Liberto, who is the father of three teenage girls and had never before been arrested, was dropped off at the jail's intake area. It was a cramped, filthy space crowded with hundreds of inmates waiting to be classified, its floor covered in feces, urine and food. Liberto found himself sandwiched between two men, one who said he'd been arrested for beating and raping a 14-year-old girl, the other for shooting someone. Twice, according to Liberto, he asked guards for his medication: They cursed at him and told him to sit down and shut up. After hours, guards showed him what he thought were his bonding papers. Instead they were documents that would officially admit him into a cell within the jail. "I hadn't been able to call my lawyer," he says. "I knew I was in a bad place. I was really scared at that point."

Liberto was placed in a cell by himself. Sitting on the steel bed without a mattress, he watched a rat scurrying in and out from beneath his bed, where a pile of feces lay. Suddenly, his cell door was unlocked. (Every hour, all the cells in the jail are opened for five minutes so that inmates can enter a day room for a break.) At this time, a group of four men entered Liberto's cell.

A devout Catholic, Liberto had earlier prayed with two inmates in the intake room. "When they came in, I said, 'Do you want to pray?'" Liberto recalls. "They said, 'I don't think we want to pray.'"

Interviewed at his home, decorated with bright Christmas knickknacks, Liberto chokes back sobs as he remembers the scene.

Two men stood by the cell door. They ordered Liberto to shut up or they would slit his throat. Pull your pants down, they said. One of the men pushed a spoon into Liberto's mouth. "They told me to suck on this spoon, lick it real good," he says, barely able to talk through his sobs. "They bent me over and rammed that spoon in my rectum so hard, ramming it and turning it and shoving it and they said, 'We're getting you ready.' And then they took their penises out and put them in my face and rubbed them on my mouth. I could feel one of them back there. They put a handkerchief or something in my mouth."

The guards announced it was time to lock down the pod again. As the men who had orally raped and sodomized him left his cell, Liberto says that a guard yelled at his assailants, "Did you show that white boy a good time?"

From admission to when he finally posted bond and left, Liberto's ordeal in the Shelby County Jail had lasted more than 26 hours.

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