Surveillance video of Jeffrey Epstein’s first and failed suicide attempt has been deleted, prosecutors said.
“The surveillance video taken from outside Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on the day of his first apparent suicide attempt has been permanently deleted,” NBC News reported.
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Disgraced financier Epstein was in jail facing federal sex-trafficking charges when he was found semiconscious on July 23 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York. But now the video of this occurrence has disappeared. MCC officials say they mistakenly saved video from a different floor of the federal detention facility, according to prosecutors in a court filing.
It was the FBI who discovered this error while looking into a case involving Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer in Westchester County, New York, who was Epstein’s cellmate on the day of the incident. Tartaglione is awaiting trial on charges that he killed four men and buried them in his yard in 2016. Prosecutors also alleged Tartaglione was involved in a cocaine distribution conspiracy. Tartaglione was cleared of any wrongdoing in the July incident involving Epstein.
The MCC “inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists,” the court papers say. “After reviewing the video, it appeared to the government that the footage contained on the preserved video was for the correct date and time, but captured a different tier than the one where (the cell housing Epstein and his cellmate) was located because the preserved video did not show corrections officers responding to any of the cells seen on the video.”
Authorities say Epstein, 66, died by suicide inside his cell three weeks later.