A Tarrant County criminal court has agreed to dismiss the case against Reginald Roy Lowe, a former county jailer accused of beating an inmate so badly he had to be hospitalized.
On July 19, 2020, Lowe slammed Cory Rodrigues into a concrete bunk and punched him several times, leaving him with five broken ribs, a broken cheekbone and a collapsed lung, according to Lowe’s arrest warrant. Lowe was charged with aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury, and two other jailers at the scene were charged with the lesser crime of official oppression.
A judge agreed to dismiss Lowe’s case Monday, upon request from the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office, court records show.
Court records do not indicate why the DA’s office chose to file the motion to dismiss the case against Lowe. A spokesperson for the DA's office said the office can't provide comment at this time.
Last July, Rodrigues filed a civil rights lawsuit against the county, the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office and the three jailers. His attorney in that case is Ernest (Skip) Reynolds III, who said he was surprised about the dismissal.
"It looks to me like someone dropped the ball,” Reynolds said. “I just find it shocking, especially in view of the injuries to my client."
The cases against the other jailers involved in the incident, Dakota Coston and Lewis Velasquez, are still pending, court records show. U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman put the lawsuit on hold in September 2022, until all the criminal cases are finished.
Rodrigues lived in a special unit set aside for inmates with mental illnesses, and he was helpless when Lowe beat him and all three men hid the incident from their superiors, according to the lawsuit.
The three jailers never filed an incident report and never sought medical help for Rodrigues, who had to wait 48 hours before he was sent to the hospital, the lawsuit states.
“The defendants might have succeeded in hiding this truly evil misconduct, but for the fact that the beating of [Rodrigues] on 19 July 2020 was so terribly severe that it caused multiple serious and long-lasting injuries to [Rodrigues],” the lawsuit says.
Rodrigues needed surgery for his broken cheekbone, medical records attached to the lawsuit show.
Lowe, Coston and Velasquez went to Rodrigues’ cell to take down the prison gown Rodrigues had put over his window, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
During interviews with sheriff’s office Detective Christen Jarvis, none of the three “could explain or come close to explaining” what happened in video of the incident, Jarvis wrote. Some of their accounts contradicted the video, and they denied the severity of the violence.
Coston told Jarvis the incident was “passive guidance,” not a hands-on altercation, and that he saw the incident “as a ‘normal thing’ in that housing unit,” Jarvis wrote.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Cory Rodrigues. The court and criminal documents misspelled his name.
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