A fiscal operations support manager at the St. Louis City Justice Center says he was fired by the jail's director after writing two letters of concern about the jail operations to the city's Division of Civilian Oversight.
Opeoluwa Oke worked at the city's Comptroller's Office and the City Emergency Management Agency before taking the job at the City Justice Center in June. He was only employed at the jail for about six weeks, but says in that time he saw much that alarmed him, including the way that the corrections commissioner handled securing a new healthcare provider, the jail’s purchase of firearms and the overall treatment of detainees.
In July, he wrote two letters of complaints outlining those worries to the city’s Division of Civilian Oversight. He was fired July 28.
Oke says that he'd only been on the job a few days when he began to have concerns about one of the first tasks assigned to him by Corrections Commissioner Jennifer Clemons-Abdullah, which involved work related to the request for proposals for a new healthcare provider for the jail.
"It was literally my second week on the job, she told me to get rid of YesCare," Oke says. He asked Clemons-Abdullah why she wanted to get rid of YesCare and says her response was, "I don't like them." YesCare is the jail healthcare provider formerly known as Corizon, which the city is currently suing and has since publicly stated that they are going to drop.
He says that less than a week after the city filed its lawsuit, he and Clemons-Abdullah had a video call with representatives from the Mayor's and Comptroller's offices, during which Clemons-Abudullah texted Oke telling him to "not give them the full information and reason" for the change in providers, he says.
"I asked her why she didn't want them to know, and she told me that she already had a [new] vendor in mind,” he says.
Oke tells the RFT he questioned why they were going through the request for proposal process if the commissioner already knew which healthcare provider she wanted.
Oke says that because his job entailed helping the jail procure everything from a healthcare provider to printers, his coworkers often referred to him as the "money guy," and even a whiff of impropriety made him nervous. He'd worked in city government when three aldermen — Lewis Reed, Jeffrey Boyd and John Collins-Muhammad — were federally indicted and sentenced to prison time for various money-related crimes.
"I was not going to go to jail for anybody," Oke says.
The Department of Public Safety told the RFT through a spokesman that they can confirm a complaint had been made to the Division of Civilian Oversight, however "they cannot comment further while the complaint is being reviewed."
Oke says he knew the jail did not have a great reputation when he started working there, and scrutiny of its operations has only become more intense in recent months. Three detainees have died in jail custody in the past six weeks, with 10 deaths since the start of 2021. A hostage situation and possible riot broke out in the jail in August. Earlier this week, an autopsy showed that Carlton Bernard, a 32-year-old detainee who was diabetic, died in jail custody August 20 due to dehydration and low insulin.
Meanwhile, the Detention Facilities Oversight Board, tasked with providing oversight for the facility, has been at loggerheads with both Clemons-Abdullah and Mayor Tishaura Jones. The oversight board has blasted the jail leadership for what they say is a lack of transparency. Along with activists and numerous attorneys, the board has called for Clemons-Abdullah to either step down or for Jones to fire her. Jones has stood by her appointee.
In recent weeks, amid increasing public pressure on city officials to do something about the jail, both Jones and Congresswoman Cori Bush have blamed YesCare, which is still the healthcare provider. In addition to the city announcing that they will seek a new healthcare provider, Bush said in a letter the company was never effective, while Jones issued a statement calling for the creation of a new position, chief medical officer, to oversee medical services at the jail.
Oke says that in addition to his concerns about the process by which the jail was procuring a new healthcare provider, he was also aghast at the treatment of detainees he witnessed at the jail. He said that he saw incident reports and video of guards roughing detainees to the ground and "nine times out of ten maced them for no reason."
Oke says he was in his second week of employment when he typed up a bullet-pointed list of his concerns both about the jail's process for securing outside vendors as well as what he saw as inmate abuses. He anonymously mailed the document to the Division of Civilian Oversight, a city agency that houses both the Detention Facilities Oversight Board and the Civilian Oversight Board, tasked with providing oversight to the jail and the police, respectively.
It was not a formal complaint, but Clemons-Abdullah still got wind of it, he says.
"Two days later, Jennifer's demeanor more or less just changed," he says of the jail's commissioner.
Oke says that the nature of his complaint, and the details concerning the RFP process, would have left little doubt who penned it, despite his submitting it anonymously.
Oke says that he stopped getting called into meetings he thought he would have otherwise been included in. "I realized that she wouldn't talk to me anymore," he says. "She tried to circumvent me from so many things."
Oke says that he heard from others that Clemons-Abdullah called him "a spy."
Oke says that other jail staffers perceived the commissioner to be someone who "will do what she wants, how she wants to, when she wants to do it."
The commissioner's tactics clashed with Oke, who comes off in conversation as something of a Boy Scout, though he would perhaps not describe himself that way. He earned a bachelor's degree in his native Nigeria before going to medical school in Ukraine. While living there 10 years ago he met his now-wife, Yana.
Oke eventually came to the U.S. to enroll in a Healthcare Administration Master's program at Webster University. Yana followed him to St. Louis after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. When they married this February at City Hall, the Comptroller's Office threw the couple a party. He says there is no shortage of people in City Hall who would vouch for him.
Oke says transferring from CEMA to the City Justice Center was a mistake. After he realized that Clemons-Abdullah had gotten wind of his communication with the Division of Civilian Oversight, he suspected his days working at the jail were numbered.
He says he sent a second letter to the Division of Civilian Oversight, outlining concerns that largely elaborated on the first letter, but also included his concerns about a specific invoice that came across his desk. The paperwork showed the jail purchasing four Glock handguns, which he was told were already in the building.
Having guns in the jail struck him as a bad idea.
"Even when the sheriff is bringing inmates in here, they check the guns outside," he says. "I'm like, ‘OK, I am not not gonna sign off on this.’"
When asked specifically about the purchasing of guns, Interim Public Safety Director Charles Coyle told the RFT in a statement, "In order to protect the safety of correctional officers and detainees, longstanding Division of Corrections policy dictates that division-issued firearms remain in storage and are carried only in conjunction with facility operations, for example during transportation of detainees."
Coyle added that personal firearms are prohibited.
Oke says that he sent his second letter of complaint to the Division of Civilian Oversight in late July, though he does not recall the exact date.
Not long after, on July 28, Oke says he was called into Clemons-Abdullah's office and the commissioner told him, "You're not doing what I want you to do."
Oke says that, strangely, the commissioner had an earbud in one ear. He got the sense that Clemons-Abdullah "was listening to something or someone, definitely not music." He said there were unusual, two to three second pauses in their conversation after he said something and before she replied. He says he doesn't know exactly what to make of that — but says he’ll never forget the conversation, which ended with his termination.
The official reason he was given was that he had improperly ordered two office chairs and two mini-fridges. He says that he did order the two chairs, one for him and one for a coworker, but that he went through proper procedures. He says that he had nothing to do with the ordering of the two office mini-fridges.
A few days later, August 4, Oke filed his first formal complaint with the Civilian Oversight Board. The official complaint largely dovetailes with what he'd put into the two letters of concern he'd already sent to the agency. That complaint, plus another one Oke submitted on August 23, run eight pages long. Oke shared copies of them with the RFT.
More recently, Detention Facility Oversight Board member Mike Milton heard that a former business operations employee had filed complaints after getting fired. Because the complaints concerned the jail and because Milton serves on the board overseeing the jail, he thought he had every right to see what Oke had put into writing.
However, when Milton asked to see copies of the complaint, he was denied.
Milton tells the RFT that the public safety director, who is Clemons-Abdullah's boss, has to approve of the civilian board seeing a given complaint, a setup Milton says is rife with conflicts of interest.
"It's another example of obstruction and lack of transparency," he says. "I have no faith we're actually receiving all the complaints."
Oke says that after getting fired from the jail, he contemplated leaving St. Louis and even packed up several boxes. However, he's decided to stay. He says he's mulling a wrongful termination lawsuit.
Oke says he has no doubt his termination had nothing to do with his performance or the ordering of office chairs.
“I was at the wrong place at the wrong time asking the wrong questions,” he says.
We welcome tips and feedback. Email the author at [email protected]
or follow on Twitter at @RyanWKrull.
Subscribe to Riverfront Times newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
