OAN’s Elizabeth Volberding
3:18 PM – Wednesday, January 10, 2024
During an interview, Mark Epstein, the brother of disgraced financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, condemned the investigation into his brother’s alleged prison death in 2019, which was determined by officials to be a suicide.
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On Tuesday, Mark was questioned about his demands for further research into Jeffrey’s death in an interview, where he asserted that the initial inquiry was insufficient and suspicious.
In an effort to learn more about what transpired the night the notorious sex trafficker died, Mark is pushing for access to additional information and police data.
“Well, first of all, you’re saying ‘that investigation.’ It doesn’t seem to have been much of an investigation at all. That’s the real question,” Mark said. “Because things like the EMT and the medical personnel at the hospital, none of them have ever been questioned. And they have found that to be odd, because they’re always questioned, especially in high-profile cases.”
On August 10th, 2019, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, 66-year-old Jeffrey was found dead in his cell at the Manhattan Correction Center. He was discovered to be dead shortly after 6:30 a.m., having allegedly used “an orange bed sheet tied to the cell’s bunk bed” to hang himself.
Within a week of his death, Jeffrey’s death was declared a suicide by police. However, Mark Epstein, 69, still maintains his own doubts regarding the circumstances surrounding his older brother’s death.
A medical examiner declared the death to be a suicide, necessitating no further inquiry. The Department of Justice later produced a 128-page report concluding that mistakes were made by the prison’s staff while blaming Jeffrey’s death on “long-standing operational challenges.”
However, many individuals have persistently challenged the police-reported version of events, including Mark, who is pushing for more information to be publicized, including video footage of Jeffrey’s cell block.
“I only want to look at facts, but when we consider the facts available, we get more questions,” Mark told the press. “There appears to have been no investigation once it was ruled a suicide, they saw no reason to dig deeper. It seems like a cover-up. Why can’t I find his pre-hospital care report and why can’t I get the 911 call?”
In addition, Mark took aim at former Attorney General Bill Barr, asserting that he claimed his brother’s death was a suicide even after a pathologist said that Jeffrey’s death showed signs of a homicide.
“Now supposedly, when [the initial death certificate] says ‘pending further investigation,’ it takes weeks to come up with a determination but yet a few days later, Attorney General Barr says it’s suicide and it wasn’t really his position to do that,” Mark said.
Barr admitted that he had early doubts about Jeffrey’s death in the months that followed, but he ultimately blamed a “perfect storm of screw-ups,” which included multiple irregularities at the facility where Jeffrey was being held.
The irregularities included violent outbursts at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, long-term staffing shortages, and alleged negligence on the part of the two officers tasked with keeping an eye on Jeffrey.
“I can understand people immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups,” Barr told the press in November, 2019.
Mark has maintained that he was not included in his brother’s will, has nothing to gain from his passing, and has been paying for his family’s protection since 2019.
“They had a hearing which was coming up a few days after his death to appeal the bail restrictions … why would Jeffrey kill himself a few days before that hearing? Because if he got bail, he’d be out of jail, awaiting trial in his house with an ankle monitor,” Mark told an investigative journalist. “Why kill yourself then? If bail was denied again, then I could understand it. Believe me, it would have been easier if [the pathologists] had come out and said, ‘It looks like a suicide,’ then I could put this whole issue behind me.”
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