Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed the residence of Autumn Hewitt. She lives in Boulder. The date of Michael Rydell’s autopsy was also incorrect. The correct date is he June 6, 2022.
Autumn Hewitt did not find out how her husband died until the death certificate arrived with his cremated remains.
According to a June 3 Graham County Sheriff’s Office news release, Gila County inmate Michael Allen Rydell was fatally injured on June 2 at the Graham County Detention Center using a prison-issue razor.
However, Hewitt did not learn the information until nearly two weeks later.
Autumn Hewitt said of the day Rydell died: “Literally misunderstood on the first call of the night.
And the question after question.
An initial call with Graham County Sheriff’s Office detective Justin Bowman appeared to be just the beginning of a series of conflicts surrounding the circumstances of Rydell’s death, prompting Hewitt to seek legal representation.
“Let’s make people aware,” Rydell’s mother Diana Ladd told Hewitt.
“I don’t want anyone else, male or female, to be a widow.[ed]said Hewitt.
Hewitt said that on the night Rydell died, Bowman did not disclose how he died. When she asked for the entire note, he told her he could not provide it.
She told the newspaper she submitted her first request to obtain a copy of the memo in August. She said she submitted another request about two weeks ago. She said she has not received any communication or response from the Graham County Sheriff’s Office.
“That’s hundreds of times,” she said, of the number of times she called Sheriff Preston “PJ” Allred.
When she expressed her intention to travel to Arizona from her home in Boulder, she asked Bowman where Rydell’s body was.
His response “raised a bouquet of red flags,” she said.
“Well, I think he was taken to McDougalls. [McDougal’s Caldwell Funeral Chapel in Safford]’” Bowman reportedly told her.
Hewitt said the detective “began to stutter” when she repeated the question.
She remembered asking:
“Ma’am, I can’t tell you at this time,” he is said to have told her.
McDougal’s office manager Jayme Gauthier told the newspaper that the funeral home was contacted at 10:21 pm on June 2 from Mount Graham Regional Medical Center to retrieve Reidell’s body. Funeral home staff arrived at the scene by 10:48 p.m., she reported.
Hewitt said she learned her husband had injured himself while discussing viewing arrangements with McDougall’s Chris Castro.
Until his September 29 conversation with the newspaper, Hewitt said he had not received confirmation that the suicide note was indeed there. The memo mentions him twice in the GCSO’s incident report and in a news release issued by the Sheriff’s Office on June 3.
Hewitt expressed doubt about the veracity of a line of text reported on the back of her husband’s suicide note. Lawsuit babe” was written. However, a supplementary narrative provided by GCSO Sgt. Nothing was written on the back of the suicide note dated June 2nd, the night Aaron Smith and Rydell died.
“Michael never called me baby,” Hewitt wrote in an Oct. 4 email.[d] To call everyone baby when I couldn’t remember their names. He hated it so he never called me baby. On the back of his suicide note is “Sue Baby”. i won’t buy it
“I think he wrote the prequels,” she added.
Hewitt says Rydell grew up close to an uncle who was a top Colorado attorney, and believes her husband knew better than to write such a statement. He said that he thought it was unlikely.
Hewitt told the newspaper Wednesday that she refused to file a lawsuit after another attorney in Arizona learned about the “Babe” line before finding her current legal representation.
Routine or non-routine?
Bowman’s testimony differs from information given to the Pima County Coroner’s Office, which handles autopsies in Graham County, according to GCSO documents.
“There is a disconnect between our report and the history of what happened,” Chief Coroner Gregory Hess said on Oct. 10 after being informed of Bowman’s report.
Baughman attended Reidell’s autopsy on June 6. This is recorded in both the coroner’s report and Bowman’s own testimony.
In his report, Bowman wrote: [Hess] Of what I knew by this point in the investigation. ”
According to his own account, Bowman was at the scene when Rydell bled to death.
A coroner’s report obtained by the newspaper on September 28 stated that Rydell was “reportedly found unresponsive in a single-room cell.”
Detective Chuck Harding, who works with Hess, told the newspaper that Reidell’s files indicated that “the deceased was found through normal rounds.”
Bowman’s account shows law enforcement officers in the midst of an ongoing crisis.
Baughman wrote that he was contacted on June 3 to help GCDC inmates. (According to the same report, Rydell was pronounced dead at Mount Graham Regional Medical Center on June 2 at 8:55 p.m.). Mark Smith, her three other detention officers — Officer Smith, Jaron Tillman, and Eli Ellison, who were actively involved in Rydell’s detention — were also in the cell.
Baughman noted that the two officers had blood on their clothes, hands and bodies.
Baughman reported that after examining the CCTV footage himself, no detainees appeared to be in the area when the incident occurred.
Prison warden Mike Cochrane told the newspaper on Wednesday that officers patrol the prison about every 30 minutes on average.
At one point, six law enforcement officers were present in Rydell’s cell at the same time, Bowman’s report says.
After injuring himself, Reydel reportedly barricaded himself under the bunk, hoping to be left alone to die. , the document states.
Macario admitted to tasting Rydell five times and stunned him three times on the outside of his left foot, then three times on the inside and outside of his right foot.
Testimony from multiple inmates who lived near Rydell’s cell corroborates the use of tasers.
Inmate Jerry Morris told Bowman:
Charles Jesse Fee told Bowman that Rydell was tasted and “the situation was handled incorrectly.”
Inmate Conor Quinn said he heard a taser fired when he heard a detainee tell Michael he was going to give him a tasting.
According to the documents, Rydell bit Tillman after being tasted five times. Bowman reports that detainee Eli Ellison “witnessed him” [Tillman] strike michael [Reidell] With a closed fist next to your face.
Rydell was prescribed generic Zoloft, an antidepressant, and had injections for low testosterone levels, and Hewitt expressed concern that her sudden discontinuation of these drugs had affected her husband’s mental health. In a call transcript obtained from GCSO on August 18, Reidell told Hewitt: [Gila County] Have their medication taken away and there is nothing she can do about it. ”
The Graham County Jail website states that it “does not accept outside medications of any kind.”
When Gila County received Rydell’s belongings from GCDC, his medication was not included. Hewitt said he asked a Gila County Jail employee what happened. She said she was told they could have been destroyed with Reidell’s permission. Hewitt has asked for documentation confirming that decision.
After Reidell’s death, Hewitt said he made repeated attempts to obtain Reidell’s medical records from GCDC. When the newspaper called and spoke to Roxanna Brant, her chief nurse at her GCDC last week, she said the records would be made public once Hewitt’s attorneys filed her ROI request.
On Thursday, Hewitt told the newspaper that Charity Dale, the Gila County Sheriff’s Office registrar, said that her Rydell files had expired and that all documents would be sent to the newspaper upon receipt of the signed and notarized HIPAA approval form. He said he advised Hewitt he could release it.
Hewitt confirmed that he is in the process of submitting the required documents.