Federal authorities have charged nine inmates and a guard at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn with crimes including assault and murder, in an effort to clean up a deadly facility that has housed some of the city’s highest-profile defendants.
Those accused are said to have carried out attacks that include the killings of Uriel Whyte in June, who was stabbed in the carotid artery during an argument, and Edwin Cordero in July, who was beaten and stabbed as he tried to protect himself with a table.
Other charges include assaults in which a corrections officer was punched in the face after offering an inmate breakfast; another in which an inmate sitting with his feet up was stabbed 44 times by three gang members; and one in which an inmate was stabbed in the spine with a makeshift ice pick.
The charges depict a federal lockup where inmates wielded deadly force, largely unimpeded. The Brooklyn detention center, currently home to the musician and impresario Sean Combs and the cryptocurrency swindler Sam Bankman-Fried, has a long history of staffing problems, medical mistreatment and violence.
“Violence will not be tolerated in our federal jails,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a news release on Monday. “Let these charges serve as a warning to those who would engage in criminal conduct behind bars, and anyone else who facilitates those crimes: Your conduct will be exposed, and you will be held accountable.”
The U.S. attorney’s office said Mr. Whyte was killed on June 7 when two other inmates, Andrew Simpson, 26, and Devone Thomas, 24, attacked him after he and Mr. Simpson had an argument. Mr. Whyte was stabbed in the neck and escaped the cell to seek medical aid, but died despite efforts to save him, according to the prosecutor’s office. The whole attack lasted about 15 minutes, prosecutors said.
On July 17, Edwin Cordero was killed by three inmates, whom the U.S. attorney identified in the news release as Alberto Santiago, 28, James Bazemore, 42, and Jamaul Aziz, 44. The men cornered Mr. Cordero while swinging at and stabbing him, according to the release. Mr. Cordero escaped, but was followed by Mr. Bazemore and Mr. Santiago, the release said.
The release further said that Mr. Santiago came up from behind and stabbed Mr. Cordero in his chest and, as he staggered forward, Mr. Bazemore stabbed him in the back. Mr. Cordero tried to shield himself with a table as Mr. Bazemore and Mr. Aziz continued hitting, kicking and stabbing him, according to the release.
It was unclear who was representing any of the defendants.
In the case against the guard, identified as Leon Wilson, 49, prosecutors said that while on duty, he used a government minivan to chase a BMW out of a staff parking lot, through red traffic lights and to the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge, where he fired three shots at it and struck a passenger in the car’s back seat. Prosecutors did not say what set off the chase.
Mr. Wilson returned to the detention center minutes later and never reported the shooting, according to the complaint. He faces up to 10 years in prison if he is convicted. Mr. Wilson’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The charges on Monday captured the kinds of problems that have caused judges, activists and families to speak out against chaos in the prison, which holds about 1,200 people, many of them awaiting trial.
Just this summer, a judge on Long Island said he would vacate a 75-year-old man’s conviction if he were placed there. The man was instead sent to serve his sentence at a medical center in Massachusetts.
In 2019, the prison was investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice over power failures that left inmates without heat in freezing temperatures. Before that, a former lieutenant was convicted of sexually assaulting detainees alongside two other guards, and the inspector general of the Department of Justice was called to look into medical mistreatment of pregnant women.
David Patton, the former director of the Federal Defenders of New York, said on Monday that all the same problems remain present today.
“The fact of violence at the institution is a failure of the institution and of management to adequately provide a safe and secure environment,” Mr. Patton said.
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