N.Y. State Police Investigate Death of Another Inmate at Upstate Prison
The New York Times
A 22-year-old inmate at Mid-State Correctional Facility in Marcy, N.Y., died Saturday. Nine inmates said he was viciously beaten by corrections officers.
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.
