The following story appeared on the Phoenix New Times' website:

By John Dickerson

Juan Mendoza Farias was handcuffed and alone in a jail cell when guards opened the hatch on his cell door and fired more than a dozen paintball-like pepper balls at him. Then they fired Taser electrical stun guns — more than a dozen times, by one guard's account — into Farias. Next came "the Devastator," a fire extinguisher-like mace sprayer, then an electronic crowd-control "stun" shield and more Tasers.

Juan Mendoza Farias
(Source: Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner)

Juan Mendoza Farias, Lower Buckeye Jail, jail deaths under Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Two hours later, during a separate altercation with 11 other guards, Farias stopped breathing and then died.

Those details come from Maricopa County Sheriff's detectives' investigation of the incident. On November 14, the Sheriff's Office released nearly 5,000 pages of jail records — four months after New Times requested them, wrote a story about the sheriff's stonewalling, and filed a lawsuit to secure them.

The lawsuit was filed in October. Without a court order or ruling, sheriff's attorney Michelle Iafrate volunteered to release most of the records — about one week after Arpaio won re-election.

New Times first reported on Farias' death in September ("Dead Again," September 11). At that time, the sheriff refused to hand over a single public record regarding Farias. New Times based its story on photos of Farias' beaten body, as well as an autopsy and jail guard reports, secured through a public-records request made to the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner.

The limited records secured in September revealed that Farias stopped breathing on December 5, 2007, when 11 guards pinned him face-down on a concrete "bed" in the Lower Buckeye Jail. When the guards pulled a "spit mask" off Farias' face, they noticed blood coming from his mouth.

The release of additional records reveals a fuller and even more disturbing scene. According to eyewitness reports from guards and inmates inside the jail, guards violently subdued Farias three different times. Jail guards say that Farias was violent, but testimony from inmates contradicts that. It's difficult to even see what Farias is doing in video footage because so many guards piled on him and the video has no sound. The altercations included two different groups of guards on different shifts.

The altercations lasted from approximately 8:30 p.m. to 11:10 p.m., when Farias urinated, stopped breathing, and began bleeding from his mouth and nose. By that time, Farias — naked, with his legs shackled — had been moved through three different isolation cells. Doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital pronounced him dead early the next morning.

Finish reading Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Own Records Raise Serious Questions About Inmate Juan Mendoza Farias' Violent Death