'STRUCK' | Hundreds of inmates punched in the head in Harris County Jail

Cervantes said she did nothing violent when she was in the Harris County jail in 2021, awaiting trial for a felony DWI charge.

“It just felt horrible,” Cervantes said, sighing deeply as she remembered her time behind bars. “I was going through like a mental breakdown at that time.”

Detention officers were called to her cellblock one day after complaints that Cervantes had been “grabbing onto other inmates,” according to the use of force report. The video starts after that, with Cervantes standing in the middle of her cellblock staring off in space.

Officers wrote that Cervantes – named Ana Marin in the report – was standing with her “fists clinched” and “balled up” at her sides, implying aggression, but the video appeared to show Cervantes with her hands at her side with fingers slightly curled.

“I always have my hands like that. My hands are closed. It’s something natural,” Cervantes said.

As officers attempted to walk Cervantes out, she grabbed one of their uniforms.  In return, she was punched in the head several times, tackled and punched several more times on the ground.

But in that case, Cervantes was the one charged with a crime – assault of a public servant.

“I didn’t throw a punch. I didn’t swing. I didn’t slap. I didn’t do anything violent,” Cervantes said. “It’s insane that this stuff happens.”

Cervantes eventually pleaded guilty to her original DWI charge and attempted assault on a public servant after she found herself sitting in jail for months.

“I wasn’t guilty of that charge,” she said, but her public defender told her, “‘You can sit here and fight it, but you’re probably going to be sitting here for more than a year.’ … I wanted to go home.”

Cervantes was not alone. A KHOU 11 Investigates analysis of court records and use of force report showed that in dozens of questionable head punching cases, the inmate was charged.

Bryaniel Williams was one of those cases. His request for a blanket turned into an argument with a detention officer.

“I said can I get a blanket? Can I get a blanket?” Williams said.  “He was using profanity at me. He was yelling at me. He was like you know, ‘you sit your ass down.’”

Video entered as evidence in his assault of a public servant case shows Williams waving his arms and tapping a detention officer with his finger. That prompted the detention officer, more than twice Williams’ size, to punch him seven times in the head.

“He was really aggressive. Yes, he was. He was very aggressive.” Williams said. “I don’t feel like I was aggressive with him on that. I didn’t hit him or nothing. … He got me real good.”

The detention officer went to the hospital for injuring his hand from punching, according to his use of force report. Williams said that information was used to paint Williams as the aggressor and justify charging him with assault on a public servant.

Steve Sinclair, founder of consulting firm Justice & Liberty Group, watched Williams’ video and was surprised to learn Williams was the one charged.

“I just can’t comprehend it. That’s not assault. The assault came when the officer started throwing blows at the individual’s head,” he said.

Sinclair saw it all during his career inside jails and prisons. He started as a detention officer and retired more than 30 years later as the head of the Washington State Department of Corrections.

He said head strikes should be “reserved for the most severe of instances,” not situations like Williams’ where officers wrote he entered a “fighting stance,” refused orders and verbally threatened them.

But a KHOU 11 Investigates’ analysis of use of force reports showed 128 incidents where inmates were punched for getting into a fighting stance. Another 128 were also punched for refusing orders, and 62 inmates were struck in the head after spitting at detention officers.

“Having someone spit on you is disgusting and awful, and I've experienced it myself,” Sinclair said. “But it’s not justification for force at that level.”

Detention officers punched inmate Roberto Rubio-Zamora at least 10 times after officers wrote that he spat at them, according to a use of force report.

“It’s not fair,” Rubio-Zamora’s father Roberto Alvarez said when he watched the video of his son in a hallway with eight officers hitting him. “That’s not right.”

Both Sinclair and Deitch, experts who reviewed Rubio-Zamora’s case and other questionable head punches, said most of those cases could have been avoided through de-escalation.

“That's using verbal tactics, the tone of your voice, the rate of your speech, to see if you can de-escalate the situation,” Sinclair said.

Instead, Deitch said in the cases she reviewed “everyone was trying to make it worse. It was about getting in people’s faces.”

“I was stunned. In virtually every single case I looked at there was nothing that I would consider de-escalation,” Deitch said. “Everyone is itching for a fight in almost every, every case that I saw.”

Former inmate Spicer said that’s how his jail beating felt.   He filed a grievance with the sheriff’s office and wrote to the judge in his robbery case, asking her to “file charges on all the officers involved in this unprovoked assault.”

Those officers were never charged, nor were they ever disciplined.

“They’re not getting in trouble for it. They’re not being pushed for it. So why not keep punching them in the head,” Spicer said. “It’s going on right now, as we speak, it’s going on right now. I guarantee it.”

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Although there were 810 cases of questionable head strikes over the past four years, internal affairs records show only 10 detention officers were disciplined for delivering those blows.

Former Harris County Detention Officer David Batts saw firsthand how much detention officers could get away with and never get disciplined. He said he witnessed a culture that allowed sometimes overworked and underpaid officers to take out their frustrations on inmates.

“I've worked with some of these officers and they’re angry. They're burnt out. They're furious,” Batts said. “So, they take it out on prisoners as a punching bag.”

Batts spent two and a half years working inside the Harris County jail. He said he never punched an inmate. Use of force reports and his personnel file confirmed that. Batts said he witnessed a “very abusive, toxic” culture in the jail, where some officers were proud of punching inmates

“The more use of forces you have, the more bragging rights you have, and that's basically how it always is,” he said.

He said the bragging got to the point of sharing stories and videos about the latest knock out. He remembered a day when one story was on everyone’s lips.

“Everybody was talking about it. And I mean, everybody was talking about it, and you know, I was like, ‘what are you guys talking about?’” Batts said. “’Well, you have you not seen the video?’ I'm like, ‘what video?’”

In that video, an inmate stood up from a chair in the Joint Processing Center waiting room and began taking off his shirt and quickly crossing the seating area. Right as he made it out of the line of chairs, a detention officer knocked him out cold with a single blow to the head.

“I mean, they would literally be talking about in the parking lot or they would sit over here and talk about it in the break room. Like, hey, ‘I did this and this and that. You saw the video? You saw my video?’” Batts said. “I'm like. Jesus, you guys are actually proud of hurting people?’”

“They don't hold anybody accountable for any of their actions. These officers can do whatever they want.”

More officers were disciplined for fraternizing with an inmate, poor attendance or bringing a cell phone inside the jail than they were for punching an inmate in the head, according to four years of internal affairs investigation records.

“It’s creating a culture where this is acceptable behavior,” said Deitch. “It creates a toxic, dangerous culture that does not respect the rights of people who are incarcerated, that creates a very us, them relationship between people who work in the facility and people who live in the facility. And that is a dynamic that creates an unsafe environment for everyone, for both incarcerated people and staff.”

She and Sinclair, the former state corrections head, agreed that no accountability creates a cycle of officers seeing the behavior and thinking it’s ok or even expected.

“That’s what’s got to change,” Sinclair said. “And there are tools and approaches … that need to be put into action to say, ‘This isn’t ok. We’re a professional organization and you can’t act this way. You must show restraint.’”

Sheriff Ed Gonzalez is responsible for the Harris County Jail. During a 40-minute interview, he conceded that his department has failed to properly address head punching incidents.

“I appreciate you bringing the information forward. I think my track record is one that you know we always do try to identify whenever there's an issue,” Gonzalez said.

“We understand that there's a lot of things that we may do right, but there's times when we're going to fall short.”

However, Sheriff Gonzalez maintained that use of force is one of his “highest concerns” and said he has taken some disciplinary action in the past.

“When we're talking about excessive use of force at a macro level … there has been discipline,” Gonzalez said. “So if you're singling out just strikes to the head, then in that category, yes, I think that we weren't firm enough or clear enough to really address that part of it.”

Records reveal the sheriff didn’t address cases of inmates struck in the head even when they resulted in criminal charges filed against detention officers. One of those was captured in a video leaked last year. It shows officer Jailyn Twitty punching an inmate, crouched in a corner covering his head.

Sinclair was shocked when he watched it.

“Unbelievable!” he said. “The inmate was not a threat to the officer in any way, obviously. And that was just flat out abuse.”

After the video was leaked, Twitty was charged with assault. His case is still pending and his attorney, Terrence Jewett, said the problem is systemic.

“We believe that a lack of training, lack of adequate staffing levels, and overcrowded jails leads to situations in Harris County jail that no one wants,” Jewett said in a statement. “I believe a Harris County jury would look at the facts and conclude that my client is not guilty so we plan to fight the charges.”

At least seven officers – Twitty, 30; Elijah Phillip, 25; LeThomas Brown, 37; Can Gokten, 28; Dalen Swain, 24; Darryl Smith, 27; and Mario Quintanilla Jr, 31 -- were arrested this year for six separate head punching incidents that happened in 2022, according to an analysis of court records.

Despite the severity of those cases, all of those officers remained on the job.

“I think we allow there to be a review by the District Attorney's Office (and) a grand jury to determine if there's going to be indictment on them,” Sheriff Gonzalez said.

But before they were indicted, every one of those detention officers went on to punch other inmates in the head again. One detention officer admitted to punching an inmate in the head 12 times in one case and 35 times in another.

“A better decision would probably be to remove an individual in that type of situation off the floors,” Gonzalez said. “They should have been pulled off the floor.”

The criminal cases against Gokten, Phillip, Swain and Smith were all dismissed after they completed pretrial diversion programs. In addition, Philip and Swain completed additional police training and Smith surrendered his license, according to court records.

“I gave up my license because the way law enforcement is going doesn’t align with my personality type,” Smith said in an emailed statement.

He stood by his decision to punch an inmate who he said was verbally threatening him and another officer.

“If you are weak, they will eat,” he wrote in the statement.

Gokten, Phillip and Swain all declined to comment on their cases.

Twitty, Brown and Quintanilla’s cases are still open.

Quintanilla’s attorney Nicole DeBorde Hochglaube said the following in a statement: “We are confident that after a full and fair review of this matter in court, Mr. Quintanilla will be cleared of any allegations. We look forward to clearing his good name.”

Brown declined to comment when investigative reporter Jeremy Rogalski caught up with him outside a court hearing. Brown was arrested for a 2022 incident, where, in his use of force report, he admitted to punching an inmate at least nine times, including seven times on the ground after the inmate threw milk at him.

After that case, records show he went on to strike three more inmates in the head, but despite all those incidents, he went on to get a favorable job review. His supervisor wrote he, “could become a great field training officer.”

Sheriff Gonzalez pledged to focus more attention on his supervisory staff.

“It's important for us to make sure that that frontline supervision is doing their job and using their best judgment,” Gonzalez said. “Looking to see if we can be doing this much better, and like I said, there’s things that we can obviously be doing better.”

The Harris County jail has faced problems in the last few years. It failed state inspections in 2023 and 2023 for staffing shortages and not conducting timely checks on inmates. The jail passed a 2024 safety review by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said his department is working toward cleaning up issues in the jail and pointed to a decrease in jail deaths. Those soared to 27 in 2022 and 19 in 2023, but dipped to 6 so far in 2024, according to the Texas Attorney General’s office.

Death in custody reports from the AG show most inmates died by suicide, medical neglect or were drug-related.

Sheriff’s department records show one inmate was beaten at the hands of detention officers, and it took his death for Sheriff Gonzalez to take sweeping action.

“You shouldn't have to lose your child because they're sitting in jail,” LaRhonda Biggles said.

Jaquaree Simmons was her child. At 23, he was the youngest son in a family of seven. His mom acknowledged he wasn’t a saint. He’d been in and out of jail since he was 17, but that didn’t justify what happened to him.

“Everybody makes mistakes. You understand what I'm saying?” Biggles said. “I don't want to see no other mother go through what I went through just because our children got in trouble doesn't mean they're animals, or that they should go in and not come back out.”

Simmons’ last trip to the Harris County jail was on a felony weapons charge in February 2021, a few days before the winter freeze. Every day, he called his mom from jail. But then the phone stopped ringing.

“Well, maybe they're just not letting them use the phone because of the storm. That's what we took it as,” Biggles said. “The next day, still no phone call, and I'm like OK, now I'm worried.”

Biggles said the next call from the Harris County jail didn’t come for her son, but from a jail chaplain, who told her there was an “accident.”

“I knew it wasn’t an accident at that very moment,” Biggles said. “It came to me instantly. Something went wrong in there. Somebody did something.”

Internal affairs reports detailed what went wrong in the hours before Simmons’ death.

Sections of the report were highlighted by KHOU 11 Investigates below.

After Simmons flooded the toilet in his single-man cell one morning, detention officers stripped him naked, and one officer dropped his knee on Simmons’ head using his full weight.

That officer, Eric Morales, was 6-foot 5-inches tall and 300 pounds.

“My son was 5-foot 3-inches, weighing in about 128 pounds,” Biggles said. “He was very little.”

Simmons was left naked in his 50-degree cell for eight hours, in the middle of a historic winter storm. Detention officers didn’t check in on him again until dinner time, when records showed he threw a tray at a detention officer.

In response, a closed fist strike to the face from one officer, four to five blows to the face from two other officers and two to three punches to the head from another.

He also was slammed into the wall and slammed into the ground. Simmons was cuffed and taken to the clinic.

“Inmate Simmons basically had to be carried by his arms, because he could not walk on his own after being struck in the head,” one detention officer said in a sworn statement.

The next day, Simmons died. Three months later, Gonzalez held a press conference condemning the officers’ behavior.

“They abused their authority,” Gonzalez said during a news conference announcing the disciplinary action. “Their conduct toward Mr. Simmons was reprehensible.”

The sheriff fired 11 detention officers and suspended six others. Four of those officers struck Simmons in the head, according to internal affairs records.

“It was very troubling, and our condolences go out to his family. It's something that … is always concerning and looking at some of the behavior that day … we took the action that we deemed necessary,” Gonzalez said.

It was too little too late for Simmons’ mom, LaRhonda Biggles.

“He took something dear from me. Very, very dear to me,” Biggles said.

She said it would have never gotten that far if the Sheriff had taken a harder line in the past. The tiny fraction of officers disciplined in 810 questionable head punching incidents sends the wrong message, Biggles said.

“They (detention officers) could just keep doing it over and over again, and nothing's gonna happen because nothing happened to him, and nothing happened to him. Nothing gonna happen to me either,” Biggles said. “If there was accountability and we wouldn't be here right now. We wouldn't be having this conversation, and my son would probably still be running around doing what he doing, but they’re not being held accountable for the things they do.”

Gonzalez acknowledged that it shouldn’t take a death for officers to be punished.

“I think that's why we need to make sure that it doesn't always elevate (to) only when there's a death,” Gonzalez said. “But we need to try to be more preventive as well.”

But he said it isn’t fair to say there hasn’t been discipline at all.

“I disagree with the notion that everything's permissive, or we somehow allow everything to happen,” Gonzalez said. “Now perhaps it wasn't as strong as it needed to be … but to simply say that we allow it and we tolerate it and somehow we might encourage it or accept it, I don't think that's 100 percent accurate.”

A grand jury did hold one detention officer accountable, indicting Eric Morales for manslaughter in Jaquaree Simmons’ death.

The family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Morales, other detention officers and Harris County.

“People behave differently when they know that there are very serious consequences,” Simmons’ family attorney Quinn Rallins said. “Harris County is going to have a choice … whether or not they're going to continue to operate with business as usual or continue or start making some real changes. So the officers know that they're within a system that will hold them accountable.”

Gonzalez conceded that they have a lot of work to do at the jail. He agreed with KHOU’s analysis of situations where head strikes weren’t warranted -- refusing orders, grabbing a detention officer or making verbal threats. He said “those types of scenarios to me would not” warrant a punch to the head.

“I'm very clear that there's room for improvement in all this and we want to run a safe and respectful jail,” Gonzalez said, “and I think that we could obviously do better when it comes to de-escalation, making sure that we're better training our personnel and better, support them as much as we can.

That training and support comes in the form of a few weeks of training before new recruits work shifts on their own. But nothing in Harris County’s policies or training manual explicitly mentions strike to the head.

The concept of punching – called “hard empty hand control” – is defined in polices, but when or where to use it is not mentioned.

“If I were an officer who was reading this policy, I would not understand that that kind of behavior is unacceptable,” said Deitch, the head of UT’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab. “It's missing some key elements and missing necessary guidance for the officers, so they know what is allowable and what isn't.”

Sinclair, the consultant who used to run the Washington State prison system, agreed that the sheriff’s office has a lot of work to do, and he had a message for Gonzalez.

“You need to communicate right now … and reestablish what's OK and not OK, you need to get to work on your policy. Take a look around the country at how other agencies are approaching use of force issues,” Sinclair said. “You know, you're putting your agency at significant risk because there should be litigation to follow this because it's not OK. It's unnecessary. It's excessive”

Around the country, some jail policies are clear when it comes to head strikes.

New York City prohibits the use of blows to the head unless an officer is in “imminent danger of serious bodily injury.” Los Angeles County only allows head punching during “life threatening or high risk-assaultive situations.” And in Texas, Bexar County’s policy says strong blows to the head “could be considered deadly force and should only be used when deadly force is appropriate.”

“From a training perspective, we do not teach to strike to the head,” Gonzalez said. He thanked KHOU11 Investigates for showing him other policies. “I think, and you helped us see this, that there are some policies that are more descriptive in prohibiting it. And, so, we're now revising our policy to be more reflective of those other policies. … It sends the wrong message if we’re not clearly spelling out the expectations.”

Detention officers were also outfitted with body-worn camera recently and the sheriff said there are other plans to hold more detention officers accountable, including adding more cameras.

“We want to have more cameras in our building, so it's all with an eye towards holding people accountable if they do wrong,” he said.

And some changes may be made to training, he said.

“If we need to elevate (training) more and make sure that we're sending a stronger message both in our training, through our follow up training through our frontline supervision and through our punishment or discipline, handed out to our employees, then we're we want to do that,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez also committed to revamping the way it analyzes use of force reports and flagging problem detention officers.

KHOU 11 Investigates discovered that the sheriff’s office wasn’t following its own policy that requires division commanders to submit an annual report detailing patterns or trends involving force. But nobody has written those reports in the seven years since Gonzalez took office.

“We need to do better, and I think the reports would be a good practice and we need to bring those back,” Gonzalez said.

Then there’s the Personnel Early Warning System, or PEWS which is supposed to be a red flag system to alert administration officers with excessive use of force incidents. Instead, it alerts every time an officer is near a use of force incident, whether they struck an inmate or simply escorted that inmate to the clinic after it was over. That results in an overflow of PEWS warnings – 12,592 alerts since 2020.

“It's not usable and effective,” Gonzalez said of PEWS. “I think it could be better developed, better refined, so that we can truly get to what the goal is, is to identify those early warning systems. … It should be a red flag.”

For all of the shortfalls, Gonzalez says there is context to consider. The Harris County jail is overcrowded and chronically short-staffed. Inmates stay longer because of court backlogs and delays, and many of those who remain in jail are awaiting trial for violent crimes. That all makes the jail a high-stress and tension-filled place to work.

“I'm very empathetic that they have a very difficult job, and they deal with a lot of heavy stuff every single day,” Gonzalez said. “But nonetheless the public expects us to run a safe and respectful jail. That's my expectation.”

“Obviously there's more work to be done and so we're definitely going to be taking some further action based on the information that you brought forward.”

The Harris County Deputies’ Organization was also asked to comment on KHOU11 Investigates’ findings, but they declined an on-camera interview and President Jose Lopez provided this statement instead:

“In all things, HCDO FOP 39 supports the rights of employees to safeguard themselves and others. These are rights detention officers, deputies, and other employees have under the law. We firmly advocate for employees to follow policy and, above all else, follow the law. Each incident is different and is put under robust review. Employees put their lives on the line daily to do their duty and protect inmates, themselves, and others.”