For nearly eight minutes, more than half a dozen New York City Department of Correction officers allowed in while an 18-year-old inmate named Nicholas Feliciano tried to hang himself in a prison cell on Rikers Island, without interfering, even when he waved his arms and then went silent.
When officers finally shot Mr Feliciano down on November 27, 2019, they dropped his limp body to the ground.
For much of the next three years, while severely brain damaged Mr. Feliciano received 24-hour care at Bellevue Hospital, the guards remained on modified duty and were allowed to collect their salaries while doing work that did not require contact with inmates. used to be . But on Monday, the Bronx District Attorney filed charges against four of the jailers.
The arrests marked a rare case of Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney who has jurisdiction over Rikers Island, who filed criminal charges against correctional officers whose negligence resulted in serious harm to an inmate.
Even as prison staff’s behavior and decision-making were called into question in a number of deaths and injuries of inmates in the past two years, including eight other suicides since 2021, the charges stemming from Mr Feliciano’s case were the first. filed by Ms. Clark against corrections officers since 2019.
Other prosecutors have been quicker to press charges as conditions at the Rikers Island prison complex have accelerated in recent years, with hundreds of officers failing to show up for work and violence and neglect rising.
In April, the U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District of New York charged two prosecutors with drug smuggling and taking bribes from gangs, and in November 2020, the Manhattan District Attorney charged a corrections officer with negligent murder after the captain ordered a man to hang in a Manhattan cell for 15 minutes and stop other guards from rescuing him. Those cases are pending.
A spokeswoman for the Bronx District Attorney’s office said the prosecution of the cases against the guards took nearly three years because the city’s Department of Investigation took them to federal prosecutors before taking them to Ms. Clark’s office. were brought.
Charged with official misconduct and reckless danger on Monday were corrections captain, Terry Henry, 37, and officers Kenneth Hood, 35, Daniel Fullerton, 27, and Mark Wilson, 46. All four men pleaded not guilty and were released without bail. Their lawyers declined to comment.
Mr Feliciano’s family welcomed the charges against the officers on Monday, but said they were coming too slowly.
The Crisis on Rikers Island
Amid the pandemic and a personnel emergency, New York City’s main prison complex is embroiled in an ongoing crisis.
“These officers should have been charged long ago instead of still working on Rikers Island while Nicholas was still in hospital trying to survive,” Mr Feliciano’s grandmother, Madeline Feliciano, said in an interview on Sunday. “It hurts. It’s very painful. It’s devastating to see him as he is because of someone’s negligence.”
The agents are due to appear in court again on September 15. Two of them, Mr. Fullerton and Mr. Wilson, resigned from the corrections department in February. It was expected that Mr. Hood would be suspended. Mr Henry would return to work on a changed shift after his arraignment on Monday, a Correctional Department official said.
At least four other guards were present when Mr Feliciano tried to hang himself, city records show, but no one was charged Monday. All but one of them are still working on Rikers.
Benny Boscio, president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, noted that the incident happened years ago, calling Monday’s indictment “more evidence that this case is driven more by politics than fact”.
Mr. Feliciano’s case received significant attention in 2019 after a DailyExpertNews investigation revealed errors made by corrections officers responding to his suicide attempt.
Mr. Feliciano had struggled with mental illness, and his suicidal tendencies were well documented during previous stays at city youth centers, mental health units, and Rikers Island, where he had spent weeks committing suicide and telling staff about his history of depression and anxiety. psychiatric hospitalization.
Still, medical staffers failed to flag Mr Feliciano as a suicide risk when he was ordered to be held at the Rikers complex in November 2019 on a parole charge. Instead, they housed him with the general population in the George R. Vierno Center, in a residential area known for gang violence.
After a fight on November 27, a bloodied Mr. Feliciano was placed in a receptacle. Hours later, still in the cell awaiting medical attention, Mr. Feliciano used a sweater to hang himself from a U-shaped piece of metal in the ceiling above the toilet. The ceiling fixture was said to have been removed after another inmate used it to commit suicide six days earlier, two people with knowledge of the incident said.
For seven minutes and 51 seconds, seven corrections officers, a captain and two paramedics walked by or peeked into Mr. Feliciano’s cell or watched him from a sentry post. But none of them intervened, surveillance video showed.
Mr Feliciano’s friend, Alfonso Martinez, said he was nearby, on a stretcher flanked by the two paramedics, when he saw his friend hanging and begged for someone to help him. By the time Mr. Feliciano was cut down, he had suffered serious injuries. He remained in a coma and on a ventilator for weeks.
Shortly after, three officers and a corrections captain were suspended for 30 days without pay for failing to help Mr. Feliciano.
Mr Henry, the captain who had ignored Mr Feliciano when he was hanged, had been punished in a similar case in 2015 when, as a prosecutor, he failed to provide medical attention to a man who complained of chest pain while gasping at air and convulsions on the floor, according to a lawsuit filed by his family. The man died and the city settled the lawsuit for $1.59 million.
Yet Mr. Henry was promoted to captain, and in 2019, in the months before Mr. Feliciano’s attempted hanging, he received two more complaints for non-supervision, personnel files show.
The Board of Correction, a prison oversight panel, said in a report made public last year that many of the red flags raised by Mr Feliciano’s case are not only still with Rikers, but have become more pronounced as conditions there have deteriorated.
Feliciano’s attorney, David B. Rankin, who represents more than two dozen other previously incarcerated people and their families who have died or were seriously injured in Rikers, said city officials must act quickly to close the troubled complex.
“It’s so frustrating to see literally the same neglect killing and catastrophically injuring person after person,” said Mr. Rankin, adding, “The idea that it took so long with so much evidence is a problem.”
The death toll in the prison system has risen in the past two years as city officials struggle to restore order. So far in 2022, 11 people have died after being held in city jails, including two by suicide. Last year, 16 people died, six of them by suicide.
In response to the increasing disorder in the prisons, the US attorney in Manhattan expressed concern about conditions in Rikers, where some inmates have been left without food and medical care, and in April raised the prospect of a federal court takeover.
Since 2020, the rate of self-harm among inmates has also risen, averaging 1,500 per year, with about 9 percent of incidents resulting in serious injury.
A federal judge has given the correctional department until October to demonstrate improvement or risk losing control of the prison complex to an independent superintendent. City officials have pledged to change the facility.
mr. Feliciano remains in Bellevue’s brain injury ward, where he uses a walker to get around. He cannot eat, brush his teeth or dress alone without help. Doctors have told Mr. Feliciano’s family that his brain had been damaged by oxygen starvation during his suicide attempt and that he may never be the same again.
Although Mr. Feliciano can no longer have normal conversations, he has recently learned to say “I love you,” his grandmother said.
Mr. Feliciano’s family is struggling to find a permanent place for him to live while he is being cared for. His medical costs will run into the tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Rankin. The family has filed two lawsuits in state and federal courts. Both are pending.
“Our lives have not been the same,” said Ms. Feliciano. “I pray to God that justice is done on behalf of Nicholas.”