Texas inmate who gouged his eye out with a plastic spoon suing over understaffing

“When the guards found him, Miguel Carrera remembers, he was crawling around on the cell floor looking for his eye,” writes Houston Chronicle reporter Keri Blakinger. “He’d just pulled it out himself. During a long night at an East Texas psychiatric prison, the 20-year-old had been left apparently unsupervised, alone with the haunting voices of his paranoid psychosis.”

Carrera says he’s had mental health problems for years and that while being held at an East Texas psychiatric prison in 2017 for an assault conviction, staff kept him undermedicated and didn’t properly monitor him even though he had threatened to harm himself.

Carrera gouged out one eye and tried to gouge out the other, which left him blind.

A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

What events, just days before this incident, could have tipped off authorities? What was his history or mental illness and diagnosis?