Ed Santos, the parole agent who conducted the questioning at the Concord office on August 26, described the experience of the aftermath. He received death threats. His children were escorted to and from school. He stayed silent about the case for years because law enforcement had been his life and because the circumstances around a high-profile case generated their own complicated dynamics.
“All hell then broke loose,” he recalled of the moment after Garrido was questioned in Concord. “There were a lot of details nobody knew.”
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## The Failure Taxonomy: What the OIG Report Found
The California Inspector General’s November 2009 report is worth examining in some detail because it produced a taxonomy of supervision failure that has implications beyond the Garrido case.
The failures documented were not random. They reflected structural weaknesses in how parole supervision was organized, staffed, trained, and monitored.
**Classification failure:** Garrido was placed on minimum supervision despite a sex offense history that specifically called for High Control designation. The risk assessment error was not caught by supervisors because supervisors were not conducting required case reviews.
**Information failure:** California agents never obtained Garrido’s federal parole file. The file contained information about his mental health, his drug history, his parole violations in Nevada, and the presence of a soundproofed studio on his property. Without that file, California agents were supervising Garrido with incomplete knowledge of who they were dealing with.
**Visit frequency failure:** The required schedule of home visits was not maintained. There were gaps of a year or more during which Garrido’s property was not visited at all. When agents did visit, their inspections were cursory. The training they received gave no guidance on where to look or what to look for during a home inspection.