapon, that shoots rounds made out of hard foam, and he fired it way too late. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I tried not to emphasize or talk about it or look at it. I just wanted to go on to my little Christmas party. So I told him to put that thing away. And he just did what he does. He snapped out of it. |
| Sukey Lewis: | But that wasn’t all. Valentino was also instructed to write up a particular type of confidential report for statewide gang investigators. The report was supposed to lay out how the killing was tied to a dispute between rival gangs. A lot of questions would later be raised about that report and who was really behind the murder. CDCR said it cannot comment on the case because it’s part of an active investigation. |
| Val Senior wonders about this murder too. His son was found dead by fentanyl intoxication less than a year after this Christmas party. And he was one of the people who suspected there was something really wrong about what happened in that day room at New Folsom. | |
| Al Letson: | Since his son passed, Val Senior has taken on a new role. Now he’s become the investigator. He’s collected everything he can find about the murder in the day room at the prison to see if it connects to Valentino’s death. |
| Coming up. | |
| Valentino Rodri…: | You go through stuff and you decide. I don’t want to paint a picture. I just want the truth told. That’s all I’m doing. |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. |
| From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today we’re bringing you a story from KQED, the latest season of their podcast On Our Watch. Their series focuses on one California prison and a culture of silence and corruption there. | |
| Sukey Lewis: | Okay, so it’s me, Sukey, and Julie and Steven and we’re here at Julie’s house. Two days after- |
| Al Letson: | It’s been two days since Sukey, her co-reporter Julie Small, and producer Steven Rascon, went to visit the parents of Valentino Rodriguez. And the crew has their work cut out for them. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Looking through the materials that are on here that are many, many tens of gigabytes of information, I’m trying to figure out what’s going on here. |
| Al Letson: | Valentino’s dad, Val Senior, gave them a hard drive with all the evidence he’s collected in the two years since his son’s death. He’s been trying to figure out if the fentanyl overdose that took Valentino’s life has anything to do with the prison where he was a correctional officer, New Folsom. Valentino died just days after reporting staff misconduct including harassment and corruption at the prison, and Val Senior has been investigating on his own ever since. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I owe that to him and I’m going to go as far as I can. And then in the end, if nothing, it’s nothing. I tried. I’ll find my answers when my time comes. |
| Al Letson: | On this hard drive is also a duplicate of Valentino’s cell phone with messages going back to 2017. |
| Steven Rascon: | Incoming, incoming, outgoing |
| Al Letson: | Sukey and her team Start there. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | You can read this to you get to know more about him. |
| Julie Small: | Yeah. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | What he was going through, but don’t copy this. |
| Julie Small: | Okay. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | Or use it maybe. I mean, you can- |
| Sukey Lewis: | We’d started looking into Valentino’s story to see if the death of this whistleblower was connected to all those cases we’d found showing off the charts use of force at New Folsom. But Val Senior was already way ahead of us in investigating his son’s death. |
| Julie Small: | Wow. |
| Sukey Lewis: | So every few weeks my co-reporter Julie would meet up with Val Senior to get more of the evidence he’d collected and she’d share what we were finding with him. |
| Julie Small: | So we’ve started a database of the guards names and then different allegations against them. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Building this relationship with Val Senior has been tricky. He’s grieving and he feels like he was burned by other people who said they’d look into his son’s death and then dropped it. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I just want this to work both ways. |
| Julie Small: | Right. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | Right? |
| Julie Small: | Okay. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I need to know what you’re doing. |
| Julie Small: | Okay. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | That’s all I’ve ever asked. |
| Julie Small: | Okay. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | Nobody even knows we’re having these meetings other than my wife. |
| Sukey Lewis: | He says he’s not trying to sway our reporting and it doesn’t seem like he is, but it does feel like he’s still testing us to see how serious we are about this investigation. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | You go through stuff and you decide. I don’t want to paint a picture. |
| Julie Small: | Right. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I never have. |
| Julie Small: | Okay. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I’m not going to (censored) nobody and ruin anyone’s lives. I just want the truth told. That’s all I’m doing. |
| Julie Small: | Yeah. |
| Sukey Lewis: | That’s what we want too. But after years of working as reporters, Julie and I both know the truth can be a really complicated thing. Take the harassment Valentino experienced from the squad. As we go through Valentino’s phone, we can see that he was called ugly names, but we can also see that Valentino sometimes used offensive language too, calling his gaming friend a homophobic slur or sending a GIF of a swinging penis. These guys, because they’re all guys on these text threads, work in a prison. Their conversations are dark and their jokes are not usually kind. |
| But there’s also a particular edge of nastiness to some of the other guys’ texts that feels different than Valentino’s off-color joking. One of our producers agreed to read some of them so you can hear what was being said. Heads up, it’s vulgar, but we’ve bleeped the slurs. | |
| Speaker 17: | Is that the (censored) from A facility? Drink up. In your mouth, you (censored). Tell your lady I said hi. You (censored) sent a picture of your girl’s ass. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Those messages are all from this one guy, Daniel Garland, and Valentino doesn’t usually take the bait, but there is this one time where you can see he just snaps. It starts with Valentino texting the group something totally innocuous, how to log in to a new HR system for vacation requests. He’s just being helpful. And Garland writes back. |
| Speaker 17: | Who gives a (censored). |
| Sukey Lewis: | That’s when Valentino loses it and says, “Go (censored) yourself, you dumb (censored). And this is what Garland does in response. He sends this weird video to the group and it’s of a guy who’s probably in his early 20s in a black and red sweatshirt at what looks like the gym talking straight into the camera. |
| Speaker 18: | You ever get out of pocket again, I’m going to slap your fat ass. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | You ever get out of pocket again, I’m going to slap your fat ass. That was a flat out threat. And when he got to work, they laughed at him. They laughed about it. |
| Sukey Lewis: | The guy saying he was going to slap Valentino was actually Garland’s son. For Valentino, this was the last straw. Garland had been insulting him since he joined the squad about a year earlier. CDCR does have a no tolerance policy against discrimination and harassment, which these text messages fell outside the lines of. In an email an attorney for Garland and some of the other officers in those text threads stated that her clients never bullied, hazed, or harassed Officer Rodriguez while he worked at the prison. When Valentino first got that video from Garland’s son, he told his dad it wasn’t a big deal, but he told other people it really bothered him. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | In the back of my head, I kept thinking all the time, “Well, the warden knows who he is. They’ll take care of him. There’s people that will take care of him.” That’s not the case. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Just after the new year, January 2020, Valentino was stressed about that gruesome stabbing that happened in the day room, the one with the video that he showed his dad? Valentino was still working on writing his reports for that. He’d worked so hard to get here, achieved his dream of being an investigator, but now all he could think about was quitting. He wrote this note into his phone. |
| Speaker 17: | It’s in bold letters, “Reasons to leave. Harassment, disrespect, threats, whistleblower violations. Voted off team. Keep your mouth shut or you’ll be fired. You do stupid work. They do important (censored). |
| Sukey Lewis: | Just so you know, in his text messages, Valentino complains that the person telling him to stay quiet and demeaning his work was his boss, the new head of the unit, a guy named Sergeant David Anderson. Anderson was also on some of the terrible text threads, so it doesn’t look like Valentino felt like he could turn to him to step in. Anderson did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Around the same time that he wrote that note, he also texted a friend that he was getting out soon. He had a plan to stick around for a few months and then switch to a part-time position where he could work a few shifts and still get benefits. But a couple weeks later, his plans to try and stick it out fell apart. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | I remember him coming home and telling me that he broke down to the assistant warden. |
| Sukey Lewis: | That’s Mimy Rodriguez, Valentino’s wife. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | And he was sobbing and he had told her how he felt about things and he felt just like everything was kind of closing in on him. |
| Sukey Lewis: | She tells Julie and me that Valentino had a really rough day at work. The person he fell apart in front of was Gina Jones, the Chief Deputy Warden of the prison. She was in charge of the squad, the Investigative Services Unit. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | And I remember sitting on the couch with him and him saying, “I left work. I left and it’s gone. I’m not going to be there anymore. I broke down to the assistant warden.” And I guess he opened up to her about everything that was going on. I remember this very clearly. He said, “This is my identity.” He’s like, “I feel like I’ve given up on everything.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | Mimy says something else happened in this meeting too. She says, Valentino made some serious allegations about his fellow officers. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | That officers could have been planting drugs on inmates, could have been planting drugs on other officers. And I know that he was very nervous to talk to anybody because he didn’t want anyone to retaliate. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Mimy’s memory of this incident is all we have to go on, but this is important because from what we’ve been able to figure out, this would be the first time Valentino told higher ups in charge of the Investigative Services Unit that the squad, the very officers investigating crimes in the prison, might be committing serious misconduct. Mimy says at the time she didn’t fully consider the implications of that, what kind of obligation to report or investigate that Valentino’s allegations might have triggered for Jones. But now she does. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | I do believe that at that time she had a right to say something or at least report it, mention something, write it down, document it, if anything. But from what I understand, nothing was even documented, which I find very interesting. |
| Sukey Lewis: | We don’t know if Jones documented this meeting in some way or not, but to be clear, Mimy says Valentino also didn’t want to make an official report. There’s an unwritten code among correctional officers, never tell on each other. But as a supervisor, Jones did have an explicit obligation to act immediately to stop the harassment. We asked for an interview with Jones, but a CDCR spokeswoman declined, stating that wardens can’t talk about personnel matters. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | I remember specifically saying, “Valentino, if these people are bothering you and hurting you, you need to report that.” But he didn’t want it to go back to him. He didn’t want it to get traced back that he had said anything about the team or that any type of retaliation could have happened to him and his work. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Now everyone’s memory is imperfect, and Mimy wasn’t in this meeting with Jones, so we don’t know for sure what he told her the day he broke down. But we did hear that this happened from another officer, who didn’t want to go on the record, but he confirmed that he’d also heard that Valentino had made these allegations to Jones. We asked CDCR if Jones had been questioned about this incident or her knowledge of discriminatory behavior in the unit, but the agency declined to comment. |
| The only action we know for sure the Chief Deputy Warden took was to put Valentino out on medical leave for stress. His diagnosis was based on a number of factors that stretched back to a 2017 altercation with an incarcerated person that had sent the young officer to the hospital with a concussion. At that time, Valentino was prescribed opioid painkillers and sent home. Eventually, a psychologist diagnosed Valentino with anxiety and depression and at some point he started having panic attacks. Looking at his medical records his symptoms weren’t all because of this one altercation though. He also witnessed terrible things at New Folsom, homicides and beatings, and along with the rejection and alienation he felt from his team, it seems like this created a powerful and traumatic feedback loop. | |
| In January 2020, something else happened. One day Mimy came home from work and the house was completely dark. | |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He was just sick. It was a kind of sickness I’ve never seen. And then he just told me, “I’ve been struggling with something.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | He was in withdrawal. Like a lot of people affected by the opioid epidemic, Valentino had become dependent on pain pills. He dealt with this before years earlier when he was in college. He called his parents for help and they got him into rehab. He told Mimy this time he felt like he could stop using on his own. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | I wish I would’ve reached out to his parents because he told me not to say anything. But I just wanted him to know that he can trust me and that I loved him and we were going to get past this. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Mimy kept her word to Valentino. And though he was privately struggling, he presented a different face to most of his friends and family. His parents, Val Senior and Irma, say they had no idea this was going on. They were happy he was out of the prison, and even better, he was coming to work with them at the family pool business. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | Just felt like I had him all to myself. He was coming here and working all the time with me and his brother. And he was always happy. He worked really hard. He was very thorough. My customers loved him. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Val Senior’s grandfather had gotten into the pool business years earlier and Val Senior carried it on, creating Generation Pool Plastering. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He was doing really well for his dad, but I can tell that as much as he loved working for his father, because he did, he loved his dad, he missed his job. |
| Sukey Lewis: | At home, Mimy could tell Valentino was not fine. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He wasn’t at the prison physically, but mentally he was still there. He was still talking to people from the prison. He was still reaching out to people, people from the prison we’re reaching out to him, telling him what was going on within the prison. He had not at all let that go. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Mimy tells my reporting partner, Julie, that Valentino’s health at this time wasn’t good. His doctors were concerned about his blood pressure and he’d gained a lot of weight. She says he was also getting increasingly paranoid and frightened. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | At one point he had put things at the door so if someone opened it, you can hear the door open. He also, he had a gun and he would sleep with it, just to make sure. And I would ask him, “Is everything okay? Who are you nervous about coming? What is going on?” |
| Julie Small: | Would he ever answer that question? |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | No. He would just tell me not to worry. |
| Sukey Lewis: | She did worry, but she also saw that he was taking steps to get help, seeing a therapist, taking medication, and trying to eat healthier. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | I just kept reassuring him, “Let’s let this year pass. We’re almost there. Just breathe.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | Mimy was trying everything she could and she thought maybe if they finally made things official, it could jumpstart their future together and they could leave behind the things that were holding him back. They’d been engaged for over two years now, but had put their wedding on hold because of COVID-19 restrictions. As the summer of 2020 went on, it looked like things might be opening up again and they decided to go for it. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | We ended up just saying, “F it. We’re just going to get married.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | But less than two weeks after his wedding day, on October 15th, Valentino went back to New Folsom to meet with the warden, the man who’s the head of the whole prison, Jeff Lynch, telling him in person about the harassment he’d received. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He told me that he went to go talk to the warden about all the corruption that was going on within the prison, at least within the officers that he was working with. He told me that he had told the warden about this one sergeant, I believe he was the sergeant of that team, how he put his hands around his neck and he said, “I can make it look like an accident.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | We only have Mimy’s account of this specific allegation, but we do know that Valentino talked about threats from Sergeant Anderson and members of the squad. Documents and recorded testimony Warden Lynch later gave about this meeting, largely corroborate Mimy’s account of what was discussed. Valentino told the warden that ISU officers planted contraband on incarcerated people. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He spoke to the warden for some time, so I’m assuming there was a lot more said. |
| Sukey Lewis: | CDCR did not respond to questions about this meeting and said the warden can’t comment on personnel matters. And that evening after the prison, Valentino texted his dad. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | October the 15th and he just texted me out of the blues, “I love you, Pop.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | Val Senior texted him back. “I love you too, kiddo.” Val Senior says his son mentioned the meeting to him too. He says he told the warden everything. |
| Valentino Rodri…: | And when he emphasized everything, he’d always say, “Everything.” |
| Sukey Lewis: | What Valentino meant by everything we still don’t know. We do know that after the meeting, the warden had asked Valentino to write up all his allegations into an official report. |
| Mimy Rodriguez: | He was asked to write a memo, but he didn’t do it. He should have done it. But he never got a chance to write the memo. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Six days later, on October 21st, 2020, Mimy came home from having dinner with her girlfriends and found Valentino slumped over in the bathroom and called 911. |
| After Valentino’s death, calls of condolence came in, and people stopped by the shop, but there was one call in particular that Val Senior kept waiting for. | |
| Valentino Rodri…: | I was under the stupid impression that the warden would call me and say, “Hey, I’m sorry about your son. He was a good man. We’re going to make sure, we’re going to find out.” Nothing. It was just complete silence. |
| Sukey Lewis: | The warden never called. |
| Al Letson: | Coming up, we sit down with Sukey and her co-reporter, Julie Small, to hear where their investigation into the death of this whistleblower led them. That’s next on Reveal. |
| From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. | |
| Today we’re looking at New Folsom Prison in California. It’s the focus of the latest season of the podcast On Our Watch from KQED. We just learned that Valentino Rodriguez, a correctional officer at the prison, had reported corruption by his colleagues just days before his death. With me to talk more about it, are KQED reporters, Sukey Lewis and Julie Small. They co-reported the series. So, Julie, what happened with Valentino’s allegations? Were they ever investigated? | |
| Julie Small: | Prison investigators did look into some of Valentino’s allegations, but there are some real questions about the scope of that investigation and also the limited discipline that resulted. Valentino alleged that members of the Investigative Services Unit, which essentially polices the prison, broke the law themselves by planting contraband such as drugs and weapons on incarcerated people. He told the warden that these guys kept contraband in their desks, but rather than calling on an outside investigator who would be neutral, the warden asked the in-house supervisor to search these guys’ desks and that search didn’t result in any discipline. However, prison officials did investigate Valentino’s other allegations that officers in the unit harassed him, using racial and homophobic slurs, and that investigation resulted in the dismissal of two of the officers, lesser discipline for another 10 correctional officers. |
| Al Letson: | So the officers, they were disciplined, but what about the supervisors? Were there any consequences for them? |
| Julie Small: | We don’t know all the actions prison officials took because only certain types of internal records are open to the public, but we found out that at least two of the higher ups who had direct knowledge of the harassment and did not intervene, both of them received promotions after his death. We’re talking about Valentino’s supervisor, the one who was on some of the inappropriate text threads and the Chief Deputy Warden who Valentino broke down to before leaving the prison. And from what we can tell, there was no consequence for the warden. He is still the warden. |
| Al Letson: | So we know Val Seniors’ hypothesis is that Valentino’s death is somehow connected to the prison. Did that bear out in your reporting? |
| Julie Small: | Yes, to some extent. I mean, one of the things we learned is that the Workers’ Compensation Board asked a psychiatrist to review all of Valentino’s medical records after he died to determine if his job contributed to his death. And this doctor said “Yes, over time, the violence of the prison, the harassment of fellow officers, the fear of retaliation if you told on them, put so much psychological pressure on Valentino that he could no longer cope with his anxiety.” |
| Now, Val Senior suspects that someone at the prison was actually trying to get rid of his son. And let me give you some context about where Val Senior’s suspicions come from. Valentino had told his father and his wife Mimy, that some officers in the unit were breaking the law and that he had evidence that could get people at New Folsom fired and might even result in prison time. Valentino had also told his family that at least one officer had threatened him. And so the fact that six days after Valentino had reported misconduct to the warden, he died, alone in his home, remains a coincidence that’s hard to ignore. So while we found nothing in our investigation to support the theory that someone at the prison killed Valentino, Val Senior still has a lot of questions that he feels law enforcement agencies never answered. | |
| Al Letson: | Julie, what can you tell us about the police investigation? Did they take Val Senior’s concerns seriously? I mean, what was the outcome? |
| Julie Small: | The West Sacramento Police Chief actually talked to us about this investigation and the chief expressed a lot of sympathy for Val Senior. But he also saw him at the time as a grieving father trying to find a reason for his son’s death. He says his officers found no signs of foul play, no signs of forced entry to the house where Valentino died, and no trauma to his body to indicate a struggle. So they didn’t really view Valentino’s death as anything other than an accidental overdose. The chief says it wasn’t policy then to investigate an overdose death as a homicide, back in 2020, but Valentino’s death did result in a change to that policy. His death was part of a wave of fentanyl deaths in the region. And now the West Sacramento Police Department has a special investigations unit involved at the scene when there’s an overdose to do a better job of collecting evidence and pursuing the source of the fentanyl. |
| Al Letson: | And Sukey, what does Valentino’s story tell us more broadly about the experience of being a correctional officer at New Folsom? |
| Sukey Lewis: | So what Valentino experienced in terms of harassment and intimidation was actually pretty common among the officers who spoke to us. But in the final episode of the podcast, we also dig into some internal affairs records from across California prisons to understand what discrimination and accountability for discrimination looks like. We were able to get 82 of these disciplinary cases in response to public records requests and found behavior that ranged from bad language, like slurs, to unwanted touching. What we found is that discrimination or discriminatory behavior actually rarely results in firing, even when it’s pretty egregious. For example, one man had a number of incidents in which he touched female colleagues inappropriately without consent, but it looks like he just got a pay cut. Another officer told a female guard who’d filed a complaint about a colleague that the action would “follow you throughout your career.” So you can see this culture isn’t just about bad words. There’s a real threat of physical and psychological danger that’s present and it’s what enforces the culture of silence among officers who work in these prisons. So those 82 cases are actually just the tip of the iceberg. |
| Al Letson: | The misconduct you uncovered went beyond Valentino’s unit at New Folsom. Tell me a bit about what you uncovered about this prison and the California Department of Corrections just in general. |
| Sukey Lewis: | So this whole podcast started because of a new law enforcement transparency law in California that opened up police internal affairs files as well as correctional officer disciplinary records. We’ve been pursuing these files across the state, including from CDCR because they’re actually the largest employer of peace officers in the state. In 2022, we had to sue them because they were disclosing these cases so slowly, but over the past few years, we have been able to obtain hundreds of these records, including interrogation tapes and settlement agreements, and what we’ve been able to do is build up a picture of what use of force looks like in prisons across the state. |
| One of the things that just really surprised us was how many of these really troubling incidents happened at New Folsom. Officers there were using serious force, so that means injuring or shooting at people, three times more than any other prison in the state. Overall use of force numbers were also very high. Our final analysis going back to 2009, found that New Folsom rates were 40% higher than any other prison. Finally, we found another thing that really stood out. The rate that officers are using force overall across the prison system has been going up, not down. | |
| Al Letson: | So California has been touted as one of the most progressive, if not the most progressive, in terms of incarceration issues in the country, and the state has been implementing lots of prison reforms. Does this mean those efforts aren’t working? |
| Sukey Lewis: | Well, California has recently adopted what it calls the California Model, which is fashioned off of the way Norway treats prisoners with a real focus on rehabilitation and humane treatment in prisons. So far, there are three prisons where it’s being tested out. New Folsom is not one of them. But even at New Folsom, there are new reforms that CDCR says should make an impact, including implementing body cams for officers and a new process for reviewing complaints against officers that’s supposed to be less biased and more fair. Now, we have already heard about some issues with these new reforms, including footage not being saved, and complaints being misclassified, but some incarcerated people and officers also say that body cams really do make a difference. |
| But I think what this story shows more broadly is that so far there’s still a real disconnect between the high level policies that are being enacted and the reality of what happens inside prison walls, including this incredibly persistent culture of silence that keeps misconduct hidden and is very detrimental to the mental health of the people who live and work inside our prisons. | |
| Al Letson: | So how are Val Senior and Valentino’s wife, Mimy, especially since the series came out? |
| Julie Small: | Well, Mimy is never going to be the same. She was only married to Valentino for a few weeks when he died, and she suffered a terrible loss, and she is going back to school, she’s working, she’s going through the motions of her life and she’s still trying to make her way through it. |
| For Val Senior, this process has kept him in this state of deep grief and anger that has been difficult for him to cope with. But he just told us recently that doing the podcast helped him get closure on some things. He told me once early on that he feared that if he stopped feeling grief for his son, that it would be like he was turning his back on his son and he would lose him again, like not feeling the grief was a betrayal. But now that he’s done something, he’s fought to share his son’s story, he feels like he can let some of that go now. | |
| Al Letson: | Sukey and Julie, thank you so much for bringing us this story. |
| Julie Small: | Thank you, Al. |
| Sukey Lewis: | Thank you so much for sharing it. |
| Al Letson: | You can listen to the On Our Watch series at kqed.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Throughout it, Sukey and Julie find another whistleblower who helps Val Senior with his investigation. They also discover a larger pattern of violence inside the prison, and find out what happened to the officers who harassed Valentino. |
| Our lead producer for this week’s show is our production manager and my brother from another mother, Steven Rascon. He was a part of the On Our Watch production team, which also includes Chris Egusa, Jen Chien, Tarek Fuda, and Victoria Mauleón. UC Berkeley’s investigative reporting program provided support and research and data analysis. Jenny Casas edited the show. Nikki Frick is our fact checker. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. Additional music from Ramtin Arablouei, Audio Network and APM Music. Our CEO is Robert Rosenthal. Our COO is Maria Feldman. Our interim executive producers are Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Camerado, Lightning. | |
| Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story. |