The U.S. Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies on Monday morning conducted a sweep of a dangerous federal prison in Brooklyn where two detainees were fatally stabbed this summer.
Members of the department’s Office of the Inspector General led the operation at the long-troubled facility, the Metropolitan Detention Center, where five inmates were charged with murder last month in connection with the killings.
Donald Murphy, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which oversees the facility, said in a statement that “the operation was preplanned and there is no active threat” at the prison, where around 1,200 people are held, including Sean Combs, known as Diddy, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Mr. Murphy did not provide additional details on the operation, but said the bureau had been involved in the planning and that the action was “designed to achieve our shared goal of maintaining a safe environment for both our employees and the incarcerated individuals housed at M.D.C. Brooklyn.”
On Monday afternoon, there was little evidence outside the detention center that a sweep had taken place. Several officers from the F.B.I. and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration walked in and out of the prison. Officers in fatigues from a K9 unit also stood near the entrance. Nearby, an F.B.I. agent appeared to be patrolling the block.
The sweep was part of continuing efforts to address persistent complaints about the roughly 30-year-old lockup on the waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood. Reports of sexual assaults and inhumane conditions have prompted vehement criticism from judges, activists and detainees’ families.
In 2017, the Department of Justice looked into the medical mistreatment of pregnant women at the prison. A year later, a former lieutenant was convicted of raping detainees. Then, in 2019, power failures left those inside without heat in freezing temperatures.
This June, Uriel Whyte, 38, who was being held at the facility on weapons possession charges, was fatally stabbed in the carotid artery, according to Department of Justice officials and court and prison records. Two inmates, Andrew Simpson and Devone Thomas, were later indicted by a grand jury on murder charges in Mr. Whyte’s death, federal authorities said.
A month after Mr. Whyte was killed, Edwin Cordero, 36, who was serving time for assault — a violation of his supervised release in a wire fraud case — was beaten and stabbed in the heart, prosectors said. Three inmates, Jamaul Aziz, James Bazemore and Alberto Santiago, were charged in the killing.
In August, a Long Island judge said that the conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center were so appalling that he would sentence a 75-year-old man to house arrest rather than send him there. Nine weeks later, a correctional officer at the prison was charged in a five-mile car chase in which he drove a government car to pursue a BMW to the Brooklyn Bridge, according to a federal complaint.
The officer, Leon Wilson, 49, fired three shots at the BMW, striking a passenger in the back seat, the complaint said. Prosecutors did not say what had set off the chase.
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