My name is Sofia Keolanui. I entered the jail cells at HPD five days ago whole save for injuries sustained in a kidnapping and attack perpetrated on me a few weeks ago. I left on the morning of the 27th with a crushed foot, missing toe and large pieces of flesh cut out from the bottom of both feet. Rather than making a dignified exit, I was carried out, unable to walk. I set my foot myself in the jail cell with the shirt I was arrested in. The officer who did it was “kind” enough to ensure that I didn’t go into shock, but no other treatment was provided.
I’m about two months pregnant. He knew this while he carved the words “Hurt Me” into my stomach with a knife.
This is what the HPD does.
Why are we tolerating it? They don’t serve and protect us, they serve and protect themselves and give lip service to protecting the people who are too scared or delusional to see them for what they really are. I won’t lie and say I’m an innocent person, I was in jail for a reason. But it takes a certain level of inhumanity to cuff a pregnant woman to a jail cell bed and take a bat to her feet, to mutilate her to the point where she may never have feeling in her feet again.
I won’t name names here, to protect my family more than myself. I don’t want retribution more than I might get already. But I will pose an open question to Chief Taov: Why are we paying you? What good do you do here? People talk like the Rejects are bad, the Crows are bad. But the Rejects haven’t done anything to me. A Crow was one of the few people to provide a brief moment of comfort in jail. Tell me, Chief Taov, who is it that I should hate more? The ones who haven’t hurt me, or the people who laughed when they raped me with a flashlight in the cellblock hallway?
Answer that.
