The U.S. Justice Department has agreed to pay a California college student $4.1 million in damages after officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration left him in a holding cell for several days last year without ever charging or even formally arresting him.
Daniel Chong was detained in an April 2012 drug raid in San Diego and apparently officers forgot they had placed him in the cell, forcing him to subsist over those days by drinking his own urine. Attorneys for Chong initially asked for $20 million in damages in their first filing.
According to news reports, Chong, a student at the University of California, San Diego, was at a friend's house when a DEA raid netted 18,000 ecstasy pills, other drugs and weapons. Chong and eight others were immediately taken into custody.
Chong was later told by agents he would not be charged and was left in the 5-by-10-foot cell until the paper work needed to release him was completed. Officers, however, did not return for four days and by then they found him severely dehydrated and covered in his own feces.
Chong later told authorities he started hallucinating by the third day and urinated on a metal bench to drink his urine. He later tried setting off a fire alarm to draw attention to himself and bit into his glasses to break them. At that point, having more or less accepted that he was going to die, he said he began using a piece of the shard glass to carve “Sorry Mom” onto his arm but was only able to make it through the “S.”
After finally being discovered, Chong was hospitalized five days for dehydration, kidney failure, cramps and a perforated esophagus. He lost 15 pounds..
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