Episode Transcript
Producer: Before we start, just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode contains references to a drug overdose and a description of a suicide. If you or someone you know needs support, we’ve got links to resources in the episode description.
Sukey Lewis: Early on the morning of August 20th, 2021, Val Rodriguez Sr. got a text from Sergeant Kevin Steele.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: He, he text me in the morning, says, “Good morning, Val. Happy Friday. Yep. Uh, we made it through another week.”
Sukey Lewis: He sent Val Sr. a funny TikTok video.
TikTok Video: I hope I can make it through this book. Okay. [laughs].
Sukey Lewis: And wrote…
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: “God Bless, I think of you often, and I am always grateful for your friendship. Know this, exclamation point.” And he always finished it with Steele.
Sukey Lewis: It was 8:00 AM in Missouri where Steele had now been living for about eight months. They talked on the phone for a bit, texted a few more times, and then later that day-
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: It was about six hours later, I think.
Sukey Lewis: Steele texted again.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: So I called him right away. He was very mad.
Sukey Lewis: Steele was upset because he’d just gotten off the phone with a special agent from the Office of Internal Affairs. The guy wanted to schedule an interview with him about the events surrounding the homicide of Luis Giovanny Aguilar, what Steele had called the B8 homicide, where Aguilar, while shackled to a chair in the day room, was stabbed 55 times by two incarcerated men who’d slipped their cuffs in view of officers.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: He was mad because whoever the agent was, says, come on, we have to hurry up and do this. It’s been almost a year. We gotta wrap this up. And he’s, he, he was pissed about that.
Sukey Lewis: It had been 20 months since Aguilar was killed, and over a year since Steele passed on evidence that officers might be involved, we know he’d found the video of a practice run and heard that officers had spread a rumor that Aguilar was a child molester. Finally, there’d been a nearly identical attempted hit by the same incarcerated people two months earlier.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: He says, I’ve already had interviews with them, Val. They know everything. They’re asking me the same questions. They’ve got everything. What do they need to interview me for? Why are they just wrapping this up all of a sudden, they’re in a hurry.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: The interview was scheduled for the following week.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: And that was his last call before mine.
Sukey Lewis: The next morning, Val Sr. says he was on the treadmill when he got another call, it was Steele’s wife.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Lili contacted me and she just said, “Kevin took his life last night.” And, um, I just began to sob a little bit. You know, just, it’s hard to, uh, accept that news over, over the phone. You know, you, I was confused and I just told her, “he was my friend.” And she goes, “I know.” And man, it felt like somebody hit me with something across my face. It was just the weirdest, it was a different feeling than when my son passed away. Like I was hit, hit with something.
[Theme music]
Sukey Lewis: In the span of just 10 months, Val Sr. was facing another loss that he struggled to make sense of. Steele, whose strength had helped Val Sr. bear the death of his son and galvanized his search for justice, seemingly could no longer shoulder the burden of their shared mission. I’m Sukey Lewis. This is On Our Watch, Season Two: New Folsom.
After everything he’d seen and everything they’d been through, Val Sr. couldn’t believe that Steele had taken his own life. And it wasn’t just Val Sr. So many people we spoke to for this story, even correctional officers who were close to Steele also couldn’t believe it. When we started investigating this story, we also weren’t sure what was true about Steele’s death. It seemed too coincidental, too extraordinary that within less than a year, a second officer from New Folsom Prison had died so unexpectedly after reporting misconduct.
[SFX – phone ringing] So we started making some calls. I called the sheriff’s office in Miller County, Missouri, where Steele had died.
Hi, Corporal Scott. This is Sukey Lewis…
Hi Carla. I sent a sunshine request for some incident reports, 911 calls, and dispatch-
My co-reporter, Julie, reached out to the county coroner, the person who’d made the determination about cause of death, and he did email her back.
Julie Small: “I’ll get the report together and send you the information that I have. An autopsy was not done due to this case being an obvious suicide.” I guess where he’s sitting maybe just seems like an obvious suicide. But, um, from Val’s perspective, it was like, but there was all this context. He felt his life was threatened, but I don’t know that the coroner in Miller County knew that.
Sukey Lewis: So we should get the coroner stuff at least next week.
Julie Small: Yeah. That should be interesting.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: I also reached out to the people closest to Kevin Steele, to his wife and daughter. Over email, I told them a little bit about the project we were working on, about the many people we’d spoken to who’d shared how Steele had touched their lives. And I asked if they’d be willing to talk to us. I hoped they could help us understand who Kevin Steele was outside of the prison walls, and how those closest to him were making sense of this terrible loss.
We did know that in the months leading up to his death, as Steele tried to find a job in Missouri, he’d also been working on a book. He’d told Val Sr. about it, but hadn’t given him a copy yet. Steele told his friend, once the book was finished, the two of them would go on a book tour, promote the book, and expose the Department of Corrections at the same time.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: His last words to me before he died was, “You know, be ready to sell your business. We’re gonna travel with this book between us, Val, and you’re gonna know the truth.”
Sukey Lewis: More than anything, this is what Val Sr. wanted—to find out the truth about his son, but he stopped short of asking Steele exactly what he meant by the truth.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: He said it would be difficult, but you’re gonna know. I says, “Okay, Kevin, whatever you need me to do.”
Sukey Lewis: Val Sr. tells Julie he hasn’t read Steele’s book, but he does know the title.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: How to Kill a Cop.
Julie Small: That’s the name of his book?
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Mm-hmm.
Julie Small: I’m assuming it would be like, “This is how you demoralize a cop. This is how you-”
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: This is the pattern. Yeah.
Julie Small: This is the pattern.
Sukey Lewis: The volume and content of Steele’s email exchanges with Val Sr. reveal his disillusionment with the system he’d been a part of for so long. Val Sr. has shared more than 200 emails between Steele and him, in which you can see every few days or weeks, Steele would email Val Sr. a lawsuit, a snippet of CDCR policy, or a link to an article, all pieces of this emerging pattern. In February, Steele emailed Val Sr. a link to a video of then Secretary of Corrections, Ralph Diaz, addressing the 2020 graduating class of officers.
Ralph Diaz: We have to hold each other accountable. We have to speak up and say when things are being done that aren’t right. When you see your partner going sideways, it’s your job to demand that they get back on track. Save them, save yourself, and save this badge that you all represent.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: In March, Steele sent an email with a subject line, “I told the truth.” It was a link to an old Buzzfeed article about a correctional officer at High Desert State Prison in Northern California who had reported his fellow guards for misconduct, including letting contraband into the prison and abusing incarcerated people. The article says his fellow officers turned on him. He was found dead by apparent suicide in 2011. Among some notes with messages for his family was one that read, “I told the truth.”
In April, Steele sent Val Sr. another article about a correctional officer in Oregon who was suing over a culture of silence enforced through violence. In June, he sent a YouTube link to a podcast called The Prison Post, featuring a former ISU agent at Salinas Valley State Prison, who turned whistleblower about 20 years earlier.
Podcast Host: We got our guest, uh, DJ Vodicka. He’s the largest whistleblower in CDCR history.
Sukey Lewis: On the podcast video, the former officer, Vodicka, spoke about his experiences testifying against a corrupt and abusive gang that officers had formed called The Green Wall.
DJ Vodicka: I testified for two hours on an open stand. I mean it, nobody knew about the Green Wall. The senators in the stand, my story hit the AP Associated Press, and shortly after that, I had to go off the grid into hiding for six months.
Sukey Lewis: In response, Val Sr. emailed Steele that he’d like to do a podcast. Steele replied, “Me too, I can’t wait to do it together. You and I will make history. Watch. I am with you always. Steele.”
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Kevin wanted to keep his story alive. The story, the big story, which I don’t know what it, what it is. The truth?
Sukey Lewis: 11 days after he died, Val Sr. sent a text message to his friend’s phone.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: “Hey buddy, I know this is crazy. I did the same thing when my son died in some way, I know you can see this message. I’m praying for your peace and the blessed travel. You’re no longer worried about anything. I’m going to do my best alone. I miss you, love you, and one day will see you and my son.”
[Somber music]
Sukey Lewis: Val Sr. would have to look for the truth, whatever that was on his own. And now he added his questions about Steele’s death to the snarl of loose ends left behind by his son, Valentino’s. What were those repeated calls his son had made on the last day of his life—to the guy from the neighborhood, who was a source for pain pills? What was in the black balloon that Mimy had found ripping up the carpets in their house that had looked like drugs from inside the prison? What had Valentino known about the murder of Luis Giovanny Aguilar? And why didn’t the West Sacramento police seem interested in answering these questions?
All this time ever, since Val Sr. had that conversation with the police chief shortly after his son died, and heard those words, “They are not looking on the streets.” Val Sr. had believed that the FBI and or the prison’s Office of Internal Affairs might still be carrying out some kind of investigation into Valentino’s death—looking inside the prison for the source of the fentanyl.
And in early 2022, about four or five months after Steele’s death and over a year after Valentino’s, it seemed like he might finally get some answers. The FBI set up a meeting with Val Sr. and his wife Erma.
That day they pulled up outside the FBI field office in Roseville, near Sacramento, a three story building with large glass windows and a fenced perimeter.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: They were very, um, particular about searching me and making sure I left my phone in a car, all that stuff.
Sukey Lewis: They were shown into a large conference room with glass walls and sat down at a long conference table with a female FBI agent and special agent Justin Bolden of CDCR’s Office of Internal Affairs.
[Music]
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: They spend a lot of time when you’re in a meeting like that observing you. So I was observing them.
Sukey Lewis: Val Sr. says a senior FBI official came in.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: He introduced himself to me, and it’s nice to meet you. I hope we can answer any of your questions, but we can’t answer everything.
Sukey Lewis: Then the official left the room. Erma says to her, it seemed like the agents had more questions than answers.
Erma Rodriguez: They kind of wanted to mainly knew what Valentino uncovered or heard or was told.
Sukey Lewis: About, like the Aguilar homicide or…?
Erma Rodriguez: More, more about Kevin, I think. Like he would just ask him what he knew about that. I don’t know if he was maybe trying to see how much he knew or how much Kevin told him.
Sukey Lewis: Fishing.
Erma Rodriguez: Yeah.
Sukey Lewis: Okay.
Erma Rodriguez: They didn’t seem really warm.
Sukey Lewis: We called special agent Bolden, but he said he can’t comment on investigations. At this point, two officers had already gotten fired over their treatment of Valentino, but they still had an appeal pending before the State Personnel board, which is basically the HR department for the state. In the meeting, Val Sr. says he felt like a broken record going over his usual list of questions and suspicions. He says Bolden listened to him, but his response was final.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: They flat out told me they’re not, we’re not investigating your son’s death.
Sukey Lewis: In a later email, the special agent clarified if there was any investigation to be done into Valentino’s death, that would’ve been the police’s job. The FBI told us they could not comment. After all this time, Val Sr. finally understood that nobody was looking into his son’s death.
[Music]
Julie Small: Describe how you felt walking outta that meeting.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Disappointed, dissatisfied, victimized, helpless, hopeless. I wasn’t sad or feeling bad. I just like, that was what I thought was my last stand.
Sukey Lewis: And without his partner Steele, his own investigation also ground to a halt.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: I hate to say I gave up, but I got to the point to, well, let me just wait and see and then time passes and I’m waiting. And then Julie called me.
Sukey Lewis: Julie made contact and we began this project trying to see if we’d be able to answer Val Sr’s questions and our own.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: So that’s why we’re sitting down here right now.
[Ad break]
Sukey Lewis: It was more than a year into our investigation, in October of 2023, that the results came back from the forensic drug testing company. We’d shipped off a package to the company months earlier with the pills and the black bindle or balloon that looked so much like drugs seized from the prison. The results of their analysis could tell us if any of these items, and especially the balloon, was a match to the fentanyl and Valentino system when he died.
If they did, it wouldn’t prove anything conclusively, but it felt like something we couldn’t ignore. And who knows, it could support Val Sr’s theory that someone from New Folsom might have supplied Valentino with the drug. So Julie and I jumped on Zoom to read through the results of the test together.
Julie Small: [SFX – Zoom chime] Did you show the email?
Sukey Lewis: I am just sending it to you now. I have not opened it yet.
Julie Small: Thank you.
Sukey Lewis: It wasn’t what we expected.
Julie Small: So this is the little capsule that had the brownish, it looked like it could be heroin powder, but it is not. It is kratom. Kratom.
[Driving music]
Sukey Lewis: We found out it’s actually pronounced kratom. It’s an herbal substance that can produce opioid-like effects, but it’s not illegal.
Julie Small: Circular white tablet.
Sukey Lewis: The tablet contains anti-nausea medication, and the other capsule doesn’t test positive for anything.
Julie Small: No drugs detected.
Sukey Lewis: Black balloon.
Julie Small: One item. The black balloon. What? Oh, cocaine.
Sukey Lewis: So the bindle is cocaine. It is not opioids.
Julie Small: Wow.
Sukey Lewis: Okay. Yeah, Val’s just texting right now. “I sent you, the results to you. None of the tests for fentanyl, none of these were in his system.” Do you wanna call Val and see what he makes of it?
Julie Small: [SFX – phone ringing] Hello?
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Yeah, I’m here.
Julie Small: Well-
Sukey Lewis: Yeah. So what do you make of- make of the results?
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: I was kicking that around in my head. I don’t know. I don’t know if it really has anything to do with the story. Um-
Sukey Lewis: We talked through the results for a bit and Val Sr. goes over other suspicions that he still has about where the fentanyl came from and more broadly, who is to blame for his son’s death.
Sukey Lewis: How important is it to you that there is a direct line between someone giving him the fentanyl and him using it versus the, I think the very clear pattern that, that we can show, which is that the stress of this job and the abuse that he suffered were factors on that day that kind of contributed to it. Even if we can’t put, you know, those drugs in somebody’s hand handing it to him.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: That’s a really hard question to answer.
Sukey Lewis: Yeah, I know.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: I’ve thought about that without even asking me that, that exact same thing. Sometimes I can be really honest with myself and sometimes I don’t know what honest is.
Sukey Lewis: Yeah.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Um-
Julie Small: What do you mean by that?
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Well, for example, the, in that, in that question you asked me in there is a hidden, uh, question, which is, well, did my son take this on his own? And would he be alive if he hadn’t? And yes, I gotta be honest. Yeah. Did he have an addiction? Yes, he did. If he had not had that addiction, would he still be alive? Yes. Yes, he would. Uh, on the other hand, if they had treated him the way they were supposed to treat him at that prison, like a, like an employee with integrity and they honored integrity, like, like they say they do, uh, on his graduation, what he’s trained for, then yeah, he’d still be alive, you know?
Sukey Lewis: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Uh, so did the- the job contribute to his death? Yes. Was it intentional? Uh, well that’s, that’s why the source of the fentanyl has always been really important to me. Been really important.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: Ever since Valentino’s death, his father has been seeking closure—from the police, from the FBI, from us, and even from Steele. It’s hard to know if getting these items tested has gotten him any closer to that goal. On the one hand, the results don’t tell us that much, but on the other, the bindle is also clearly not what he thought it might be: evidence to support his theory that someone from the prison might have sent fentanyl to kill his son. But Val Sr. says he still believes in that theory.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: I think it was intentional. Well, there’s, there’s nothing that has led me not to think that. Nothing. Everything I have found, it was intentional to get rid of him.
Sukey Lewis: I tell him, while this test kind of feels like a dead end, it does answer the question of what was in the bindle. And it frees us up to try to answer some of his other questions. We probably won’t be able to answer all of them, but we will try our best to answer most of them and then also kind of ask the bigger question behind those questions, which is: why are we the ones who are having to ask them? You know, why, why is this investigation not being done by the police?
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Yeah. Why does Anderson get a promotion?
Sukey Lewis: Val Sr. brings it back to the prison. How come Sergeant David Anderson, Valentino’s direct boss, who Valentino says had threatened him and who hadn’t put a stop to the abuse from his other colleagues as required by agency policy, was not fired or removed as a supervisor? While we don’t know exactly what CDCR did to investigate or discipline Anderson, we do know that as of last year, he still worked at New Folsom and had even been promoted to a Lieutenant. Anderson did not respond to our calls requesting comment.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: All right, girls.
Sukey Lewis: All right. Appreciate you, Val. Have a good night.
Julie Small: Thank you.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Okay, you too.
Sukey Lewis: Thanks. All right.
Julie Small: Give our best to Erma.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: Okay, I will. Good night.
Julie Small: Good night.
Sukey Lewis: Even though the results from the forensic company felt unsatisfactory, they did free us up to move forward with some interviews we’d had on hold. As I told Val Sr. in that call, we had a lot of questions for the West Sacramento police chief. What had they done to investigate and could they have done more to find the source of the fentanyl? So in late October, Julie drove to the West Sacramento Police Department to put these questions to Chief Robert Strange.
Julie Small: Hello. You must be Chief Strange.
Chief Robert Strange: How are you doing?
Julie Small: Good. How are you?
Chief Robert Strange: Nice to meet you.
Sukey Lewis: The Chief brings Julie through the lobby, decked out in Halloween decorations and into his office on the walls. He’s got law enforcement mementos and baseball memorabilia. He tells Julie, he first spoke to Val Sr. almost exactly three years ago, right after Valentino’s death.
Chief Robert Strange: Honestly, at first I thought, well, this is a man going through the loss of his son, trying to find an explanation. And I thought I just wanted to do my best to console him. But the longer things went on, and maybe a year later I started seeing, um, just news reports about what had been happening at Folsom Prison. I started putting two and two together realizing that there may have been at least some, some truth to at least the concerns he had about the work unit.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: He’s referring to the ISU squad. Now, it says something about the relationship between Chief Strange and Val Sr. that the Chief is even willing to talk to us. In my experience, a lot of the time, police chiefs refuse to address specific cases. They worry about liability issues. And Strange tells Julie that he only agreed to the interview at all after clearing it with Val Sr.
Chief Robert Strange: I said, “Hey, like I got this inquiry. I wanna make sure that you’re okay with this.” ‘Cause it’s one of those things where I, I know I don’t have, I don’t have answers he wants to hear, that’s for sure. Um, but I also don’t wanna, I don’t want to get sideways with him either, and I understand what he’s trying to do. So, I mean, frankly, if he said, no, don’t talk to ‘em, I probably would’ve gone a different direction.
Sukey Lewis: As you can hear, their relationship is complicated. Val Sr. begged the Chief to do more to treat this case like it was his son on the bathroom floor. The Chief, while sympathetic, says he simply didn’t have the answers Val Sr. was looking for.
Chief Robert Strange: I’m not gonna be able to deliver, um, a criminal investigation outcome that says that somebody is responsible for your son’s death.
Sukey Lewis: But the Chief listens to Julie as she walks him through the various leads that Val Sr. says were never followed up on—like the Black Bindle. Why didn’t the police collect it from Val Sr.? The Chief says he does remember some conversation about it.
Chief Robert Strange: I honestly don’t know what ultimately happened. I also would say I, I don’t know what it was gonna tell us, frankly. Uh, and that’s just the unfortunate reality is there wasn’t, it was gonna tell us that it was maybe drugs, right? Ultimately that’s what would’ve been tested.
Julie Small: Right.
Chief Robert Strange: Um, but I don’t think it would tell us more than a toxicology probably did or, or anything along those lines.
[Music]
Sukey Lewis: And Julie also asks the Chief about perhaps the most tangible lead in Val Sr’s cache of evidence: the cell provider call log from Valentino’s last days that shows this striking pattern of calls.
Julie Small: Like this is the day- days leading up to his death. He called this person this many times.
Sukey Lewis: The log lists six short calls that Valentino made on the day he died, and eight calls the day before, all to the same number. The number of the guy who lived in the neighborhood and was a known source for pain pills. And Julie shares what we’d discovered: none of those calls showed up on Valentino’s actual phone or on the hard drive we’d been given by Val Sr. They only appeared on this physical call log—the bill from his provider, which tracks all connections. This means someone, maybe Valentino, deleted all his calls to the neighborhood guy.
Julie Small: These phone calls were deleted from his phone.
Chief Robert Strange: Oh, really?
Julie Small: Yes.
Chief Robert Strange: Hmm.
Sukey Lewis: If there were any text messages between the two men, they were also missing from the phone.
Chief Robert Strange: I was not aware of this at all. And specifically what you’re showing me here with the- both the number of calls and the approximate nature of these calls to his death… it’s pretty interesting.
Sukey Lewis: Initially, the man we’re calling “the guy from the neighborhood” didn’t agree to talk to us, but a few weeks after Julie spoke to the Chief, she went by his house. It felt important to get his side of things. He didn’t agree to a recorded interview, but he did speak with her. He denied ever selling Valentino drugs. He said he did not see him the day that he died and had no involvement in his death.
Julie wanted to ask the Chief about this to figure out if the police could have done more to investigate at the time. But while the Chief says the pattern of calls is interesting, the case is still closed for now, and it’s not clear what evidence would be enough to reopen it. The Chief tells us he did assign a detective to look over the case again in early 2022.
Chief Robert Strange: I really, truly did not think that it would change anything, but at least out of an act of compassion, I just thought, let’s have him sit down with Val, talk through this again and see if there’s anything that maybe I haven’t seen.
Sukey Lewis: This detective spoke to Val Sr. and talked to Mimy, but did not find evidence of foul play, or anything that changed the department’s original assessment of the case. Just like I don’t think anything we’ve shown the Chief has changed that assessment.
Chief Robert Strange: Quite simply, there just wasn’t evidence for us to see it as more than a self-inflicted overdose.
Sukey Lewis: And this is at the heart of the conflict between these two men. For Val Sr. his son’s death has always been a criminal matter. He cannot look away from the stunning fact pattern, the threats on his son’s phone, the timing of his death, just days after reporting misconduct to the warden. But even beyond that, the lethal drug that killed his son had to come from somewhere. And Val Sr. can’t understand why the police didn’t aggressively try to find out where.
For Chief Strange, this case has always been a tragic accident. And none of the evidence at the scene and none of the evidence Val has uncovered, has changed this fundamental point of view. The department’s policy at the time was that they simply did not deeply investigate these kinds of cases. But the Chief says that policy is one big thing that Valentino’s death has changed. He says, based on that case, the department now does things differently when someone dies by fentanyl in the city.
Chief Robert Strange: It did change things. I- I think we would’ve changed anyway.
Julie Small: Mm-hmm.
Chief Robert Strange: But I don’t know that we would’ve changed as soon as I got back from talking to Val Sr. one day, ’cause that’s how it went down. I came back, I talked to my special investigations unit sergeant and I said, “Oh wait, I think we need to change what we’re doing.”
Sukey Lewis: Because as we mentioned earlier, Valentino’s death in 2020 was part of a wave of fentanyl deaths. And even though this is cold comfort to Val Sr. If Valentino died today, the Chief says they’d have their special investigations unit involved at the scene of his death to look for evidence that might help them trace the source of the drugs. We don’t know what would’ve happened if this new policy had already been in place at the time. It still may not have resulted in any criminal charges, and there’s a lot of debate about whether policies that further criminalize drug sales are effective in addressing the opioid crisis. But it’s also possible that a more rigorous look at all the evidence right from the beginning, might have been able to give Val Sr. the one thing he still looking for, answers.
[Music]
To this day, Val Sr. still cannot accept why the Chief didn’t do more at the time. There is one final thing that we learned from Chief Strange about what he did do in the wake of Valentino’s death. He says, after talking to Val Sr, he called someone at the Office of Internal Affairs at CDCR and was put in touch with special agent Chris McGraw, thinking maybe the prison would want to take possession of Valentino’s phone to investigate some of those allegations Val Sr. had told him about.
Chief Robert Strange: Uh, Val Sr. was talking about his perception of there being threats and at least some, um, just to put it generally some treatment of his son as a whistleblower and, and in the sense of being treated completely improperly as a whistleblower.
Julie Small: Right. There was evidence on the phone of, of, word leaking out that he had met with the warden and he told on the team.
Chief Robert Strange: Oh wow, okay.
Julie Small: And those, and he became aware of that the night that he died.
Chief Robert Strange: Okay. Wow.
Julie Small: Yeah.
Sukey Lewis: But the Chief says, at the time when he talked to McGraw, it didn’t sound like any internal investigation was going on.
Chief Robert Strange: It didn’t sound like it was something that, so to speak, jumped off the page to him… that we had Val’s- Val Rodriguez Jr’s phone. Like that was an opportunity. And so, uh, in that sense, I didn’t perceive a level of opportunity or excitement around that.
Julie Small: Mm-hmm.
Sukey Lewis: We reached out to McGraw, but he didn’t respond to our emails requesting comment. The police department released the phone back to the family. But Julie tells the Chief that McGraw did eventually get Valentino’s phone from Val Sr.
Chief Robert Strange: Learning of that today is heartening for me to know that at least there’s a likelihood that a fuller picture of the story of what was happening with Val Jr. leading up to his death, is hopefully, um, at least a little bit more colored in by the contents of that phone. Even if the realities of what is learned initially at least is more painful.
Sukey Lewis: As we now know what the department discovered on that phone—the slurs and harassing messages—resulted in two officers getting fired and lesser discipline for a handful of other officers. Four of them are still appealing that discipline. And as far as we can tell, the higher ups avoided scrutiny altogether. We wanted to know why. Chief Strange says he also doesn’t know if CDCR and the FBI are done investigating.
Chief Robert Strange: So it’ll be interesting to see if there’s more still going on in the investigative world and prosecutorial world when it comes to everything surrounding what was happening at that prison during that period of time. Thus far, it’s fairly alarming to put it very mildly. And anytime that anyone anywhere that’s wearing a badge, not only doesn’t take their oath seriously, but downright dishonors it—it absolutely affects all of us.
[Ad break]
Victoria Mauleón: [SFX – Zoom chime] Who wants to start?
Sukey Lewis: In early 2023 I got on a Zoom with Julie and our editor, Victoria Mauleón, to give them a big update.
Um, so I talked, I called Michael Steele, Kevin Steele’s brother. We had that initial conversation. He said he would talk, but then was like, I can’t right now…
[Music]
Val Sr. had shared a lot with us about who Steele was to him, but they had only really become close in the final year of Kevin’s life. We hoped someone in his family could give us a deeper understanding of this man who was so central to our story. His daughter had responded to my email saying she wasn’t able to participate, and Lili, Steele’s widow, also didn’t want to do a recorded interview with us. But finally, I had connected with someone who’d known him longer than almost anybody: his younger brother, Michael.
Sukey Lewis: He said that he had talked to Lili and that she was, um, she was positive about him participating. She was supportive of it.
But Michael said he did have some reservations.
His big question for me was, which side of the blue line are you on? And I said, you know, “Do I have to pick a side? Um, you know, I’m on the side of transparency and accountability.” [laughs] Um, but he was like, you know, Kevin loved his job and he committed himself to it. Um, and he committed himself to participating in law enforcement. And, and Michael doesn’t wanna see that torn down.
[Music]
Um, he obviously feels really complicated about it ’cause he also called him “a victim of the corruption in CDCR.” You know, I also said at one point, like, “This work isn’t about trying to tear things down. It’s about trying to, like, shine a light to expose problems or fix things.” And I used that word “fix,” and he was like, “Nothing is gonna be fixed for me.”
Sukey Lewis: In July of 2023, after months of calls and texts, Mike agreed to meet me in person…
Michael Steele: I’m Mike Steele, brother of Kevin Steele.
Sukey Lewis: …At the place where he spends the most time thinking about his brother.
Julie Small: For the recording, why don’t you just say where we are. So- to make sense of the noises people will be hearing.
Michael Steele: We’re on my boat at the Marriott Marina.
Andrea: In San Diego.
Michael Steele: In San Diego.
Sukey Lewis: And you said-
Michael Steele: Which is my happy place.
Sukey Lewis: Mike’s long-term girlfriend, Andrea, is here with him for support.
What kind of energy did he bring to life?
Michael Steele: Intensity-
Andrea: Mm-hmm.
Michael Steele: … in everything.
Andrea: Mm-hmm.
Sukey Lewis: Mike’s got those same startling blue eyes that his brother had.
Michael Steele: The only difference between him and I that he was mad about is he didn’t have any hair and I did.
Andrea: (laughs).
Michael Steele: And he started losing his hair really early, like in his 20s.
Sukey Lewis: They have a lot of other similarities too. They both went into the military. Kevin chose the Air Force and Mike went into the Marines.
Michael Steele: My dad was Navy. Uncles were Navy. You know, we always have had, uh, a very clear love of our country.
Sukey Lewis: Mike tells me after his brother’s service as a young man, he later joined the reserves and was twice deployed to Iraq.
Michael Steele: This roadside bomb shit all, you know, like, um, a lot of intensity. There was so many of his, um, comrades that didn’t come home.
Sukey Lewis: Mmmm.
As we sit on his boat in the San Diego Marina rain pats lightly on the plastic curtains. Mike’s eyes filled with tears and they run down his face.
Michael Steele: He loved deep. And I mean, I, you know, like I said, my whole life, I just wanted him to be proud of me. And my dad, obviously. But, um, his opinion of me was more important than anybody else.
Andrea: Yeah.
Julie Small: Mm-hmm.
[Driving music]
Sukey Lewis: Kevin started working for the Department of Corrections in 2001, and after seven years at San Quentin, he was transferred to New Folsom Prison.
Michael Steele: If he was supposed to be there at 5:00. He was there at 4:00, probably. You know, we both had the same work ethic. And he said, nobody fucking works harder than cast Steele. Like he fucking never slept.
Sukey Lewis: When did he sleep?
Michael Steele: Like he was a machine.
Sukey Lewis: Yeah.
When he became an investigator, he was relentless.
Michael Steele: He didn’t quit until he got to the bottom of it.
Sukey Lewis: But Mike says his role in the investigative services unit sometimes put him at odds with other officers. Now it was his job to find out the truth, even if that meant uncovering what some of his fellow officers were doing to the people in their custody.
Michael Steele: He felt like he had to protect those people from, um, I mean, I’m just being completely honest that I struggled with him having that task of having to turn on his own people.
Sukey Lewis: If it were him in that position, Mike says he’d probably side with the brotherhood of officers.
Did you ever ask him about it or say like, why are you-
Michael Steele: Yeah.
Sukey Lewis: … sympathetic?
Michael Steele: I did.
Sukey Lewis: Yeah.
Michael Steele: Yeah.
Sukey Lewis: What would he say?
Michael Steele: What’s right is right. I mean, in those words exactly what’s right is right.
Sukey Lewis: But not everyone he worked with lived up to that code. And it bothered him. It bothered him to the point where Kevin started writing that memo to the warden at New Folsom, and ultimately making his plans to leave the state.
Michael Steele: I mean, he lined everything up to where he was gonna drop the bomb and then, you know, ride off into the sunset and where all of his time lined up for retirement and just the who- everything was calculated for him.
Sukey Lewis: Mike says, even after his brother left, every conversation turned back to New Folsom.
Did he talk to you about the, what he called the B8 homicide, which was the one that he believed officers had set up?
Michael Steele: Yeah, he did.
Sukey Lewis: Yeah.
Michael Steele: I said, as difficult as it is, you just gotta, you did what you were supposed to do, you did what you were paid to do. You gave the fucking evidence, proof, everything that you were supposed to do, you did. Let it fucking go.
Sukey Lewis: But he couldn’t, he was still consumed. Mike says he could feel something was wrong.
And I don’t know if you are comfortable talking at all about his drinking on the record, but I also just wondered how much you feel like that played a role?
Michael Steele: Um, hmm. It was a Friday
Sukey Lewis: At one point Mike had told me that Kevin had been drinking more heavily in Missouri, and so he and Lili made a deal: they’d only drink on the weekends.
Michael Steele: I don’t think it weakened him. I’m certain that it didn’t help, but I don’t know that it, um… I don’t know.
Sukey Lewis: But he says drinking didn’t change who Kevin was.
Um, so I was just gonna ask if he talked to you at all about his safety concerns and how much that played a role in deciding to leave California?
Michael Steele: Um, yeah, there was definitely issues and, um, God, he had guns. Boy a fucking ton of them. And, uh, he was, he was ready, you know, ’cause he did think that that was a possibility that they would, you know…
Sukey Lewis: And did he ever have like any, you know, actual threats or any, you know, things that felt concrete?
Michael Steele: I don’t, I wouldn’t say that I’m aware of any.
Sukey Lewis: Mm-hmm.
Michael Steele: I’m not saying that that didn’t happen, but I, I’m not aware of any.
Sukey Lewis: Okay.
Michael Steele: But I mean, being in there, it, you know, you, you know what the system’s capable of, you know, just a matter of when it gets turned on you.
Sukey Lewis: Mm-hmm. Did you or anyone else, like in his close family, consider foul play or think that you know somebody?
Michael Steele: I mean, initially that’s what we thought, you know, it was part of the discussion that- but I saw the video. It is what it is. All by himself.
Sukey Lewis: The video. This is the reason Mike is certain that Kevin wasn’t murdered. Just a warning, we’re gonna now walk through the details of his death. When we finally got the documents and dispatch tape in response to our records request to Miller County, we also got this video. It’s a 10 second recording captured by a camera attached to the outside of the shed. The time code on the video shows it was 5:23 in the afternoon.
You can see Kevin Steele come into the frame wearing an orange T-shirt and blue shorts. He has a length of rope in his hand. The other end of it is looped around his neck in a noose. He walks into the shed and he doesn’t come out.
Michael Steele: I saw the video of him going out to the shed, barn, whatever it was.
Sukey Lewis: Mike says, seeing the way his brother was walking…
Michael Steele: That was the fucking plan. And, um, it was just fucking following through with the plan. You know?
Sukey Lewis: Police reports show that Lili got home around 6:00 PM but couldn’t find Kevin.
Michael Steele: It’s weird. He had taken chicken out to cook for dinner, out of the freezer, and he had opened the garage door for her ’cause he always would open the garage door when she was getting ready to get home. So she pulled up and the door’s open like everything’s normal. But she said when she went in the house, she thought it was strange—Kevin wasn’t in the house and the dogs were.
Sukey Lewis: Lili walked out to the shed and then called 911.
911 Operator: 911, location of your emergency.
Sukey Lewis: She tells the dispatcher that she came home to find that her husband had hung himself. It’s really heartbreaking. So we’re not gonna play much of it. But at one point during the call, she does say something really important and she gave us permission to play this clip.
911 Operator: Has he been sick?
Lili Steele: No. [Sobs] He’s just been dealing with a lot of stuff from his… work.
Sukey Lewis: His work. Just like Mimy Rodriguez, when she found Valentino on the bathroom floor, Steele’s wife felt his work at the prison had something to do with his death.
11 minutes into the call, first responders arrive. The records show Lili later found a word document written on her husband’s computer that she turned over to the sheriff’s office. The note is titled, My Thoughts. The police report notes that the final edit was made to this document that same afternoon, a couple of hours before he died. “Lili is my angel, my light, and my survivor. Lili always had my back and remained my cheerleader. I know what time it is. It is the ninth hour and no one is here. I was. CDCR killed me. I told the truth and shielded the truth. Truth requires no shield, no triple plated armament or Abrams tank. These barbarians killed Valentino and I.” Then he lists the names of senior officials at New Folsom and finishes, “Cowards and bandits.”
Three days after Kevin’s death, the family all gathered around the flagpole at Kevin’s house in Missouri. Mike and his father lowered the flag from the flagpole and folded it while they played a recording of Kevin’s niece playing taps on the trumpet.
Michael Steele: I told you who he is. I told you he was. There’s no denying that they’re fucking responsible for what happened.
Sukey Lewis: I think on- when we were on the phone, on one of the times I talked to you, you called him a victim of the system. Um-
Michael Steele: 100 percent.
Sukey Lewis: Yeah.
Michael Steele: The system that he was trying to protect.
Sukey Lewis: CDCR said the agency takes allegations of employee misconduct, “Very seriously.” And that they have a new process for reviewing complaints. But they did not answer our questions about how the department responded to Sergeant Kevin Steele’s efforts to address misconduct in the prison.
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: He just didn’t understand. He felt betrayed that he had worked his butt off for that prison- for the state. Never so much as took a pencil.
Julie Small: Do you ever feel angry with him for doing that? For leaving?
Valentino Rodriguez, Sr: I feel angry with my son and yeah, I feel angry with him, of course. Yeah. I didn’t ask to go on this ride with him. He reached out to me. And we did a lot of stuff together and he made a lot of promises to me—to be my voice. And just kind of pulled me along and then I just, like, I got pulled to here and then… cast away.
Sukey Lewis: Val Sr. Never wanted to fight this fight, but he feels like he has to keep pushing for his son and for his friend.
[Theme music]
Coming up next time, we hear from a man who broke the rules of prison life to talk to Kevin Steele. Now he says his life is in danger.
Dion Green: I’m just frustrated. It just, I was having a funny feeling that this is, this is going to go bad. This is not gonna go like it’s supposed to go.
Sukey Lewis: And we dig deep into what really happened in the B8 day room, the day that Luis Giovanny Aguilar was killed.
Tinkerbell: You know, and I’m not gonna sit here and judge whether, um, Aguilar was a good person or not, because it doesn’t matter. That wasn’t our job. Our job was to protect him.
Sukey Lewis: You are listening to On Our Watch, Season Two: New Folsom from KQED. If you have any tips or feedback about the series, you can email us at onourwatch@kqed.org. You can also leave us a review in Apple Podcasts. The series is reported by me, Sukey Lewis and Julie Small. It’s edited by Victoria Mauleón. It’s produced and scored by Steven Rascón and Chris Egusa, sound design and mixing by Tarek Fouda. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of podcasts and she executive produced the series.
Meticulous Fact Checking by Mark Bettencourt. Additional research for this episode by Kathleen Quinn and Laura Fitzgerald, students in the investigative reporting program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, whose chair David Barstow provided valuable support for the whole series. Special thanks to Rahsaan Thomas of Ear Hustle, Sandhya Dirks of NPR, and KQED Health Correspondent April Dembosky. Original music by Ramtin Arablouei, including our theme song. Additional Music from APM Music and Audio Network.
Funding for On Our Watch is provided in part by Arnold Ventures and the California Endowment. And thanks to KQED’s Otis R. Taylor, Jr. Managing Editor of News and Enterprise, Ethan Toven-Lindsey, our Vice President of News and Chief Content Officer Holly Kernan. Thanks for listening.
