Knowing this difficulty, and for their own sanity as well as ours, the INS had given each Mohammed a wrist band with his photo, his name and his Federal ID number. The photos were all fairly interchangeable but when put with the name Mohammed-Something it did help somewhat to identify who was who.

Then along came Sergeant C. We’ll call him that for lack of anything less incriminating. Sgt. C was a heck of a guy, but just a little bit over the top when it came to jail management. Actually he was over the top and on his way down into the chasm. He was known as Sgt. Scramble.

My first impression of Sgt. C was his unquenchable appetite. The man was a human mulching machine. This was a middle-aged man who was quite slender and not very tall, so where he put the mountains of food he consumed never ceased to puzzle me. He was polite about it, though. He would wait until all the inmate trays had gone out and the rest of the staff had gone through the kitchen food line and then Nellie Bar The Door! Anything left was fair game and after Sgt. C was finished, there was nary a crumb.

Didn’t matter what was served, either. From tacos to tuna, Sgt. C would pile it all up onto his plate, sometimes onto two plates, and carry it on down to the lunchroom to feast. I recall the looks on everyone’s faces as they watched him devour his concoctions; looks of absolute astonishment. It was rumored that Sgt. C did not eat at home, although no reason was ever given for that. According to said rumor, his only meal during the day was whatever he could consume at work in the jail. Some of the Trustys who worked in the kitchen said they saw him stuffing fruit and cookies into his uniform pockets, too, but you had to consider the source of that rumor. It came from inmates who made hooch out of old fruit cocktail and yeast. What did they know? At any rate, there was even a period of time when amazing things began disappearing from the jail refrigerator during the night shift: enormous roasts of beef, gallons of milk, twenty-pound wheels of cheese. Some blamed the missing food on Sgt. C. Personally; I think it was the jail ghost. But that’s another story and we’ll get to him later on.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Scramble was there to take over when the INS officers arrived with their twenty-eight Mohammeds. He was good at that sort of thing, taking over, I mean. He was not particularly good at accomplishing whatever he took over, but he did have a knack for intervening and taking charge. He was gracious with the INS officers and assured them we would take the very best of care of the Mohammeds during their stay, which was to be approximately ten days.

“Not to worry,” Sgt. C proclaimed, “We’ve emptied out a whole dorm for them so they’ll have lots of privacy and the utmost safety.”

And then, as the pleased INS officers drove away, Sgt. C proceeded to remove all the Mohammeds’ identification wristbands.

The reasoning for this, he assured us, was that INS wristbands did not fit the guidelines for Yavapai County safety measures. They had metal pieces on them and the plastic could be used to cut things, like flesh. At the time, Yavapai County did not use any identification on the inmates. Nowadays we also use wristbands, but back then there was, as yet, no such thing. Sgt. C would not allow the Mohammeds to have anything on their person that the rest of the jail population did not have. They were changed from their white robes into orange uniforms and promptly marched up to the second floor where their dorm awaited.

Each inmate in Yavapai County jail is issued a bedroll, which consists of a mattress, sheets, soap, toothbrush & paste, shampoo, and a towel. Within five minutes of placing the twenty-eight Mohammends into the dorm, every one of them had their towel wrapped securely about their head. No jokes, please, they truly did have their towels on their heads. It was as close to their traditional mode of attire as they could come. Why the County was never sued for this infraction of religious culture is a mystery to me, but it did not occur.

The following ten days were pure Hell for the officers in the jail, including Yours Truly. We had absolutely no clue which Mohammed was which. No one knew who had been served his meals, who had gotten the correct medication, whose commissary was going to whom, and the Mohammeds did nothing to help. If they spoke English, which I was pretty sure most of them did, they refused to acknowledge it. If you called out “Mohammed Nassim!” when trying to serve the meal trays, twenty-eight small, dark men with towels on their heads would raise their hands and shout “Ey! Ey!”, which I was pretty sure was Islamic for “Dumb Yankee!”
The Yavapai County jail, much like all jails in the nation, uses certain inmates to work as Trustys. These men and women have to meet certain criteria to earn that position and they are rewarded for their work with privileges of varying kinds. Trustys work from sun-up to dark and often through the night and sleep is one of those rare and valuable things. The dorm in which the Mohammeds were placed happened to be right next to the Trusty dorm. Only a single wall of cinder block separated the Mohammeds from our working inmates and the jail kitchen, and thanks to a myriad of air vents in and about that area, sound traveled with amazing speed and clarity. This was a good thing when it came to security issues because officers could hear when fights or arguments broke out, and it was easy to shout for a Trusty when you needed one to help with some task. It was not, however, a good thing when the chanting started.

Just at midnight, the first night and every night thereafter for ten nights in a row, twenty-eight Mohammeds sat in their individual cells on the dormitory floor, towels on their heads, and chanted at the top of their lungs. Knowing very little about Islam, I had no idea if this activity was truly a part of their religious culture or if they did it simply to annoy everyone. I suspect it was the latter because the chanting did not take place at any other time than in the middle of the night when the rest of the jail was quiet as a tomb.

The Trustys suffered the most, as the off-key wailing came directly from beyond their dorm wall. I don’t think anyone would have complained too much if the Mohammeds were harmonizing to Stardust, but the uneven, nerve shattering chants that welled up from beyond their cell doors were more like an army of cats with their tails being ripped off by iguanas. It was akin to fingernails on a blackboard, or perhaps bagpipes under water.

Actually, there is no description that really gives a true feeling of the sound. Suffice to say it was enough to send the Trustys over the edge. They began hurling shoes and books at the wall and shouting unmentionable threats. The instinct of the officers was to try and stop the Trustys from acting out at the Mohammeds but in all truth we officers were as annoyed by the noise as the Trustys. All we could do was order them to quiet down or threaten to dish out punishment if they did not obey, such as stopping commissary or not allowing recreation or phone privileges, which they did not care about anyway. Their response was the usual, “Ey? Ey?”

The Mohammeds finally left our facility eleven days later, but only after several hours of mass confusion involving which Mohammed was which. It resembled the Keystone Cops with deputies and Federal agents stumbling about and over one another in an attempt to replace the wristbands Sgt. Scramble had so adeptly removed. I’m pretty sure none of the Mohammeds really cared, just as I am sure very few of them got the correct wristband. I am also pretty sure most of them were back in the USA within six weeks of their deportment. At least they did not come back and chant at midnight in the Yavapai County jail.