Charles Homans

A number of people flagged this issue.

But for whatever reason, by the end of the day, he still doesn't have a cellmate.

He returns to his cell and he's all alone.

The only people watching him at this point are the guards.

And how many guards are watching Epstein?

What's the setup?

So this is a jail that has for a very long time had just a ton of chronic problems.

And one of them is real issues of staffing.

It's understaffed.

It's overcrowded with inmates.

And the staff who's working because it's understaffed tend to be working very long hours, which has this sort of cascading effect.

They're often very, very tired staff.

sometimes calling in sick because they need to catch up on sleep.

People are being subbed in at all sorts of jobs they don't regularly do.

It's just kind of a recipe for disaster, so much so that six months before all this happened, a union official representing the corrections officers at this jail warned in a letter to the Bureau of Prisons, quote, quite frankly, at this point, we are one incident away from a staff or inmate fatality.

So there are two guards on duty in the shoe at this time.

And they sit at this desk that you can actually see from Epstein's cell.

And when Reyes was still in the cell, they would watch these guards at night and kind of note their behaviors and, you know, the fact that they were often sleeping on the job, things like that.

So Epstein actually knew a good bit, we think, about the guards' behaviors and their inattention at times.

So there was one guard in particular who was on duty through this entire period of time leading up to Epstein's death, a woman named Tova Noel.