The State Police are investigating the death of a prisoner over the weekend in a facility near the central New York prison where another inmate was fatally beaten by guards in December.
Prison officials said on Saturday that an inmate at Mid-State Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Marcy, N.Y., near Utica, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital earlier in the day. Officials did not identify the man and released no additional details about the circumstances surrounding his death, but nine prisoners interviewed by The New York Times on Sunday, seven of whom agreed to have their names used, said the inmate had been brutally beaten by corrections officers.
Their accounts could not be independently confirmed, and Thomas Mailey, a prisons spokesman, said the death was under investigation.
A spokeswoman for the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said her office was conducting a preliminary assessment of the death. Deaths that appear to be from other than natural causes or a known medical condition are investigated by the Office of the Attorney General, the New York State Police and the state corrections department’s Office of Special Investigations, Mr. Mailey said.
A spokesman for Gov. Kathy Hochul did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday, and a spokesman for the corrections officers’ union said he had no information about the death.
The inmate who died was a 22-year-old man who had entered custody in May and was serving a five-year sentence for second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, according to information from prisoners and official records. His death followed that of another prisoner, 43-year-old Robert Brooks, who died on Dec. 9 at Marcy Correctional Facility, across the street from Mid-State. Ten officers have been criminally charged in Mr. Brooks’s death, six of them with murder, after they were captured on body-worn cameras beating and choking him in the infirmary.
The latest fatality comes amid a mounting crisis in the New York State prison system, where wildcat strikes by thousands of corrections officers are expected to enter a third week. It is also the fifth death in the prison system since the strikes began. At least one of the deaths was a suicide.
Corrections officers at nearly all of the state’s 42 prisons, including Mid-State, have been on strike since Feb. 17 — without the backing of their union and in defiance of a judge’s order — to protest what they say are dangerous working conditions, severe staffing shortages and forced overtime. The state’s corrections commissioner, Daniel F. Martuscello III, announced on X that he was giving the officers until Monday to return to work.
Some prisoners’ rights advocates have accused officers of engaging in the strikes to try to distract attention from the beating death of Mr. Brooks.
Ms. Hochul ordered thousands of National Guard soldiers deployed to replace the prison officers.
The death at Mid-State occurred on Saturday morning, as members of the National Guard were preparing to conduct a security check in a housing area to make sure all of the prisoners were accounted for, said the nine prisoners interviewed by The Times, who described the death in unusually graphic detail.
Inmates, many of whom fear retaliation by prison guards, are often reluctant to speak out about allegations of brutality behind bars.
The 22-year-old prisoner, they said, became upset when the count was set to begin and left for the shower area of the dorm, where he could be heard crying. One prisoner, Rodney Richards, said the inmate appeared to be having a disagreement with the National Guard members who were filling in for striking officers, and had refused to go to his cubicle. Several prisoners said he had stopped taking his psychiatric medications.
In response, the Guard members alerted a group of corrections officers known as the “correctional emergency response team,” the prisoners said, noting that anywhere from seven to 15 officers responded, some already wielding their batons.
Jordan McLin, who said his cubicle was near the young prisoner’s, said he could hear the blows landing on the man’s body.
“He was screaming,” Mr. McLin, 26, said. “I kept hearing ‘stop resisting’ and at one point you can just hear something being hit.”
Another prisoner, Aaron Perry, 34, said the 22-year-old inmate had begged the prison guards to stop beating him.
“He said, ‘I didn’t do anything,’” Mr. Perry recalled. “‘You’re really hurting me. Stop!’”
Some of the prisoners said the responding officers did not appear to be wearing body-worn cameras; others said a few of the officers had them, but they were turned off. Four of the prisoners interviewed said they saw a corrections sergeant with either a hand-held or body-worn camera, but that he was facing away from the attack.
Members of the National Guard, who do not wear body cameras, stood by, looking on, the prisoners said. None intervened. The New York National Guard did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
After the beating, the prisoners said, the man, who had been handcuffed and shackled, was dragged down the hall and down a flight of stairs, his face bloodied and swollen. Mr. Richards said the man “was not recognizable.”
One of the prisoners, Michael Hummel-Parker, 32, said the man was making gurgling noises — a sign, he said, that he could not breathe.
Jerod Crosby, 46, another inmate, said he could see from his cell window either officers or medical workers giving the prisoner CPR inside an ambulance.
Inside the housing area, inmates were ordered to clean up the blood, they said. A bloodied mop and the prisoner’s belongings were removed from the facility, the prisoners said. Within hours, investigators were interviewing witnesses.
Mr. Richards, 43, said the beating he witnessed had left him uneasy.
“I fear for my life,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
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