H  SETTLEMENT FOR MAN LEFT IN DEA CELL 

S1  EDS: SUBS lede to RECAST.
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S3  LOS ANGELES - A year after Daniel Chong, a San Diego college student, was found hallucinating and suffering from kidney failure inside a Drug Enforcement Administration holding cell where he had been accidentally left for four days, the agency has agreed to compensate him for his ordeal.

S4  The federal government has agreed to pay Chong $4.1 million, Julia Yoo, one of his lawyers, said this week.
S5 Chong’s lawyers filed a legal claim seeking $20 million last year.

S6  “It was an accident,” Chong, now 25, said at a news conference Tuesday to announce the settlement, “a really, really bad, terrible accident.”

S7  Chong was picked up last year during a raid on his friend’s house, where he and some friends had gathered to smoke marijuana.

S8  Chong, a student at the University of California, San Diego, and the other suspects were taken to DEA offices, where he was interviewed.
S9 Agents told Chong that he would be released, he said, and he was taken to a holding cell to wait for what he was told would be a few minutes.

S10  Instead, he was forgotten inside the cell for four days.
S11 Without food or water, he drank his own urine, contemplated taking his own life and tried to scratch a goodbye note to his mother into his arm.

S12  When agents found him on the fifth day, he thought he might be minutes from death.
S13 He spent several days in a hospital intensive care unit, where he was treated for severe dehydration and kidney failure.
S14 Over the past year, his lawyers said, he has continued to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

S15  “His doctor said this was one of the worst cases of stress he had ever seen,” Eugene G. Iredale, one of Chong’s lawyers, said in an interview Wednesday.

S16  The DEA issued an apology shortly after Chong was found in the cell.
S17 A spokeswoman for the agency Wednesday refused to comment on the settlement but confirmed that the detention policies had been changed.
S18 The Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department was reviewing the case.

