A former corrections officer took the stand Thursday on the second day of a federal jury trial of three former state corrections officers charged in the June 15, 2015, attack on an inmate
at Hawaii Community Correctional Center, and its cover-up.
Jordan DeMattos testified for the government against Jason Tagaloa, Craig Pinkney and Jonathan Taum, saying the four were at a July 2015 meeting at Taum’s home in which Taum coached them as to what to say when investigators questioned them.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Nolan presented as evidence of the alleged conspiracy to obstruct justice a clip of a cellphone video of that meeting showing the four watching a surveillance video of themselves in the early morning assault against Chawn Kaili in the Hilo jail’s recreation yard.
DeMattos testified that during the attack, Taum directed the blows, telling Tagaloa to aim for “a different part of the body other than the head.”
The three are being tried on the charge of deprivation of rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment by assaulting the inmate in the recreation yard, and Tagaloa is charged with an added count of the same charge for allegedly assaulting him in a cell.
All three are charged with obstruction of justice by falsifying a cover story in reports and repeating
the story to investigators, and with falsifying official reports.
DeMattos pleaded guilty to willfully depriving the inmate of the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment in connection with the assault; conspiring with the three to obstruct justice and falsifying an official report. He will be sentenced Sept. 29.
DeMattos said the cellphone video shows Taum at the meeting standing near a television, repeatedly playing the video of the attack.
He instructed the three to say every strike they were trained to use didn’t work, so they used untrained strikes. “It was to cover up,” DeMattos said.
DeMattos said Taum later changed his tune. “I couldn’t say that he instructed the strikes,” he said.
DeMattos admitted to lying on report forms, repeating the same lies and that the inmate became aggressive, “hands were balled up in fists” and refused to obey commands.
In the government’s trial brief, another officer said Kaili appeared to be high and paranoid, and he planned to put him in the visitation room, but Taum decided to rehouse him to a cell in another complex.
When Kaili saw the large officers coming toward him, he feared being assaulted.
Tagaloa allegedly slammed him to the ground, and he, Pinkney and DeMattos (who at the time weighed 300 pounds) piled on him.
The three allegedly punched and kicked the inmate 49 times, 17 punches to the head, 26 punches to the body, a kick to the head and five kicks to the body, because he refused to be handcuffed. He was pinned facedown on the pavement, lying in a pool of blood, then taken to the cell where Tagaloa allegedly punched him in the head and he lost consciousness.
