and i just gave him one of his favorite pictures, too. william bernard, also known as whitey, says battaglia is one of his few friends on the unit. me and whitey, we re friendly. he s good people. he s white, so i like him. i mean, i m not racist, but just have my set ways. bernard says he s growing more confident these days. along with his new mohawk, he s learned new ways to get by. like trading commissary items. everything s for sale. everything. everything has a price. even these little packets of sugar. get ten of these, it s worth $1. three of the oatmeals are worth two soups. i give you a haircut for that one. i would give you a haircut for free. i just got my hair cut. my hair looks good. i woke up one morning and i didn t want to get out of bed. i was just depressed.
like, i wasn t crying or anything, i just told him, stop, that s enough. i ve been here, what, seven months. enough is enough. two months later, william bernard would no longer have to worry about defending himself in jail. his judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity. but the legal definition is different than it sounds. the judge says he was competent to stand trial but not in a proper state of mind on the night he had the conflict with his father that led to his arrest. he was remanded to the state department of health, who will monitor him and he must report to the court every six months for the same period of time he would have gotten in prison had he been convicted. in bernard s case, that s 20 years.
life inside the bergen county jail has been tough enough for william bernard. he says fights and harassment by other inmates has caused his stutter to worsen and sent him into panic attacks. he believes frequent visits to medical for anxiety treatments have led some inmates to believe he s an informant. now charged with threatening to kill his father and assaulting the police officers who came to arrest him, he s consumed by thoughts of spending up to 20 years in prison if found guilty. i m just afraid my father will get on the stand and testify against me. i think that would be a really strong point in a case, especially with a jury. and just just that thought alone that i can get a ridiculous amount of time for something that i didn t do really, really just that thought throws me almost completely
whoever is [ bleep ] with us, they going to get it. he go to his room, we say go into your room. he go into a room, he s finished. bernard denies being a snitch. he says frequent visits to the medical unit because of his anxiety and panic attacks have caused some inmates to suspect he s been reporting illicit activities to staff. i don t want to have that label follow me all the way through because a lot of these gangs and stuff, they re interconnected, so word travels. coming up there s been rumors going around about suboxone, a synthetic type of heroin, sent into the jail. staff must contend with yet another drug. but now how did you get this? they have a new source of intel. one hand washes the other.
it was a little chaotic. for the most part i tried to be nonconfrontational as much as possible. it s not what i prefer, but, unfortunately, i m put in i m put into a situation that there s really not too much i can do. from what i understand, inmate rivera and inmate polanco believed inmate bernard was working with some sort of police agency. since they thought he was snitching, they decided to assault him. both the inmates who attacked bernard were placed in disciplinary segregation. one of them, rafael riviera, says bernard, whose nickname is whitey, had it coming. let me tell you something. whitey don t have no friends. because he s a [ bleep ] snitch. working for the police. because he working for the police, every spot that he s going, he going to get [ bleep ] up. and i bet you that [ bleep ] is going to happen. people don t play no game.