Beaten, bloodied and dead

The officers pounded on the door of the brick house, then rang the bell several times. No answer. Their noontime presence was an unusual sight in front of the $850,000 home nestled deep inside the affluent Marlboro neighborhood.

Finally, a towering 22-year-old opened the door. Standing at 6-foot-3-inches and weighing more than 200 pounds, Amit Bornstein wanted to know why they were at his house. He was under arrest, the two Monmouth County Sheriff Officers told him. He had failed to appear in court to answer three charges — pot possession, stealing from cars and a traffic ticket.

Amit became agitated as his 13-year-old brother, Elad, watched from inside. Who will take care of the boy? Their mother died years earlier. Their father was in Africa on business. No one else was home. A neighbor finally agreed to take Elad in for the time being.

The cuffs clicked around Amit's wrists, and officers drove him away.

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Amit would never see Elad again.

Six hours later, heavily bruised, cut and bleeding, Amit sat dying in the Monmouth County Jail, strapped naked to a chair inside an isolation room. A surveillance video showed him shaking, possibly from a brain seizure, then falling quiet.

At 7:31 p.m. on July 29, 2010, Amit is pronounced dead at a local hospital.

How Amit Bornstein died, why he died — even what happened inside the Freehold Township facility during the last two hours of his life — is fiercely contested.

Amit's father, Israel, claims in his wrongful death lawsuit that his son was "assaulted and battered" by corrections officers, leading to his death. The pathologist hired by the family said Amit was covered with 28 bruises and other injuries, and that he died from a lack of oxygen.

County lawyers said otherwise: Bornstein became so enraged they wouldn't let him use his cell phone that it took up to eight officers to subdue him. He died not from a beating, but from heart disease and a condition called "excited delirium," or high agitation that gave him "superhuman strength." The existence of such a condition, though, is not fully accepted within the medical community.

A federal jury begins hearing the family's civil suit on Feb. 17. The court will decide if Bornstein's civil rights were violated by corrections officers and if the jail's private medical vendor was negligent in treating him. The jury may also determine there was no liability on the part of the jail, its employees and the medical contractor. A prior review by county prosecutors determined no crime was committed, but in civil court, the standards to prove liability are much different.

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The Asbury Park Press read hundreds of court documents, medical records and reviewed 17 surveillance videos from inside the jail to piece together the final hours of Amit's life. Amit is one of 29 inmates who died in custody in New Jersey in 2010.

Amit's father won't watch the jail's video. But his friends and family say his son showed no signs of superhuman strength, he said.

"You can see the answer in the video. If he's so great, if he's so big, if he's so strong, one of them (corrections officers) would be knocked down," said Israel Bornstein, 62 of Old Bridge. "What's he doing in jail? It was very minor things."

At the jail, Amit told a jail nurse that he worried about his brother Elad. Since his 18th birthday, Amit was the primary caregiver for his younger sibling. Their mother was killed in 2002 after being hit by a car while crossing Route 9 in Manalapan.

Israel Bornstein is a diamond dealer who constantly travels for work. He was in Africa at the time of Amit's arrest. Jail medical records noted that Amit was "abandoned by father — mother deceased. Cares for brother."

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Priscilla Harvey, the nurse who examined Amit for his jail intake medical record, wrote that he seemed anxious and depressed. She later told attorneys he was "extremely concerned" about Elad.

Harvey, who works for the county's private medical contractor, also wrote that there were no concerns about Amit's ability to cope. Later, she wrote in reports on Bornstein's death that he was calm with her.

Harvey was examining Bornstein when the jail watch commander, Lt. Thomas Bollaro, got a call from the state Department of Children and Families.

If they couldn't reach a family member to take Elad, the boy would go into DCF custody. Bollaro is not named in the suit.

Bollaro told corrections officer George Theis to retrieve Bornstein's father's number from his cellphone. Theis called the inmate away from his medical exam to come to the front office to open his bag. Theis is named as a defendant in the suit.

Bornstein wanted to use the phone to find other numbers for someone to take his brother. But the jail refused.

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Theis testified that Bornstein then reached over the desk with a fist and told him to "suck my --- ---." Theis told him he is going back to the "cool-down" isolation cell called Tank 8.

The jail video shows Amit with his hands sometimes resting on the desk or gesturing to someone off screen. However, a video clip reviewed by the Press shows that if Amit made a fist, it could have happened in the two seconds his right hand goes out of the camera's view. The video has no audio and its time stamp clock did not show the correct hour. It only recorded when the cameras detected motion.

Bornstein returned to the nursing station and sat down, but Theis told him to stand. Theis testified that Bornstein said, "Don't --- touch me."

In their depositions, Theis and Officer Tracy Tift said they were leading Bornstein to Tank 8 when Bornstein turned to his right in a way that both corrections officers perceived to be threatening.

Tift said Bornstein spun around with his hands up in an aggressive manner.

"In my mind, yes, it was a — it was a fighting stance," Tift said in his deposition.

Theis grabbed the back of Bornstein's jail jumpsuit, jail video showed. Tift said in his deposition that he punched Bornstein in the right cheek. "I felt it was pretty hard," Tift said. "I'm not sure. It didn't seem to have any effect."

The aggressive man that Monmouth County Jail officers describe in court documents is not the same boy Israel Bornstein said he raised.

To Israel, Amit was a bright boy who could play any musical instrument with ease. He took karate, before moving on to lacrosse. He worked out at the gym all of the time and had the physique of a body builder.

Amit studied to be a gemologist and considered following his dad in the family business. But he also dreamed of being a professional poker player.

"He had a great future. He would play (locally) with people," Israel Bornstein said. "He would tell me, 'Daddy, I'm doing good. Daddy, I'm doing bad.'"

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His son always helped friends, Israel recalled. Their family was better off than many, and Amit was generous with money his father gave him, he said.

Israel traveled the world for diamonds. After his wife died, a nanny looked after his young sons while he was away. Part of her job was preparing meals for the boys, but Amit volunteered to cook for his younger brother.

"He would say, 'No, Elad, I'll do it for you. You need something in school? I'll teach (you),'" Israel Bornstein said.

Amit graduated from Marlboro High School in 2006, as a mostly B and C student, according to his school transcripts released in court documents. He was a member of the school's French Honor Society in his freshman and sophomore years. He was a USA Junior Statesman, a program aimed at training youth about debate and civic participation, and a member of the school's lacrosse team his junior year.

The transcripts also show Amit served a week-long out-of-school suspension for fighting his junior year. During his senior year, he served a seven-day suspension for "outrageous conduct" and a four-day suspension for cutting class.

Friends and family say Amit got in trouble, but not more than any ordinary a teenage boy.

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But that description of Amit is very different from the ones provided by jail officers.

Amit was arrested in October 2008 in connection to a series of car burglaries in Marlboro. Police say he stole credit cards from one of the cars and used them for purchases. A grand jury indicted him on third and fourth degree charges in February 2009, but he never showed in Superior Court for subsequent hearings. That led to the bench warrants being issued, which landed him in jail.

If convicted at trial as a first-time offender, he would likely have been sentenced to probation.

After the first punch from Tift, Theis grabbed one of Bornstein's arms as the two officers directed Bornstein down a hall to Tank 8, according to Theis' deposition. Bornstein, he said, struggled against him the entire way, trying to pull away from his grip.

According to Theis, Bornstein pushed back as the officers were trying to put him in the holding cell, preventing them from doing so. Theis grabbed Bornstein's torso and pushed him to the ground.

Tift, the officer who threw the first punch, said Bornstein was resisting by not putting his hands behind his back as ordered. Instead, he kept them tucked underneath his body as lay on his belly. Tift, who used pepper spray in an attempt to get him to free his hands, said Bornstein was not attacking the officers, but rather flailing his legs to avoid being handcuffed.

Other officers in their depositions described Bornstein's actions as "violent."

"If he wasn't violent he would have just gave up his hands and gotten handcuffed and stood up, but he was fighting and resisting and movin' and wigglin' and kickin'. That's violent, right?" Sgt. Kenneth Noland said in his deposition. Noland is also being sued in the lawsuit.

Noland, a supervising officer who was working his last shift before retirement, testified that he tried to talk calmly to Bornstein in his normal voice asking him to give up his hands. But Bornstein "growled and spit. It was like unintelligible utterances."

In all, eight officers said they used force on Bornstein during the struggle in the hallway.

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Theis testified he put his knee on Bornstein's upper back to gain control. Bornstein tried to push himself up in an attempt to stand that caused Theis to twist his right knee, an injury that required several surgeries and forced him to retire on disability. He walks with a cane today.

Throughout, officers said they repeatedly instructed Bornstein to "stop resisting" and to "give up (Bornstein's) hands."

Monmouth County, in its motion to have the case dismissed, said the details of the case "clearly demonstrates that (the officers') actions were taken in the interest of prison security and were not intended to cause harm." The motion was denied.

The force used, they claim, was appropriate.

"Bornstein's ferocious resistance was rightfully viewed as a threat to the security of the prison," attorneys for the county wrote in court documents.

But other inmates, who watched from their holding cells, said they saw a different fight.

The inmates told a Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office investigator that Bornstein was not resisting even though officers were yelling at him to stop.

"When he was trying to get up, yeah, they would call that resisting," Darryl Dash, an inmate at the time from Long Branch, stated to investigators from the prosecutor's office. "But, he really couldn't resist."

While officers involved in the hallway scuffle said they did not punch or kick Bornstein, several inmates said the officers did. Inmates also recalled Bornstein telling the officers, "I'm not resisting. I'm with you guys."

In all, the scuffle with Bornstein lasted six minutes, according the time stamp on security video. The officers said it was Bornstein's brute strength that caused the delay.

"It looks almost as if that's what they wanted to do, to slam him to the ground," Dash told investigators. "They had control of him. They pressed him up next to the tank door, and instead of putting him in the tank they took him down the opposite way slamming him."

Officers said the altercation left "drops" of Bornstein's blood on the floor. Inmates describe it as a "pool" of blood as large as a paper plate that required a jail hazardous materials team to clean. Inmates said they had to clean the blood that seeped beneath their holding cell doors.

Bornstein was taken to the nurse's station. An officer placed a mask on Bornstein because he was spitting out blood.

Many of the officers said in their depositions that Bornstein disobeyed their orders to sit still while at the nurse's station.

Noland said Bornstein resisted by "wiggling" in the chair next to the nurses' station. Officer Daniel Hansson said Bornstein "threw himself on the floor."

Tift, however, described Bornstein's movements as "falling over" out of a chair.

"(H)e looked like he was gonna, you know, fall down. So instead of him — we didn't want him to fall and hit his head — so we — we placed him on the ground," Tift said in his deposition.

Harvey, the nurse who conducted his jail intake exam, also checked Bornstein. He had cuts above both eyes and told the nurse "he hurts everywhere," according to her medical notes. Harvey is not named in the suit.

Harvey wrote in her medical report that Bornstein had blood on his face and chest and also urinated on himself.

Bornstein stayed in the nurse's station for 14 minutes before officers took him to the jail's medical unit for care, according to the jail video.

After falling from a white plastic chair while in the nurse's station, officers left Bornstein lying on the ground for several minutes before an officer grabbed the back of his jail jumpsuit and dragged him to a seated position next to a partition.

At times, Bornstein appeared in the video to be on the verge of losing consciousness, unable to hold himself upright.

Bornstein collapsed on the ground to his right, pulled himself up, and then fell left. That lasted for three minutes before officers put him in a wheelchair and took him to the jail's medical unit.

Bornstein's jail medical records show he was examined at 5:45 p.m., by nurse Nancy Petruzziello and licensed social worker Sarah Lamm, both employed by Correct Care Solutions, LLC, the company Monmouth County hired to treat jail inmates. CCS is named in the suit, but none of its individual employees are named.

Petruzziello wrote in her progress notes that Bornstein was alert but complained that he could not breathe with the spit mask on.

Bornstein had blood in his mouth, but Petruzziello did not see a cut and his teeth were intact. When she tried to take his blood pressure, Bornstein became aggressive and started to spit when the mask was removed for an examination, she wrote.

Lamm also wrote that Bornstein was agitated and aggressive, spitting and being "physically harmful" toward corrections officers. Lamm was unable to assess Bornstein's mental health status and ordered him to be admitted to the constant watch room, a solitary confinement cell to keep inmates safe from themselves or others.

At 6:06 p.m., Petruzziello, after consulting with CCS attending physician Dr. Kabeeruddin Hashmi, gave Bornstein 2mg of the anti-anxiety drug Ativan injected into his right shoulder. The entire time, Bornstein was restrained with handcuffs and shackles while in a wheelchair at the order of corrections officers, according to CCS records.

Sgt. Richard Vilacoba brought the camera to the medical unit to take photographs of Bornstein's injuries. He said Bornstein was loud, but he couldn't understand what he was saying.

The inmate, whose hands were cuffed to the wheelchair, was "just yelling and roaring," Vilacoba said in his deposition. He is not named in the suit.

Tift was the lone officer to say in his deposition that Bornstein was not being abusive in the medical unit.

Tift agreed with other officers who said Bornstein struggled with them in Constant Watch Cell 2, giving officers no option, but to use force.

Because inmates placed in constant watch rooms are at risk for suicide, jail policy requires them to change out of their jail jumpsuits to into a thick, padded smock. The padding prevents inmates from using the smock to kill themselves.

Officers took Bornstein out of the wheelchair in Cell 2 and placed him kneeling on the ground with his upper body leaning against the cell's twin bed, according to testimony. Tift said officers asked him if he wanted to undress himself and put on the smock.

Instead, once officers removed handcuffs and shackles, Bornstein resisted, forcing the officers to undress him while he tried to push himself off the bed, Tift said.

"He was literally lifting at least three of the officers doing his push up. We couldn't keep him down on the bed," Officer Christopher Piney said in his deposition.

Bornstein was not trying to strike any officers, he said. To regain control, Piney said he punched Bornstein at medium to full strength in his "love handle."

Officer Donald Bennett, who was assigned to hold Bornstein's left shoulder, said he struck Bornstein no more than three times with his closed right fist to get him to stop resisting. Officer Timothy Huddy used several "softening blows" to Bornstein's left side. Bennett and Huddy are named in the suit.

Tift said he did not punch Bornstein during this altercation, but did not know if others did.

Officers finally placed Bornstein in the restraint chair after a nearly three-minute struggle. Huddy placed his safety smock in his lap.

Soon after, the smock fell to the ground. Monmouth County lawyers said in court papers that Bornstein was pulling against the restraints. His family and their hired experts say Bornstein suffered a grand mal seizure and died soon after.

Despite the constant watch room's name, Monmouth County's attorneys claim in their lawsuit against CCS that the medical staff did not follow the close monitoring its own policy requires of inmates in the solitary cell.

According to his restraint monitoring form, CCS nurse Crystal Barton visually checked on Bornstein every 15 minutes, but did not examine him physically because he was locked in the cell by corrections officers.

Per CCS policy, Barton should have checked the vitals every 15 minutes, but CCS health services administrator Kathleen Mateyak said in her deposition there was a valid reason for deviating from policy: Bornstein was agitated and officers would not let her in.

Piney, the officer overseeing constant watch during most of the time Bornstein was there, claimed Barton did not ask to examine Bornstein from 6:09 p.m. to 6:35 p.m. When she finally did, he said she did not seem urgent in her request.

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Barton said she noticed Bornstein was naked with the safety smock on the floor. Bornstein was wiggling his hands and feet and talking to himself, she wrote in her progress notes in his medical file.

At 6:35 p.m., Barton wrote that she saw through the cell window that Bornstein was calm and quiet with steady breathing. She asked Piney to unlock the door so she could check his vital signs.

But it wasn't until 6:40 p.m. that Vilacoba arrived to unlock the cell, where Barton found Bornstein unresponsive and not breathing with a shallow heartbeat.

A minute later, Petruzziello responded and ordered officers to call paramedics while she and other nurses began CPR.

The official confirmation of his death came 51 minutes after nurses and officers entered his cell, when efforts to revive him ultimately failed. Emergency department doctors at CentraState Medical Center, less than 4 miles away, pronounced him dead at 7:31 p.m.

If Bornstein knew he had a medical condition, his medical screening records did not indicate it. The records show he was not being treated for a heart condition, high blood pressure or seizure — all ailments that medical experts point to as contributing causes of his death.

The Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office, which conducted the autopsy for Monmouth County, concluded Bornstein died of coronary artery disease that was exacerbated by the physical struggle with corrections officers.

His heart weighed one pound, about a quarter pound larger than typical weight of a heart for a man Bornstein's size. He also had 75 percent narrowing of his coronary artery.

Reports from experts for both Monmouth County and CCS repeatedly point to Bornstein's use of steroids, a conclusion they make based on the existence of Tamoxifen in his system. The breast cancer drug is a marker for steroid abuse because it reduces the estrogen build up that can come from the use of anabolic steroids, they say.

Steroid use explained Bornstein's uncontrollable strength and his aggression, according to experts hired by the defense. And, the experts say, steroid use explained why a 22-year-old man would have such severe heart disease.

Yet Bornstein had no steroids in his system, according to toxicology reports from the medical examiner's office. Bornstein's family said in an interview they had no knowledge of Bornstein using steroids, and attorneys for his estate point to pharmaceutical data that shows steroids can linger in a person's system for up to six months or more after the last dose.

Bornstein's family hired famed pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who was an expert in O.J. Simpson's murder trial as well as death cases involving actor John Belushi and Ferguson teen Michael Brown, to conduct a second autopsy.

Baden, however, did not get to examine Bornstein's windpipe and Adam's apple, which would show injuries that hindered his ability to breathe. Most of his heart was missing from the body.

"There were some slivers of heart present, but the heart itself was not. About 80 percent of it was missing," he said.

That's not normal, Baden said. Medical examiners are supposed to return all body parts to families or explain why they aren't. But he also said he believes the initial autopsy that showed no evidence of trauma to them.

Michael David, the attorney representing Israel Bornstein and his son's estate, say the family does not know what happened to Amit's heart.

Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office referred questions about autopsies to Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office, which declined to comment on the case because of the lawsuit.

His heart, however, was not what killed Amit, Baden concluded. Even with heart disease, Baden believes Amit died from lack of oxygen caused by the two struggles with officers, the pepper spray and the spit mask.

His autopsies showed Bornstein had 28 fresh blunt force trauma wounds over his body.

Baden said the pressure officers put on Bornstein's chest, back and abdomen coupled with the spit mask blocking his nose and mouth impaired his breathing, preventing enough oxygen to get to his brain.

Still another potential cause of death emerges in the court documents.

Dr. Todd Wilcox, a national correctional healthcare consultant hired by Monmouth County in the case, believes Bornstein suffered from excited delirium, a condition marked by agitation, combativeness, superhuman strength and high body temperatures.

It's also a rare disorder over which the medical community is split. The American College of Emergency Physicians recognizes it as a syndrome. The American Psychiatric Association does not take a position on excited delirium. It's not listed in the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, however the document, the authority on mental illness diagnosis, does have a provision for hyperactivity under its section on delirium.

And civil rights advocates have said they are troubled by how frequently it's used in connection to suspected police abuse cases.

Since Bornstein's death, the Monmouth County Jail has trained officers on how to deal with excited delirium cases and added more security cameras, according to statements from the jail in 2010. One excessive force and wrongful death lawsuit was filed in federal court in December 2014 by the wife of inmate Anthony Dasaro, who died in May 2014, according to court records. The suit claims he was "violently assaulted and brutally beaten and killed" by "police officers and/or corrections officers." The case has no trial date and the county has not filed a response yet.

Wilcox said in his deposition and reports the likelihood of death from excited delirium is incredibly high, but Bornstein could have survived the condition if he had been taken to the hospital immediately after the struggle in the hallway with Monmouth County jail officers. That was when Bornstein was in the nurse's station, around 5:30 p.m. He was taken to the hospital an hour later.

Wilcox offered the opinion as a critique of CCS staff for not recognizing the condition. But in his deposition, he also faulted jail officers for not making the decision to send Bornstein to the hospital immediately.

"He should never have progressed into the facility, he should never have been placed in the restraint chair, he should have been sent to the hospital and none of that should have ever been in play," Wilcox said in his deposition.

Susanne Cervenka: 732-643-4229; scervenka@app.com.