Self-Made Quadriplegic?

 

We can all rest easier knowing that the North Carolina Department of Corrections protects us from Timothy E. Helms. The record on that is clear.

 

Less clear is who will protect Helms – and the rest of us – from the North Carolina Department of Corrections.

 

Sunday’s edition of the Raleigh News and Observer carried an article about Helms written by Michael Biesecker.  He explains that Helms, serving three life terms for a fatal drunken-driving crime, is a quadriplegic. He can’t sit up or feed himself, but he apparently has extraordinary powers. More on those later.

 

Now the North Carolina’s Department of Corrections must have been worried about those powers, because the reporting by Biesecker says they kept the 48-year-old Helms in “disciplinary or administrative segregation,”  for more than 1400 days. Those days cover all of 2008, including after August when Helms became injured. And 89 so far this year.

 

In case your BureaucratSpeak dictionary isn’t handy, “disciplinary or administrative segregation” is solitary confinement.

 

You never know when a quadriplegic is going to make a break for it or organize a riot, I guess. The North Carolina Department of Corrections isn’t taking any chances.

 

And to be fair, Biesecker’s reporting in the News and Observer is clear that the 48-year-old Helms, in the slammer since 1994, is no angel. After hitting his head in a car accident when he was ten, his record before prison features drunken driving, assault, petty crime and visits to mental health facilities. In prison, the N&O reports his record of offenses includes –gasp!—hoarding 84 postage stamps, and other slightly more serious stuff. And for most of that time, he wasn’t even quadriplegic.

 

That started to change last August 3, when his special powers came into play. Seems he used some batteries and metal scrap to set his cell on fire. Hundreds of days in solitary confinement might make you cranky enough to do that, especially if you already have mental health issues, but that’s no excuse.

 

The prison guards, of course, put out the fire, the N&O reports, and “subdued” Helms. The next day, they took Helms to a local hospital, where doctors found a fractured skull, brain bleeding, fractured ribs and the marks you get when a nightstick whacks you.

 

Even in North Carolina, you’re not supposed to beat prisoners into quadriplegics, but the N&O reports an internal Department of Correction investigation found nothing to “conclusively determine what might have caused his injuries. . ."

 

So that’s where those extraordinary powers we mentioned must have come into play. Clearly, the North Carolina Department of Corrections thinks it possible that Helms beat himself so severely he made himself a quadriplegic. And to top it off, a hospital report said, he shoved two batteries in a plastic bag up his rectum.

If  Helms doesn’t have extraordinary powers, then some guards from the North Carolina Department of Corrections might have broken the law. The State of North Carolina is checking into all law-breaking in connection with the incident.

Already, the News and Observer reports, the eagle-eyed folks from the state have come across two felony-class charges. They charged Helms with burning a public building and malicious damage to occupied property by use of an incendiary device.

 

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Read the excellent News and Observer article yourself at: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1472530.html