SC inmate lost an eye in a beating. A new lawsuit says jail guards were negligent

An inmate at the Sumter-Lee Regional Detention Center lost an eye after being attacked by another detainee who stabbed him in the eye, according to a lawsuit.

The attacker’s cell door was unlocked and no guards were on the housing unit when James Bell allegedly attacked Roger Gooden with his fists, feet and an improvised knife in a beating that lasted for five minutes, according to the lawsuit filed Friday.

The lawsuit was filed by Gooden’s lawyers at the Strom Law Firm against the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail. It accuses the sheriff’s office of gross negligence in failing to prevent the attack.

The detention center “says its primary responsibility is to provide humane treatment and security to its detainees,” wrote Ally Benevento, one of Gooden’s lawyers, in a news release. “They failed to do either for Roger Gooden.”

When contacted Monday, a spokesperson for the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office said the facility had not yet been served with the lawsuit so officials could not comment.

Gooden is also represented by attorneys Bakari Sellers, Amy Willbanks and Mario Pacella, also of the Strom Law Firm, which has become a leader in litigation against county jails in South Carolina. The Strom Law Firm has filed eleven lawsuits against Richland County over conditions at the troubled Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center.

Declining conditions and under staffing at the Richland County Jail have resulted in an explosion in the number of assaults and stabbings. In July alone, four inmates died inside of the jail.

“What we’re seeing beyond negligence is just systemic issues with our county jails, which not only erodes public trust but has real life implications, like death,” Sellers told The State. “My hope is that Sumter County doesn’t end up like Alvin S. Glenn.”

A sudden attack

Gooden was jailed on January 13, 2022, after being sought in connection with a shooting at an El Cheapo gas station in Sumter, South Carolina. He was charged with a slew of offenses, including attempted murder, possession of a weapon during a violent crime, kidnapping, two counts of armed armed robbery, criminal conspiracy and possession of a weapon by a convicted felon. These charges remain pending against Gooden, who is now being represented by Sellers.

But after four months inside of the detention center, Gooden was elevated to the position of “trustee.” In this role, Gooden was allowed to move freely inside of his assigned dorm and was responsible for assisting detention center officers, handing out mail and janitorial duties, among other assignments. Gooden was assigned to Bravo pod, the jail’s lockup unit that housed detainees with disciplinary infractions or other “special accommodations,” according to the lawsuit.

On Nov. 29, 2023, a guard referred to in the lawsuit only as “Detention Officer Johnson” left the pod shortly after he started his shift, leaving Gooden alone in the dorm except for other inmates who were supposed to be locked in their cells.

Bravo pod was “regularly left unsupervised,” according to the lawsuit, and on that day the jail’s “staff failed to ensure that Detainee Bell’s cell was secure before leaving it unattended.”

As Gooden was returning a tablet to another inmate, Bell slipped out of his cell yelling for Gooden to “go outside” with him, according to the lawsuit. Bell then attacked Gooden, punching and kicking him in the head and body for five minutes before stabbing him in the eye socket with a “jail-fashioned ‘shank,’” according to the lawsuit.

When Gooden tried to crawl away, Bell attempted to drag him back to continue the assault. While the lawsuit does not make clear how Bell got out of his cell, it states that the jail’s central control room receives an alert whenever a cell door is unlocked.

“SLRDC staff in central control did not respond to an alert from Detainee Bell’s cell after Detainee Bell opened the door when it was supposed to be locked,” according to the lawsuit.

Following the alleged attack, Bell was charged with first degree assault.

Medical attention slow to arrive

But Gooden’s ordeal wasn’t over, according to the lawsuit.

Despite suffering severe blood loss and catastrophic injuries to his eye, Gooden was left to wait an hour for an ambulance. Once EMTs arrived, they said that he should be airlifted to the hospital. But Gooden was instead driven by ambulance to the Prisma Health Tuomey Hospital before being transported to Prisma Health Richland’s trauma center, the only Level 1 trauma center in Midlands, for surgery.

But when it was discovered that no surgeon was available to perform the surgery he needed, Gooden was tranferred for a third time to Prisma Health Greenville before being returned to the Sumter-Lee Regional Detention Center, a roughly two and a half hour drive.

Gooden then waited for four days without access to pain killers before returning to Greenville for a surgery to remove his eye and repair his eye socket and eyelid.