Jeffrey Pendleton was an activist, a member of the Fight for 15 movement who walked picket lines in the effort to gain a $15 minimum wage among fast food workers. He worked at a Burger King in Nashua, New Hampshire, earning about $100 a week and sleeping on the streets between his shifts because he could not afford housing.
He was discovered dead in a Nashua jail cell earlier this month after he was arrested for marijuana possession and was unable to come up with the $100 cash bail. His friends and fellow movement members are demanding answers.
Area participants in the Fight for 15 movement will take a break from their demands for a higher minimum wage today when they march outside the Valley Street jail to highlight the death of one of their own — Jeffrey Pendleton. [...]
“Even though he worked in a multi-billion dollar industry, Jeffrey was living on the streets and died in a police cell because he was poor. It’s an injustice to all of us that he died, and we need answers now,” said Andy Fontaine, who worked with Pendleton at the Burger King in downtown Nashua.
ThinkProgress has more:
The jail is notorious locally, and Hillsborough County paid out roughly $1 million between 2008 and 2013 to settle numerous lawsuits over abuses and conditions there. [...]
Pendleton was well known to the Nashua police. He had won a $10,315 settlement from the lily-white town’s security forces in 2015 after suing the department for imprisoning him for 33 days for walking in a park near the town library. In a separate case, the nearby town of Hudson gave him a $7,640 settlement after ticketing him for panhandling. American Civil Liberties Union lawyers aided Pendleton in each case, according to the Manchester Union Leader.
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/0egL2NrhXXQ/-Protesters-demand-answers-in-death-of-Fight-For-15-activist-Jeffrey-Pendleton
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