Via – NPR

Two prison officers who were assigned to guard Jeffrey Epstein on the night he was found dead in his cell of an apparent suicide have been indicted on criminal charges, federal prosecutors in New York announced Tuesday.

Authorities have charged Michael Thomas and Tova Noel with making false records and conspiracy. The two worked as prison guards at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail in Manhattan that’s mostly used for defendants awaiting trial.

Prosecutors say Thomas and Noel neglected to check on Epstein every half-hour, as they were required to, then falsified prison logs to make it appear as if they were keeping an eye on him.

“They repeatedly failed to conduct mandated checks on inmates, and lied on official forms to hide their dereliction,” said U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman.

According to the indictment, Thomas and Noel “sat at their desks, browsed the Internet, and moved around the common area” of the prison instead of monitoring Epstein in his cell in the Special Housing Unit.

Epstein, 66, the wealthy financier who faced sex-trafficking charges at the time of his death, was awaiting trial in a case that, if he was convicted, could have resulted in a decades-long prison sentence.

The New York City medical examiner said in August that an autopsy showed that Epstein had hung himself in his cell, a conclusion that has been rejected by both conspiracy theorists and members of Epstein’s own family, who have claimed his death was a homicide and hired a private forensic pathologist to probe the incident.

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