Daniel Chong thought he would be going home that afternoon.
On April 21, 2012, this 24-year-old engineering student at the University of California, San Diego was detained during a DEA drug raid at a friend’s house. The agents told him he would not be charged, and, according to his lawyers, an officer asked him to hang on for a bit, saying they would come get him in a minute. They left him handcuffed in a cell about 1,5 by 3 meters, without windows, and no one came back to open that door until the afternoon of April 25.
According to his lawyer, Chong drank his own urine to survive, hallucinated and came to believe that agents were trying to kill him with gas through the ventilation system. The AP reported that he broke his glasses with his teeth and used a shard of glass to carve “Sorry Mom” into his arm; he managed to finish only an “S”. When he was found, he was severely dehydrated and spent five days in the hospital with kidney failure and a perforated esophagus, after losing about 6,8 kilos. In July 2013, the Department of Justice agreed to pay him 4,1 million dollars, and the DEA publicly apologized.