Convicted killer from Caribbean is person who died at Tacoma immigration center, ICE says
A 61-year-old man found dead Thursday in his cell at the privately-run federal immigration detention center in Tacoma has been identified by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as Charles Leo Daniel, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago.
Daniel was first taken into custody by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations on March 31, 2020, ICE said in a news release issued Monday. Before that, Daniel was serving an 18-year prison sentence for a murder conviction in King County Superior Court.
He was accused in 2003 of stabbing a 52-year-old man to death at his home in the Lake City area of Seattle, according to archive news reports from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times. The victim was Raymond “Bongo” Lindsay, a musician. One of the reports said at the time Daniel had recently lived in California and Arizona. ICE said Daniel was convicted of the murder Oct. 29, 2003.
Daniel’s cause of death has not yet been identified. The Pierce County medical examiner will make the finding. The Tacoma Police Department said Friday that an officer was dispatched to the Northwest ICE Processing Center, 1623 E. J St., on Thursday morning, and there didn’t appear to be signs of foul play or that Daniel hadn’t been attended to.
Staff at the detention center noticed Daniel was slumped off his bed and dragged him into a hallway to perform medical aid, police spokesperson Detective William Muse said. Arriving Tacoma Fire Department personnel continued to try to resuscitate him, but Daniel was declared dead at 11:35 a.m.
Local immigration activists have claimed that Daniel was held in segregated confinement, a form of punishment that human-rights activists call solitary confinement and a form of torture when people are held in such conditions for longer than 15 days. ICE did not respond to questions posed Friday and Monday by The News Tribune about what unit Daniel was held in.
An immigration judge ordered Daniel to be deported on Dec. 14, 2020, ICE said in its news release. He was to be sent to his home country of Trinidad and Tobago, a nation of two islands off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. ICE did not answer questions Monday about the status of Daniel’s deportation proceedings before his death.
ICE said the Embassy of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago in Washington, D.C., was notified of Daniel’s death, along with the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, and the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility. ICE is also required to notify next of kin, but the agency did not mention in its release if relatives of Daniel had been informed. ICE did not respond to a question sent over email Monday about the notification.
La Resistencia, a group that advocates for the closing of the facility and an end to deportations, said in a news release Monday that more than 160 detainees at the detention center have started a hunger strike after Daniel’s death. The facility has a capacity for 1,575 detainees.
Strikers demand their immediate release due to months of detention without resolution to their cases, inhumane and unbearable conditions, according to the news release. Activists said it’s the third hunger strike at the facility this year.
Hunger strikes have long been used by detainees at the facility on the Tacoma Tideflats as a tactic to protest poor conditions or delays in meeting with ICE officials about their immigration cases.
The contractor that runs the facility is the GEO Group, which operates many of ICE’s immigration jails around the country. It’s mired in a legal battle over state oversight of the Tacoma detention center after state health and workplace safety inspectors were repeatedly denied access last year to investigate detainee complaints and allegations of workplace safety violations.
Two other deaths have been reported at the facility since it opened in 2004, according to ICE records. In 2006, a 42-year-old man died of coronary artery disease. In 2018, a 40-year-old man held in solitary confinement died by suicide.
This story was originally published March 12, 2024 at 5:15 AM.
