By Colbert I. King
Saturday, May 21, 2005
"He passed away" was the initial explanation given by Federal Bureau of Prisons public affairs specialist Carla M. Wilson when, upon my request on Wednesday, she checked on the status of inmate Keith Barnes, age 29. Her choice of words was rather striking; my source at the D.C. Prisoners' Legal Services Project hadn't put it quite so delicately. After I shared with Wilson the information I had received concerning Barnes's demise, she said she would make additional inquiries within the Bureau of Prisons and get back to me.
With all the crime and violence plaguing parts of the Washington area, why a column on a jailed felon? What, you might ask, does Barnes, now dead, have to do with us, the living? Plenty, in my book. Barnes is an example of why murderers seem emboldened, why communities live in fear and why the thought of cooperating with the police causes some folks to take off running in the opposite direction as fast as their legs can take them, arms pumping and fingers extended and joined.
Keith Barnes, by all accounts, should have been behind prison walls. He was serving a life sentence for murder while armed and conspiracy to commit robbery in the District, according to a D.C. Corrections Department source and a Federal Bureau of Prisons document. He had been sent to the U.S. penitentiary in Coleman, Fla., on Feb. 20, 2002, and was denied parole a year later, when he became eligible. He was told at that time that he had to serve an additional five years before his sentence could be reviewed again. A month after his parole hearing, Barnes was placed in the penitentiary's special housing unit for protective custody reasons.
Barnes was in trouble, and he knew it. He had testified against a codefendant and believed that others were out to get him. He especially didn't want to be housed with D.C. inmates, because they knew that he had cooperated with the authorities. Fearing for his life, Barnes asked to be transferred out of the Coleman penitentiary. In fact, he wanted to be placed outside of the Federal Bureau of Prisons system because he feared his life would be in danger in any federal facility containing D.C. inmates.
In a letter to his congressional representative, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Barnes wrote that he had already been assaulted by another D.C. inmate at the Coleman facility. The letter prompted Norton to write to Bureau of Prisons director Harley G. Lappin on Dec. 7, conveying her constituent's fears along with his request for a transfer.
As is customary in the federal bureaucracy, Lappin bucked Norton's letter down the line to the place that Barnes seemed to fear the most: the U.S. penitentiary in Coleman. Its warden, Stan Yates, in a Dec. 23 letter to Norton, might as well have written, "Let not your heart be troubled." Yates told Norton that the inmate who assaulted Barnes had been placed in a "central inmate monitoring program" that ensured the two would never be housed in the same population. Yates also said that since Barnes could not name specific inmates who would be a direct threat to him, the penitentiary was unable to substantiate his fears of being housed with other D.C. inmates. But Yates assured Norton that Barnes's situation "is continuously being monitored"; that any inmates identified as a threat to Barnes "will not be allowed to be in the same general population with him"; and that Barnes would be recommended for "re-designation" to another facility where there are no known threats to him. Yates ended his letter with: "The Bureau of Prisons has programs in place to assist inmate Barnes in remaining safe during his time of incarceration."
True to Yates's promise, Barnes was transferred from the U.S. penitentiary in Coleman, arriving at the U.S. penitentiary in Beaumont, Tex., two weeks ago on May 6.
Here is a follow-up e-mail sent by Wilson of the Bureau of Prisons late Wednesday afternoon: "On May 7, 2005, inmate Keith Barnes was transported from USP Beaumont to a local area hospital with multiple stab wounds where he was pronounced dead by hospital staff that same evening. An investigation is being conducted by the FBI."
The body of Keith Barnes, I have been told, had 68 puncture wounds.