4 Days, 20 Hours: The Ordeal of Daniel Chong

When you get a chance, and provided you’re not too sensitive to human suffering, go on YouTube and key in “Trapped in an elevator for 41 hours.” You’ll find a 3-minute, 11-second video of the single most horrifying experience of Nicholas White’s life.

On Friday, Oct. 15, 1999, White, a 34-year-old production manager at Business Week, had just taken a cigarette break and was headed back to the magazine’s offices on the 43rd floor of the McGraw-Hill Building in New York City, when the elevator car he was in suddenly stopped between floors. The YouTube video shows us what ensued through the eyes of the car’s security camera, the tape from which was obtained by the New Yorker magazine and posted online.

What we see is a man’s life disintegrating before our eyes. White is initially bewildered—he presses and represses the emergency button for assistance, scratches his head, paces his little room in circles. An hour goes by, and confusion gives way to anger—we see White standing sullenly with his arms folded, sitting on the carpeted floor in a huff. By the 19th hour, Saturday evening, he’s in full, flailing panic, realizing he may be trapped in this damned car all weekend, maybe even longer, that his life might actually be in jeopardy. The 32nd hour finds him lying face-down on the filthy carpet in despair. Finally, in the 41st hour, the video shows the elevator door at last sliding open and White rushing past the worker standing there as fast as his legs could carry him, back into the land of the living.

Nicholas White was trapped for one day and 17 hours in an elevator car, and the shock of it destroyed his life, or at least the life that existed before he stepped into that carpeted cell. According to the New Yorker’s account of the incident, White refused to return to work at Business Week and eventually lost his job, his friendships with colleagues, his apartment and his savings. At the time the New Yorker published his story, on April 21, 2008, he was still unemployed.

Few other Americans can relate to White’s ordeal like Daniel Chong, a 23-year-old engineering student at UC San Diego. Like White, Chong was imprisoned in a box without food or water, and like him endured a speeded-up version of the stages of grief, from denial and anger straight through to acceptance born of hopelessness.

But that’s where the similarities end. Unlike White, Chong was trapped in his cell for nearly four days and 20 hours. Unlike White, who left his prison on his own two feet, Chong had to be carried out, and would spend the next three days in an ICU being pulled back from the brink of death.

And while White never would learn what caused his elevator car to stall for 41 hours, Chong knows exactly who was responsible for his pain: the federal government.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

On Saturday morning, April 21, Chong was at a friend’s apartment in the University City section of San Diego—he’d spent the part of the previous day there celebrating 420 Day and decided to sleep over—when agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration stormed the place. The agents believed the apartment was being used in a “suspected MDMA distribution operation”—they later claimed to find about 18,000 Ecstasy pills there, along with cannabis, psychedelic mushrooms, prescription pills and three firearms. They arrested nine people, including Chong, who by every account had nothing to do with the suspecting trafficking, but was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“I don’t know to this day whether Daniel and his companions really were caught with a lot of Ecstasy or whether the media has turned a corner and are concentrating on the more salient point of the case, which is that here was a young man caught with a small amount of marijuana and then put through this terrible circumstance, where people find themselves in the bowels of the federal criminal justice system,” says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML in Washington, D.C.

The particular bowel Chong found himself in was the Kearny Mesa administrative headquarters of the DEA in San Diego, where he and the eight other arrestees were taken. The federal agents stationed there are a busy lot as they go about their portion of the work that comes with the estimated 1.4 million drug arrests in the U.S. every year. In 2009 alone, the Kearny Mesa branch assisted in taking down more than 200 cannabis grow operations in the San Diego area, the confiscation of nearly a half-million pot plants and the seizure of $3.5 million in suspects’ assets.

The branch’s workload has gotten a lot heavier of late, as agents answer the call of their U.S. attorney to shut down every medical pot dispensary in the region considered too close to a school, along with those they just feel like raiding. Four San Diego dispensaries were raided in January (including one just down the street from the DEA headquarters); at least 16 were informed in late 2011 that they had to go.

A Windowless Room

The Kearny Mesa branch is a hectic place, and on Saturday, April 21, in through its doors came nine drug suspects in need of processing. The first task of the agents on the case was to separate the suspects by putting them in individual holding cells, and then interviewing them individually. This required considerable coordination, with the arrestees shuffled from holding cells to interview rooms under close supervision to keep them from rehearsing their stories with one another and from interacting with the other drug suspects held there.

At some point, an agent brought Chong into an interview room, questioned him, and—according to press accounts—determined the college student was just a 420 celebrant in no way involved in the suspected Ecstasy ring. Chong was told he’d soon be released, and, he recounted later, an agent even offered to drive him home.

Chong was returned in handcuffs to his holding cell—a windowless, toilet-less, 5-foot-by-10-foot-by-10-foot box. The agents finished processing the other arrestees: seven were transferred to county facilities, and one was released.

Calls and emails by CULTURE to Chong’s attorney, Eugene Iredale, were not returned, and the DEA has clammed up on any information related to the case. But for whatever reason—whether someone forgot to check a box or sign off on a sheet or had an undiagnosed brain—the busy federal agents at the DEA’s Kearny Mesa office forgot a 23-year-old San Diego State engineering student was still in their custody. Specifically, they forgot he was still handcuffed in a windowless room without food, water or access to a toilet.

Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in D.C., says he’s never heard of another instance of federal officials plain forgetting about a detainee, not in all his 25 years closely following Drug War-related events. But Chong’s story hardly surprises him.

“When you’re arresting millions of people each year, people getting picked up for petty violations, all sorts of things can happen,” Nadelmann says. “People get thrown in cells and get raped, get brutalized. What happened in this case doesn’t happen all the time, but what does happen all the time is people get thrown in with some very scary people in some very scary places.”

Chong could hear the other detainees at the facility through the walls of his cell, but he was in no danger from either them or his jailers. The one group couldn’t get to him if they wanted to, while the other didn’t care enough to remember he was there. Though Chong didn’t know it yet, his only real enemy was time.

Terrible Trouble

A human being can survive without food for three to four weeks on average. It takes much less time to die of thirst. The generally accepted timeframe for death by severe dehydration is three to five days, assuming the victim wasn’t already dehydrated at the outset. Chong had been arrested the morning after a night of partying, and it’s no stretch to figure this student of one of the booziest universities in the nation had consumed more than just cannabis on 420. Had Chong imbibed alcohol the night before, it’s likely he entered his holding cell with his body already craving hydration.

The hours passed with Chong sitting on the cell’s metal bench, patiently waiting for that promised ride home. It was taking longer than he’d anticipated, but he wasn’t worried yet—he could hear the doors to other cells around him opening and closing, and he knew that soon, his would open as well. He had no way to tell how much time was elapsing other than his own body, which, as the minutes ticked by, informed him with increasing urgency that it was hungry and could really use some water.

This was Saturday afternoon. By Sunday morning, Chong was both worried and pissed. How could they keep him locked up all this time without so much as a glass of water and a bathroom break? It didn’t occur to him that he might have been forgotten—a prospect he would later describe at a news conference as “inconceivable.”

According to Chong, the holding cells at the Kearny Mesa facility are laid out in a way that would make it impossible for personnel to forget about their charges. The rooms are arranged in a circular pattern around a work station in the center. All a guard had to do was look over to see the door of Chong’s cell. Whatever the reason for the delay, Chong had had enough. He was tired and hungry and really thirsty, thirsty to the point his head hurt and his stomach was queasy—the second stage of the six stages of dehydration. Like a hangover that just kept getting worse. He went to the door and shouted for attention. Nothing. He kicked the door with his feet.

“Hey!” he shouted. “I need some water! What’s going on?”

No response.

By the afternoon of that second day, Chong knew beyond a doubt he was in terrible trouble.

“The Most Egregious Case”

“Unfortunately, here at NORML, we have a long, long list of people who have died in prison or while winding through the criminal justice system,” says St. Pierre. “Probably the most infamous case is Jonathan Magbie. His case was the last one that caught the media’s attention, notably here in Washington, D.C.”

Jonathan Magbie was a 27-year-old quadriplegic arrested in 2004 after the car he was riding in was pulled over by D.C. police. Officers searched the car, found a joint and a handgun, and arrested everyone, including Magbie, who required use of a ventilator 20 hours of the day to stay alive. Despite this, and despite the marijuana possession charge being Magbie’s first criminal offense, Judge Judith Retchin sentenced him to 10 days in the D.C. Jail—which had no respirator.

Magbie died on the fourth day of his sentence.

“Mister Magbie’s death confirms that cannabis cannot kill, but cannabis prohibition does,” St. Pierre says. “I think Daniel Chong’s case will supplant that of the death of Mr. Magbie, which is currently the most egregious case.”

On the third day of his entombment, Chong lost his hold on reality. He had kicked at his cell door and screamed for help to the point of exhaustion, gaining nothing from his efforts but shouts from the other prisoners to shut up. (Why this commotion didn’t alert his holders that something was amiss remains unknown.) He began to experience what he believed were hallucinations, though when asked at his news conference what the hallucinations were, he could only say they were “impossible to describe” and that by the third day he was “completely insane.”

That’s probably because Chong, at this point in his incarceration, was in the sixth and final stage of dehydration—his body had lost so much water that his brain’s neural activity had slowed, and he wasn’t so much “seeing things” as he was lost in a state of dementia. While he still didn’t suspect the possibility he had been forgotten, he became convinced the DEA were “trying to get him.” Paranoia is another common symptom of extreme dehydration.

Mad with thirst, he was forced to drink his own urine. This may ultimately have saved his life, staving off the final symptom of water starvation—loss of consciousness, followed soon after by death.

Chong told reporters that on the second or third day, he picked up a blanket that had been left in his cell and discovered hidden in it a small packet of white powder. Desperate for anything that might improve his predicament, he ingested it. His attorney would later say the substance was determined to be methamphetamine, apparently left behind one of the cell’s previous occupants. Whether ingesting speed helped Chong or made things worse is debatable: While it certainly didn’t improve his state of dehydration, it may have provided him the mental lift he needed to keep going.

But not for long.

$20 Million Lawsuit

As the third day fell into the fourth, Chong reached a point where he lost his will to live. The pain was just too much, and he could no longer deny his situation was hopeless. If his captors would deprive him of water for this long, surely they had no intention of letting him live. The agents of the DEA had taken everything from him—they’d taken his freedom, his dignity, even his sanity. Soon they would take what little life he had remaining. Why delay the inevitable?

Chong took off his glasses and used his handcuffs to smash the lenses against the cell floor. He wanted to leave a final goodbye to his family, so he picked up a glass shard and tried to carve “Sorry Mom” into the flesh of his left arm—tried but failed, as his hands shook too much.

Then he scooped up the remaining glass in his hands and swallowed it.

“[Daniel Chong’s] situation forces the question into the national spotlight: ‘Is the War on Drugs worth the loss of the life of a student who was just smoking some weed on 4/20?’” asks Lisa Fullmer, president of the University of San Diego School of Law chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. “It forces people to realize ‘That could have been my kid.’”

It was Wednesday afternoon, nearly five days after Chong was put into his holding cell, when the door finally opened. According to press accounts, the DEA agent standing there said, “Here’s the water you’ve been asking for.” Whether this was said before or after the agent got a good look at the gray, sunken-eyed college student bleeding from the mouth is not known.

Chong was rushed to Sharp Memorial Hospital in Kearny Mesa, where he spent the next five days—three in intensive care—being treated for severe dehydration, malnourishment, first-stage kidney failure and a perforated lung from swallowing glass. Chong told reporters that while being driven to Sharp, he told the DEA agent sitting next to him what had happened to him and that the agent kept saying, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

“Oh, my God” is right. News of Chong’s ordeal was reported across the world, sparking angry demands by U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, and U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican, for a full investigation into the DEA’s actions at the Kearny Mesa branch. The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General has, in fact, launched a formal investigation into the incident (calls to the Inspector General’s office for comment were not returned).

Condemnation of the incident was so intense, that, on May 2, newspapers across the world carried a formal statement by Kearny Mesa DEA special-agent-in-charge William R. Sherman, telling Chong he was really sorry.

“I am deeply troubled by the incident that occurred here last week,” Sherman wrote. “I extend my deepest apologies to the young man and want to express that this event is not indicative of the high standards that I hold my employees to.”

Another news item reported on May 2 was news that Chong’s attorney, Eugene Iredale, whom NORML’s St. Pierre describes as “excellent,” had filed a formal complaint over the incident, to be followed by a $20 million lawsuit.

The day before, at his San Diego press conference, Chong—looking pale, thin and alive—was asked point-blank by a reporter why he had gone to his friend’s University City apartment on April 20. It was the very first question posed to him: not what he felt about his ordeal, not how he had managed to survive such an experience, but what he was doing at an apartment about to be raided by the DEA.

“Celebrating a national holiday—420,” he said, looking the reporter straight in the eye. “To smoke marijuana.”