Black man in N.Y. state died of suffocation after being handcuffed and hooded
A Black man died of asphyxiation after police officers in Rochester, N.Y., put a hood over his head, then pressed his face into the pavement for two minutes, according to video and records released Wednesday by the man’s family.
Daniel Prude died March 30 after he was taken off life support, seven days after his encounter with police. His death — which preceded that of George Floyd in Minneapolis by about two months — received no public attention until Wednesday, when Prude’s family held a news conference and released police body-camera video and written reports they obtained through a public records request.
Joe Prude, who had called 911 for help, expressed disbelief over the treatment given to his brother, who the video shows was naked and agitated during the encounter with police.
“I placed a phone call for my brother to get help, not for my brother to get lynched,” he told reporters. “How did you see him and not directly say, ‘The man is defenseless, buck naked on the ground. He’s cuffed up already. Come on.’ How many more brothers gotta die for society to understand that this needs to stop?”
The videos show Daniel Prude, who had taken off his clothes, complying when police ask him to get on the ground and put his hands behind his back. Prude is agitated and shouting as he sits on the pavement in handcuffs for a few moments as a light snow falls. “Give me your gun — I need it,” he shouts.
The officers then put a white “spit hood” over his head, a device intended to protect officers from a detainee’s saliva. At the time, New York was in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Prude demands that they remove it. The officers slam Prude’s head into the street. One officer, who is white, holds Prude’s head down against the pavement with both hands, saying, “Calm down” and “Stop spitting.” Another officer places a knee on Prude’s back.
“Trying to kill me!” Prude says, his voice becoming muffled and anguished under the hood.
“OK, stop. I need it. I need it,” the prone man begs before his shouts turn to whimpers and grunts.
The officers appear to become concerned after he stops moving and falls silent and they notice water coming out of his mouth.
“My man. You puking?” one says.
One officer notes that Prude has been out naked in the street for some time. Another says: “He feels pretty cold.”
His head had been held down by an officer for just over two minutes, the video shows.
The officers then remove the hood and his handcuffs and medics can be seen performing CPR on Prude before he is loaded into an ambulance.
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Spit hoods have been scrutinized as a factor in the deaths of several prisoners in the U.S. and other countries in recent years.
A medical examiner concluded that Prude’s death was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” The report lists excited delirium and acute intoxication by phencyclidine, or PCP, as contributing factors.
Prude was from Chicago and had just arrived in Rochester for a visit with his brother. He was kicked off the train before it got to Rochester, in Depew, “due to his unruly behavior,” according to an internal affairs investigator’s report.
Rochester police officers took Prude into custody for a mental health evaluation about 7 p.m. on March 22 for suicidal thoughts — about eight hours before the encounter that led to his death. But his brother said he was only at the hospital for a few hours, according to the reports.
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Police responded again after Joe Prude called 911 at about 3 a.m. to report that his brother had left his house.
The city halted its investigation into Prude’s death when state Atty. Gen. Letitia James’ office began its own investigation in April. Under New York law, deaths of unarmed people in police custody are often turned over to the attorney general’s office, rather than handled by local officials.
James said Wednesday that investigation is continuing.
“I want everyone to understand that at no point in time did we feel that this was something that we wanted not to disclose,” Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said at a news briefing. “We are precluded from getting involved in it until that agency has completed their investigation.”
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One officer wrote that they put the hood on Prude because he was spitting continuously in the direction of officers and they were concerned about coronavirus.
Activists demanded that the officers involved be prosecuted on murder charges and that they be removed from the department while the investigation proceeds.
“The police have shown us over and over again that they are not equipped to handle individuals with mental health concerns. These officers are trained to kill, and not to de-escalate. These officers are trained to ridicule, instead of supporting Mr. Daniel Prude,” Ashley Gantt of Free the People ROC said at the news conference with Prude’s family.
Calls to the union representing Rochester police officers, and to the organization’s attorney, went unanswered Wednesday.
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Protesters gathered Wednesday outside Rochester’s Public Safety Building, which serves as police headquarters. Free the People ROC said several of its organizers were briefly taken into custody after they entered the building while Warren was speaking to the media.
They were released on appearance tickets, said Iman Abid, regional director of the NYCLU, who was among those taken into custody.
Demonstrators later gathered at the spot where Prude died, chanting, dancing and praying. They stayed late into the night.
Prude, known to his big Chicago-based family by the nickname “Rell,” was a father of five adult children and had been working at a warehouse within the last year, said his aunt Letoria Moore.
“He was just a bright, loving person, just family-oriented, always there for us when we needed him,” she said, adding that Prude “never hurt or harmed anybody.”
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Prude had been traumatized by the deaths of his mother and a brother in recent years, having lost another brother before that, Moore said. In his last months, he had been going back and forth between his Chicago home and his brother’s place in Rochester because he wanted to be close with him, she said.
She knew her nephew had some psychological issues. Still, when he called two days before his death, “he was the normal Rell that I knew,” Moore said.
“I didn’t know what was the situation, why he was going through what he was going through that night, but I know he didn’t deserve to be killed by the police,” she said.
The fatal encounter happened two months before the death of George Floyd in Minnesota prompted nationwide demonstrations. Floyd died after an officer put his knee on his neck for several minutes during an arrest.
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