At least three of the New York prison guards implicated in the savage beating death of a handcuffed man had been accused of participating in similar attacks on prisoners across the state.
Two of the corrections officers and a sergeant accused in the death of Robert Brooks, an inmate at the Marcy Correctional Facility in central New York, were previously named in federal lawsuits filed by prisoners accusing them of brutal attacks that left one man disfigured and another in a wheelchair.
A lawyer for one of the injured men drew a line from the earlier accusations of violence to the attack this month.
“The fact that they failed to rein in these officers that they knew had beaten someone else is a direct contributor to Mr. Brooks’s death,” said Katie Rosenfeld, the lawyer. She criticized the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision for fighting her client’s lawsuit for four years.
Letitia James, the state attorney general, on Friday released video footage of guards beating Mr. Brooks in a prison infirmary on Dec. 9. The footage, captured on body cameras worn by four of the officers, showed the guards punching, kicking and choking Mr. Brooks over roughly 20 minutes.
In a swift and rare rebuke of the guards’ actions, Daniel F. Martuscello III, the state’s corrections commissioner, vowed to address a culture of brutality that has long permeated the state’s prison system.
“It is not enough to simply condemn this horrific act and then go back to business,” he said in a statement on Friday. “Institutional change must follow.”
But a spokesman for the corrections department, when asked about earlier allegations against the officers and why the department had not acted sooner to address them, declined to comment, citing the pending investigations.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said last weekend that she was moving to fire the 13 guards and a prison nurse who had been implicated in the attack.
In the videos released on Friday, Mr. Brooks is seen lying on the ground outside the prison with his hands cuffed behind his back. He appears to have already been beaten.
The officers pick him up by his cuffed hands and hold his feet. Once inside the infirmary, officers toss him onto a gurney and take turns punching him in the head, slamming a shoe against his chest and kicking him near his genitals.
At one point, an officer, with his hand gripped around Mr. Brooks’s neck, pulls him up into a seated position and repeatedly lifts him up by his throat.
When he appears unresponsive, an officer gives Mr. Brooks a sternum rub, pressing a knuckled fist on his chest in a painful technique used by emergency service workers to try to revive unresponsive patients.
The video shows some officers walking in and out of the room, milling about in the hallway or looking on from the doorway. Some of those assaulting Mr. Brooks pause to change their gloves or wash their hands.
“This kind of looks like another day in the office,” said Jennifer Scaife, the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a prison watchdog agency. “These kinds of things don’t just bubble up out of nowhere.”
Years earlier, some of the same guards had meted out brutal punishment against prisoners without provocation, according to a series of lawsuits that describe assaults by the corrections staff in glaringly similar detail.
Attack in a Bathroom
In February 2020, Adam Bauer was a year out from his release date when corrections officers beat him in a bathroom at the Marcy prison and then accused him of attacking them, according to an ongoing lawsuit.
Nicholas Anzalone, one of the officers accused in the assault of Mr. Brooks, joined with other officers in the attack on Mr. Bauer, the lawsuit said. On Friday, a man who answered a phone belonging to Mr. Anzalone, a corrections officer who joined the department in 2007, declined to comment.
“They knew about Nicholas Anzalone for many years and they did nothing,” said Ms. Rosenfeld, Mr. Bauer’s lawyer.
Mr. Bauer said he was exiting a bathroom stall and about to light a cigarette with a battery when a guard stopped him and asked what he was doing, the lawsuit said. The officer ordered M r. Bauer to stand against the wall for a frisk. After a few pats, the officer began punching him in the head until he fell to the floor and then kicked him, according to the lawsuit.
Two sergeants and Mr. Anzalone joined in, including one sergeant who slammed a clipboard against Mr. Bauer’s head so hard that the metal clasp tore a hole in his scalp. The guards then dragged him out of the prison, put him in a van and drove him to the infirmary, Mr. Bauer said. Once there, he was forced to lie facedown on the floor as Mr. Anzalone kicked his feet, the lawsuit said.
Photos of Mr. Bauer show him dazed, topless and wearing only red shorts while seated on a gurney in the infirmary. Blood was splattered on the floor and dripped down his face from two gashes on his forehead.
“I was scared to death,” Mr. Bauer, now 50, said in a phone interview on Friday. “I really truly thought they were going to kill me.”
To cover up the assault, the lawsuit contends, the officers lied. They told a nurse that he had harmed himself. They took him to a nearby hospital and told medical staff there that he had been attacked by another prisoner. One corrections employee told hospital workers that Mr. Bauer’s injuries were from “a seatbelt.”
When Mr. Bauer was returned to the prison, he was thrown into solitary confinement on false disciplinary charges for 60 days until a prison official reversed the decision, according to the lawsuit.
The corrections department’s Office of Special Investigations looked into the allegations against the guards, Ms. Rosenfeld said, but ultimately found that the force was “necessary and reasonable” to get Mr. Bauer to comply. The officers, she said, were never interviewed by investigators.
“You’re in their world when you get there,” Mr. Bauer said on Friday. “They do what they want.”
Permanently Disfigured
That same year in September, two other guards now implicated in the beating of Mr. Brooks — Sgt. Glenn Trombly and Officer Anthony Farina — participated in an assault on a prisoner named William Alvarez, according to a lawsuit.
Mr. Alvarez was cleaning the bathroom shower area when an officer pepper-sprayed him without provocation, according to his lawsuit. Mr. Alvarez ran out into the main dorm area in sight of other prisoners, he said, but the officer ordered him into a vestibule.
As he stood with his hands on the wall, Mr. Alvarez said in his lawsuit, the officer slammed his head repeatedly against it and then cuffed him. Mr. Trombly and Mr. Farina arrived, and together the three officers kicked him in the head and body before dragging him into a van and taking him to the infirmary.
The attack continued in the van, the lawsuit said, with Mr. Farina and Mr. Trombly looking on as the other officer punched him over and over again until the van pulled up to the infirmary and Mr. Trombly said, “That’s enough.”
Mr. Alvarez, who said in the lawsuit that he is now permanently disfigured, required facial surgery.
Like Mr. Bauer, Mr. Alvarez was accused of attacking the guards and held in solitary confinement for 60 days.
Lawyers for Mr. Alvarez in the lawsuit described the attack on their client as “intentional, sadistic, and malicious.”
Mr. Trombly and Mr. Farina did not respond to requests for comment.
Before Mr. Trombly was moved to the prison in Marcy, N.Y., he worked at the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, N.Y., where three prisoners accused him of beating them.
During a frisk in June 2013, Ernest Iverson said Mr. Trombly, who was an officer at the time, whispered “I hear you like to sue people” before placing him in a headlock. He then lifted Mr. Iverson off the floor, swung him back and forth by his neck and struck him in his back, according to court testimony. Mr. Iverson said he planted a weapon on him.
Mr. Trombly denied the allegations and said that the only force he used was to place Mr. Iverson in handcuffs. He testified that he discovered the weapon on Mr. Iverson during the search. A jury sided with the officers.
A month later, a similar story emerged from another prisoner. Rendell Robinson accused Mr. Trombly of forcing him to strip naked during a frisk and said he and another officer took turns punching him in the face, according to a lawsuit. Mr. Robinson had a concussion and a fractured nose.
“I really began to fear for my life at this point because they would not let go of me,” Mr. Robinson wrote in his complaint to the court.
In 2015, another man, Equarn White, accused Mr. Trombly and several other officers of viciously attacking him in an empty classroom, pulling his legs in opposite directions, stomping on his testicles and striking the bottom of his feet with a baton.
In his lawsuit, Mr. White said the officers, immediately after the attack, talked about what to say in department reports. He was placed in solitary confinement and, while there, he said in the lawsuit, he began urinating blood and required the use of a wheelchair.
On Tuesday, before the videos of Mr. Brooks’s final moments were released publicly, the State Police filed applications seeking so-called red flag orders for Officer Anzalone and two other officers implicated in the fatal attack, Matthew Galliher and Robert Kessler.
Such orders allow law enforcement authorities to remove guns from people believed to be a potential threat to themselves or others. A judge in Oneida County rejected the applications but ordered the State Police to conduct background checks on the officers and scheduled a hearing on the matter for Jan. 7.
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