Robert Brooks, 43, died a day after being attacked by several correctional officers at the Marcy Correctional Facility on Dec. 9. His death has prompted a state investigation.
*** There is a video at the site linked above that is very informative and shows the man before the police killed him. ***
The office of New York’s attorney general released body camera footage Friday showing the fatal beating of a state prisoner this month by correctional officers who punched and kicked him repeatedly while he was handcuffed on an infirmary bed.
The incident, which has drawn outrage from political leaders and was condemned by the officers’ union as “incomprehensible,” is being investigated by state Attorney General Letitia James. The inmate, Robert Brooks, 43, died in the hospital a day after the Dec. 9 attack.
“I do not take lightly the release of this video, especially in the middle of the holiday season,” James said at a virtual news conference.
“These videos are shocking and disturbing,” she added.
Brooks can be seen in the videos with his hands cuffed behind his back. In one video, he is sitting up as an officer presses his foot down on him. He is then punched by two officers.
At another point, he is forcefully yanked from the bed by his shirt collar and held up above the ground, his face visibly bloodied.
Robert Brooks as seen in body camera footage at the Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County, New York, on Dec. 9.Office of the New York State Attorney General
Last week, Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to begin the process of firing 14 workers at the Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County, where the incident occurred. They include correctional officers, sergeants and a prison nurse. In the interim, all have been suspended without pay, except for one officer, who already resigned. In a statement following the release of the videos, Daniel Martuscello, the commissioner of the state corrections department, said his office has launched its own investigation in an effort to bring “institutional change.”
“Watching the video evidence of Robert Brooks’ life being taken left me feeling deeply repulsed and nauseated,” Martuscello said. “There is no excuse and no rationalization for a vulgar, inhumane act that senselessly took a life. This type of behavior cannot be normalized, and I will not allow it to be within DOCCS.”
James said the officers had not activated their body cameras, but they were still on and recorded in standby mode. As a result, she added, they did not capture audio and only recorded for 30 minutes.
Her office released the entirety of the four officers’ videos, which included some blurring.
On Dec. 9, James said, Brooks was being transferred from the Mohawk Correctional Facility, also in Oneida County, to Marcy Correctional Facility. The events unfolded in a medical exam room before 9:30 p.m. Brooks was carried into the room hanging upside down with his hands handcuffed behind his back, one video shows.
The entrance to Marcy Correctional Facility state prison on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024, in Marcy, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Albany Times Union via Getty Images)Will Waldron / Albany Times Union / Getty Images
Without audio, it’s unclear what words were exchanged between Brooks and the officers. While he does not appear to physically retaliate in the footage, the videos present different angles, and at times it’s unclear what is happening to Brooks as officers move and stand around the room. After the officers yank Brooks from the bed, he is brought to a corner. Later, he is seen on the bed wearing only his underwear and being tended to by the nurse.
Brooks was taken to the hospital and died the following day. An autopsy was conducted, and “preliminary findings show concern for asphyxia due to compression of the neck as the cause of death, as well as the death being due to actions of another,” according to a state corrections office investigative report obtained by NBC affiliate WKTV in Utica.
In the wake of the initial media reports, James said her Office of Special Investigation would conduct a review and make the video public after Brooks’ family viewed it first.
“I have a responsibility and duty to provide the Brooks family, their loved ones and all New Yorkers with transparency and accountability,” she said Friday.
Attorney General Letitia James speaks during a press briefing on Nov. 6.Lev Radin / Pacific Press / Getty Images
Brooks had been imprisoned since 2017 on a 12-year sentence for first-degree assault involving a longtime girlfriend. State corrections officials declined to detail what led Brooks to be transferred to the Marcy Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison, that night. The New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday, but the union has previously said it viewed parts of the videos.
“What we witnessed is incomprehensible to say the least and is certainly not reflective of the great work that the vast majority of our membership conducts every day,” the union said in a statement this week, adding what transpired is the “opposite of everything NYSCOPBA and its membership stand for.”
Hochul said in a statement that the “vast majority” of correctional officers “do extraordinary work under difficult circumstances,” but “we have no tolerance for individuals who cross the line, break the law and engage in unnecessary violence or targeted abuse.”
Martuscello said the agency has expanded its body camera policy effective immediately, requiring all corrections officers to have their cameras activated any time they are engaging directly with inmates.
The Correctional Association of New York, an independent prison oversight group, released a report last year after monitoring the Marcy Correctional Facility in October 2022. The report noted complaints of “rampant” physical abuse by staff members, with 80% of incarcerated people reporting having witnessed or experienced abuse and nearly 70% reporting racial discrimination or bias.
Brooks’ family thanked Hochul in a statement this week for taking action “to hold officers accountable.”
“We cannot understand how this could have happened in the first place,” the family said. “No one should have to lose a family member this way.”
The Colorado TV reporter told police that he believed he had been followed by the man because he is Pacific Islander.
Colleen Slevin
A Colorado man is facing possible bias-motivated charges for allegedly attacking a television news reporter after demanding to know whether he was a citizen, saying “This is Trump’s America now,” according to court documents.
Patrick Thomas Egan, 39, was arrested Dec. 18 in Grand Junction, Colorado, after police say he followed KKCO/KJCT reporter Ja’Ronn Alex’s vehicle for around 40 miles (64 kilometers) from the Delta area. Alex told police that he believed he had been followed and attacked because he is Pacific Islander.
After arriving in Grand Junction, Egan, who was driving a taxi, pulled up next to Alex at a stoplight and, according to an arrest affidavit, said something to the effect of: “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”
Alex, who had been out reporting, then drove back to his news station in the city. After he got out of his vehicle, Egan chased Alex as he ran toward the station’s door and demanded to see his identification, according to the document laying out police’s evidence in the case. Egan then tackled Alex, put him in a headlock and “began to strangle him,” the affidavit said. Coworkers who ran out to help and witnesses told police that Alex appeared to be losing his ability to breathe during the attack, which was partially captured on surveillance video, according to the document.
According to the station’s website, Alex is a native of Detroit. KKCO/KJCT reported that he was driving a news vehicle at the time.
Egan was arrested on suspicion of bias-motivated crimes, second degree assault and harassment. He is scheduled to appear in court Thursday to learn whether prosecutors have filed formal charges against him.
Egan’s lawyer, Ruth Swift, was out of the office Friday and did not return a telephone message seeking comment.
So much of this story is upsetting. But one detail stood out to me, and it has not been stressed enough when police violence and false arrests. The man, Mr. Brock lost his job three days after the brutal assault and may have suffered severe financial distress. Police and prosecutors know that often just being charged can ruin a persons life. Hugs
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Joseph Benza III, main officer involved in incident with Emmett Brock, pleaded guilty in federal court last week
Multiple L.A. sheriff's deputies relieved of duty as feds probe beating of trans teacher https://t.co/JNQeqBKe9P
ATLANTA (Dec. 29, 2024) — Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States and winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, died peacefully Sunday, Dec. 29, at his home in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family. He was 100, the longest-lived president in U.S. history.
President Carter is survived by his children — Jack, Chip, Jeff, and Amy; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Rosalynn, and one grandchild.
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son. “My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.”
There will be public observances in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., followed by a private interment in Plains, Georgia. The final arrangements for President Carter’s state funeral, including all public events and motorcade routes, are still pending. The schedule will be released by the Joint Task Force-National Capital Region at
Members of the public are encouraged to visit the official tribute website to the life of President Carter at www.jimmycartertribute.org. This site includes the official online condolence book as well as print and visual biographical materials commemorating his life.
The Carter family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to The Carter Center, 453 John Lewis Freedom Parkway N.E., Atlanta, GA 30307.
This is a continuation of Scottie’s request that I do a post on a thought a day.
This will be similar to yesterday’s thought about how we are being manipulated; conditioned to react on provided “facts” rather than thinking for ourselves and considering the reason and rationale behind what we see on the news and social media. I think on it as the old “slight of hand” trick used by magicians: watch this so you don’t see that.
We recently had the head of the NCAA testifying in front of Congress. Sure enough, the “Trans Issue” came up. Come to find out, there are over 510,000 athletes in the NCAA, and “less than 10” are trans. Think on that: that is approximately .00196% of a chance of even meeting, much less knowingly meeting, a trans athlete in the locker-room. I cannot imagine the chance of being assaulted by a trans athlete in the “wrong” locker-room, but it would be staggeringly thin. So, my question is more along the line of – why is there fear?
One of the things I learned from my own life, news and social media is that there are all too often people very ready to find fault, to belittle, to hope to destroy someone if for no other reason than to make themselves seem more palatable.
In truth, I’ve found those with the greatest hurts, the most obvious injury, the hardest struggle, to most often be the most honorable. They understand pain because they deal with it, they live with it, and in the struggle to overcome it they grow from it.
It is somehow the ones who hold a stiff veneer over a rotten core that strike out like a scared chihuahua trying to get the hurt in on others before their own vulnerabilities show.
I don’t have any answers to those who strive to be genuine in their lives and still take part in our world, except admiration. They have cleared hurdles in their life while others seem only willing to stand to the side and criticize. What I would answer is that I question the motives of those who seek to destroy another’s life.
Billionaire tRump supporters running the government, running the newspapers, running pretty much everything now. Sounds familiar.
Ahhh…yes, Nancy Mace’s state.
“I object to being designated as the national bird on the eve of the country being handed over to turkeys.”
I screwed up with this post and I will look to see if there are others. This is an offense to trans people and I understand why. It is also offensive to gay men when they are depicted as submissive females. I really dropped the ball on this and thank Janet and Ali who called me out on it. Be low is Janet’s comment. I post it with her permission. I apologize for my error. Hugs
Re: President Musk and his First Lady
I would ask that we not misgender Trump. As much as I hate him, that is reinforcing of the root of anti-trans woman transphobia. That being feminine is “less than” is straight up misogyny. Never mind that the “man in a dress” imagery is direct from the anti-trans playbook.
I would ask that liberals not stoop to their level. I believe that you don’t mean it that way, but it nevertheless normalizes and reinforces that thought pattern.
The collection of memes is excellent otherwise.
Again I appreciate it when my viewers point out my own short sightedness, my own shortcomings. I also have much to learn but I admit that I did not catch this myself irritates me greatly. Hugs
On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.
As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.
Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.
As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.
What haunts me is the night of December 28.
On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.
In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka’s band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.
But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka’s band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn’t sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.
And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment from a slight rise above the camp.
For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?
On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
But it is never too late to change the future.
—
Note:
Every year on this date, I post the story of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
My book about that event was so hard to write I had to take a long break in the middle of it. When you write a book, you get to know your characters as if they were family. Sometimes you love them and sometimes you don’t, but they become part of you. As the massacre drew inexorably closer, I wrote about the scenery, plant life, and animals of the Plains as a distraction from what I knew was coming.
But it came anyway. Even after all these years, I still have a hard time on the date of the massacre.
In an interview this year, someone asked me why I write as if I am running out of time, and it hit me that I write these letters because no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop the Wounded Knee Massacre.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico is developing a cellphone app that will allow migrants to warn relatives and local consulates if they think they are about to be detained by the U.S. immigration department, a senior official said Friday.
The move is in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to carry out mass deportations after he takes office on Jan. 20.
The app has been rolled out for small-scale testing and “appears to be working very well,” said Juan Ramón de la Fuente, Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs.
He said the app would allow users to press a tab that would send an alert notification to previously chosen relatives and the nearest Mexican consulate. De la Fuente described it as a sort of panic button.
“In case you find yourself in a situation where detention is imminent, you push the alert button, and that sends a signal to the nearest consulate,” he said.
U.S. authorities are obliged to give notice to home-country consulates when a foreign citizen is detained. Mexico says it has beefed up consular staff and legal aid to help migrants in the legal process related to deportation.
De la Fuente expects the app to be rolled out in January. He didn’t say whether the app has a de-activation tab that would allow someone to rescind an alert if they weren’t really detained.
The government says it has also set up a call center staffed 24 hours a day to answer migrants’ questions.
The Mexican government estimates there are 11.5 million migrants with some form of legal residency in the United States, and 4.8 million without legal residency or proper documents.
December 29, 1890 The U.S. Army killed approximately 300 Miniconju Sioux (another of the Teton Sioux tribes). They had fled after the murder of Sitting Bull and sought refuge on the Oglala reservation of Pine Ridge at Wounded Knee, in the new state of South Dakota. The 7th Cavalry (Custer’s old command) fired their artillery amidst mostly unarmed women, children, and fleeing men. The Wounded Knee Massacre was the final major military battle in the genocide against Native Americans. 18 soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor for their “bravery.” Encroaching white settlement after gold was found in 1874 on Sioux lands led to conflicts. The Great Sioux Agreement of 1889 established reservations for the native inhabitants and encouraged further white settlement on Indian land.
December 29, 1996 War-weary guerrilla and government leaders in Guatemala signed an accord ending 36 years of civil conflict. What was the conflict all about?
Scottie's Playtime 
Re: President Musk and his First Lady
I would ask that we not misgender Trump. As much as I hate him, that is reinforcing of the root of anti-trans woman transphobia. That being feminine is “less than” is straight up misogyny. Never mind that the “man in a dress” imagery is direct from the anti-trans playbook.
I would ask that liberals not stoop to their level. I believe that you don’t mean it that way, but it nevertheless normalizes and reinforces that thought pattern.
The collection of memes is excellent otherwise.
Again I appreciate it when my viewers point out my own short sightedness, my own shortcomings. I also have much to learn but I admit that I did not catch this myself irritates me greatly. Hugs