The guards carried Robert Brooks into the infirmary face down, holding him by his cuffed hands and ankles. Once inside a private exam room at Marcy Correctional Facility, near Syracuse, New York, on Dec. 9, officers beat and choked him while nurses lingered in the hall. Brooks died the next day at a nearby hospital.
Lawyers for the Brooks family say the guards intentionally took him to the infirmary because it lacked cameras due to medical privacy concerns. But unbeknownst to the officers and nurses, a few of the guards’ body cameras were turned on. The footage of a medical setting transformed into the scene of a brutal homicide shocked the public and led to murder charges against six officers.
A few months later, on March 1, officers beat Messiah Nantwi to death, prosecutors allege, in an attack that started in his cell and continued in the infirmary at Mid-State prison, across the street from the facility where Brooks was killed. They were not wearing body cameras. Prosecutors have charged two officers with murder in the attack on Nantwi.
While beating deaths and murder charges like the Brooks and Nantwi killings are incredibly rare, alleged physical abuse in New York prison infirmaries is not. The Marshall Project has identified 46 allegations that corrections officers assaulted prisoners in medical wings of New York prisons since 2010, according to a review of court settlements, disciplinary records and pending lawsuits. Three prisoners died, including Brooks and Nantwi, while many others were left with severe injuries such as collapsed lungs and broken bones. And in the past six years, three women have alleged in lawsuits that male officers raped them in an infirmary.
These numbers are probably an undercount of the assaults committed inside medical units, experts said, because many prisoners don’t file complaints for fear of retaliation or not being believed. In addition, The Marshall Project analysis didn’t include allegations from lawsuits that have been dismissed.
Prisoners and advocates say guards abuse people in the infirmary because it’s tucked away and has areas with no cameras. Beatings in the infirmary of one New York prison were so common, prisoners called the medical wing “the torture chambers.” At another facility, the infirmary was called “the slaughterhouse.”
Many allegations mirror those in the Brooks and Nantwi killings in which guards continued to attack the men in infirmaries after beating them in different areas of the prison.
At Great Meadow prison in the Adirondacks, a teacher slashed her own leg with a razor and blamed it on an incarcerated man. A group of officers then beat the man as they dragged him to the infirmary, he alleged in a lawsuit, where officers ordered the medical staff to leave, placed a plastic bag over his face and beat him until he nearly died. The teacher later admitted her report was false and resigned. A prison spokesperson said the man never told investigators about the plastic bag. Three years later, guards at the same prison escorted a prisoner into the infirmary where they kicked and punched him, leaving him with fractured ribs and injured lungs, his lawsuit alleges.
“We are regularly told about assaults from staff occurring in prison infirmaries,” said Sumeet Sharma, a director of the Correctional Association of New York, a state prison oversight group that visits with incarcerated people and employees. “There’s this understanding that medical staff is not to judge how those assaults happen, but to provide treatment and medical care when those assaults do happen.”
After the Brooks killing, corrections Commissioner Daniel Martuscello III ordered that all security staff with body-worn cameras must record whenever they are around prisoners, including in medical settings. “It’s on us to create a culture that isn’t based in violence and respects the lives of everyone in our care,” Martuscello said in a statement to The Marshall Project.
A still image from body camera video of the beating of Robert Brooks in an infirmary at Marcy Correctional Facility on Dec. 9, 2024. Brooks died the next day.
The correctional officers union did not respond to questions or a detailed list of findings for this story.
If an officer uses force, medical staff must examine the prisoner as soon as possible and document any injuries. This usually means a trip to the infirmary. But in cases The Marshall Project reviewed, violence that starts elsewhere in the prison continues or even escalates once a person is inside one of the relatively secluded rooms within the medical unit.
“The infirmary is the biggest beat up place inside of any facility you go to,” said Leon Lagandean, who said he had been beaten in infirmaries in three New York prisons. He is suing the state for a 2018 assault in the infirmary in Elmira. He said assaults often happen in infirmaries because they’re one of the few areas without cameras.
A prison spokesperson said the department is using new software and hiring analysts to identify patterns in areas where officers use excessive force. He said that many incidents in one location would be a hotspot calling for further review.
On a summer evening in 2023, two guards stopped Michael Castaldo, who was incarcerated at Groveland Correctional Facility, while he walked across the yard to pick up mail. Castaldo said he had bumped into one of the guards the day before in his dorm. On the yard, that guard whispered, “So, you like bumping into people, huh?” according to a lawsuit Castaldo recently filed.
The guards then knocked Castaldo to the ground. Three other officers joined the fray, and began kicking and punching Castaldo and striking him with batons. They handcuffed him and pepper sprayed him before taking him to the infirmary.
There, handcuffed on a gurney in an exam room, a sergeant and another guard continued the attack, according to his lawsuit, punching and slapping him in the presence of a nurse.
Castaldo said the beating left him with severe hearing loss in his left ear; he said the prison didn’t respond to his repeated requests for a hearing test, stitches for open wounds and X-rays for possible broken ribs. A department spokesperson said investigators didn’t look into whether guards assaulted Castaldo in the infirmary because he only reported being beaten in the yard.
The infirmary is a busy and critically important area in a prison. It is where guards take people for medical appointments and treatments. Sometimes people are held for observation.
While many beatings began elsewhere in the prison, in some cases, officers attacked prisoners who were already in the infirmary seeking medical attention.
When an incarcerated man went to the medical unit at Sullivan Correctional Facility in 2022 with chest pain, officers pepper sprayed and assaulted him, he alleged in a lawsuit, dislocating his jaw and causing permanent hearing loss. The department said that no injuries to the man were reported or noted at the time. His attorney said that’s because he wasn’t given the opportunity to report his injuries. The department also asserted the man wasn’t following instructions and was pepper sprayed and restrained after he lunged at officers.
After Matthew Raymond had a series of seizures in 2016, Troy Mitchell and a group of other officers put him, hands cuffed and legs shackled, on an exam table in the emergency room at Auburn prison, according to a lawsuit filed by Raymond. Mitchell then ordered the nurse, Aimee Hoppins, out of the room.
Mitchell pulled Raymond’s shirt over his face, held his head down and slowly poured a bucket of water over his mouth and nose, according to the lawsuit. Raymond testified that Mitchell then punched him in the face and neck, and beat him in the groin with a baton while other officers held his legs open.
Raymond suffered permanent injuries to his genitals and bladder from the attack. He underwent surgery to reconstruct his bladder and may never be able to have kids again. The state settled with Raymond for $1.2 million.
Nurse Hoppins examined Raymond after the assault and noted injuries to his face and red marks on his body, but he had on boxers and she did not examine his genitals, she testified.
Hoppins testified in the case that Mitchell told her he was going to put in his paperwork that Raymond injured his face during a seizure. But Mitchell had shown Hoppins video that contradicted that story, and when she asked about it, he told her it wasn’t her business since it was a security issue. He also said he would destroy the video, Hoppins testified, and the video was never located.
Hoppins felt powerless to report Mitchell, she later testified. He’d been sexually harassing her for years, and he was in her chain of command, she said, so there was nothing she could do without him knowing.
“It’s their world, you just live in it,” Hoppins testified.
The department didn’t try to discipline Mitchell for the alleged waterboarding. The department did cite him for failing to hand in his state-issued handgun and for emptying a canister of pepper spray point blank into the eyes of another prisoner in the infirmary, a case the state settled for $100,000. Mitchell agreed to retire and forfeit a few months of pay.
In a prison medical unit, security directives can sometimes get priority over health needs, experts say, and nurses don’t have the independence they’d have in other clinical environments.
Despite these challenges, nurses should stand up for the prisoners in their care, and they need leaders who will back them up when they do, said Mary Muse, a prison health care consultant and former director of nursing for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.
“Our role is advocacy for the patient,” Muse said. “We are given a license. We owe a duty to the public,” and part of that duty is following the ethics and standards of nursing. “If you’re following those [standards], then witnessing harm and abuse should give you pause, and you should want to intervene.”
Tucked out of view from most staff and the incarcerated population, infirmaries are isolated, and that can leave people vulnerable to abuse. At New York’s female prisons, some women have alleged male guards took advantage of that seclusion and raped them.
In August 2022, an incarcerated woman was working her job as a porter in the infirmary at Albion prison, near Lake Ontario. Supervising the infirmary that day was Jonathan DeJesus, who followed her around, groping her and telling her she was beautiful, according to a lawsuit she later filed. DeJesus cornered her alone in the infirmary bathroom, where, according to the lawsuit, he raped her. She saved the evidence in a tampon and reported the assault. DeJesus was later convicted and sentenced to six months in jail. An attorney representing DeJesus in the civil lawsuit declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
Officers were required to use body cameras at Albion in areas of the prison without wall cameras, a department spokesperson said. DeJesus wasn’t issued one that day. Albion had a limited number of functioning body cameras at the time, according to the department.
New York prisons began equipping guards with body cameras 10 years ago, but progress was slow. In October, only seven of the state’s 40 prisons were using body cameras, according to New York Focus. There are now 25 prisons equipped with cameras for every officer on duty, according to the agency.
In the beating death of Brooks, the officers may have thought the infirmary afforded them privacy, since they never activated their body cameras. But some of their cameras were in fact recording during the assault. The footage has led to calls for reform, including from Brooks’ family.
“There are a lot of atrocities that take place in the prisons,” Brooks’ father, Robert Ricks, told New York lawmakers during a February hearing. “And prior to my son being murdered, and me seeing it on TV, nobody could have told me that these things were transpiring in our jails and in our prisons.”
