After a man released from jail during the recent cold snap was found frozen to death in a cemetery, you might think the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office would be on the defensive.
Quite the opposite. A sheriff’s office spokesman, Deputy Paul McRedmond, is taking the offensive. McRedmond says his agency — which operates the jails in Portland — did all it legally could to help George Grigorieff when he was booked into Multnomah County Detention Center downtown Dec. 18. (The photo above is Grigorieff’s mug shot from that night.)
“We’re the cold-hearted bureaucracy handling 30 to 40 thousand bookings a year,” McRedmond says. “(But) we see so many heartbreaking stories come through that jail, and we do everything we can to assist people and not just shuffle them through the process.”
Grigorieff, 63, was arrested after Portland police found him standing in the cold on the corner of Southwest 14th Avenue and Alder Street on the night of the 18th (the temperature that night dropped to 32 degrees). Officers approached him on a welfare check, McRedmond says.
Police discovered Grigorieff had three outstanding warrants for failing to appear in court on misdemeanor charges of drinking in public and interfering with public transportation. He was booked into jail at 10:56 pm.
McRedmond says Grigorieff’s clothes were washed and dried while he was in his cell. He also received a medical evaluation. He was released nearly three hours later at 1:45 am on Dec. 19.
McRedmond says by law, the jail could not keep Grigorieff longer or ask him to stay. Guidelines set by judges lay out how limited jail space is allocated, and Grigorieff’s charges required him to be booked and released. To do otherwise would have violated Grigorieff’s civil rights, McRedmond says.
The jail lobby was open and posted as a warming center that night, McRedmond says. He’s unsure if Grigorieff or anyone else used it.
Grigorieff was ordered to appear in court the next day for an arraignment, but he never showed up. His body was found three days later at the Lone Fir Cemetery in Southeast Portland. He was wearing multiple layers, including two hooded sweatshirts and two pairs of pants, according to a report in The Oregonian.
McRedmond says the jail staff grieved when they heard the news.
“Where does self-responsibility end off and state responsibility start, and vice versa?” he asks. “There’s a gray area there. There’s always a crack.”
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This is an open comment to advocacy agencies like Sisters of the Road and the Oregon Law Center for consistently suing and interfering because of extreme utopian impractical beliefs of supposed rights for these fragile vulnerable people. These agencies do great harm with their feet don