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Daniel Prude’s Death: Police Silence and Accusations of a Cover-Up


In the minutes after Daniel Prude’s heart briefly stopped during a struggle with officers who had pulled a hood over his head, an unofficial police narrative took hold: He had suffered a drug overdose.

That account hardened when the police chief in Rochester, N.Y., told the mayor that a man in custody was in the hospital after taking PCP, or angel dust.

Mr. Prude died a week later, on March 30, but the Rochester police department offered no public comment in response, continuing to treat his death as an overdose. An extended period of silence followed, beginning in Rochester and leading all the way to the state capital. It ended this week with deepening scrutiny of the long-overlooked case and accusations from Mr. Prude’s family that the city and state have engaged in a cover-up.

Mr. Prude’s death drew national attention on Wednesday after his family released police body camera footage, obtained through a public records request, that showed Mr. Prude surrounded by police officers, naked, handcuffed and held facedown in the street, wearing the hood.

He was under the influence of PCP, and having a psychotic episode. Mr. Prude seemed lucid at times but at other points asked for money or a gun. He did not resist arrest and was unarmed.

The Rochester police chief this week denied that he and the department had misled the public. But an examination by The New York Times of the official response to Mr. Prude’s death shows that police and city officials in Rochester withheld information about their handling of the case.

When Mr. Prude died, the police issued no news release. No publicity followed a county autopsy in mid-April that determined that the manner of death was homicide, and found that Mr. Prude, 41, had suffered “complications of asphyxia,” with the PCP a contributing factor.

An internal investigation in late April quickly cleared the officers involved of any wrongdoing; its findings were never disclosed. (The seven officers involved were suspended only on Thursday.)

Despite a national debate over race and law enforcement, state officials made little effort to bring attention to Mr. Prude’s death. The state attorney general’s office did not disclose that it was investigating the case until this week, though it said it does not generally announce such inquiries until they are concluded.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s only public mention of the case before this week came on July 15, three months after a county medical examiner had ruled it a homicide, when the governor issued an order formally declaring that the attorney general had jurisdiction.

Credit…via Prude Family

And even as the nation erupted in outrage over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in Minneapolis after a police officer held a knee to his neck, New Yorkers were kept in the dark about another death in police custody.

Days after Mr. Floyd’s death, state prosecutors asked a City of Rochester lawyer to withhold body camera footage from the public because releasing such evidence would interfere with the office’s investigation, the mayor’s office said on Thursday.

The attorney general’s office denied this, noting that the city and the Rochester police department were “free to move forward with their own investigation.” Rochester city officials, however, repeated their assertion on Friday.

A combination of factors may have ultimately caused Mr. Prude’s death, according to the medical examiner’s report. But the release by Mr. Prude’s family of officers’ body camera footage from that night — showing a naked Black man, handcuffed and hooded in the falling snow — radically complicated the police narrative.

His death added another name to the list of Black people, including Mr. Floyd and Breonna Taylor, who lost their lives after police encounters, leading to unrest in the nation’s streets and providing a potent issue in the 2020 presidential election.

The events leading to the stark images from the body cameras began March 22, when Mr. Prude, a father of five from Chicago, arrived at his brother’s home in Rochester. He had been kicked off an Amtrak train in Buffalo, about 75 miles to the west, and he appeared deeply troubled, seeming to hallucinate and trying to hurt himself by jumping down a flight of stairs, family members said.

His brother, Joe Prude, had him hospitalized that very day for evaluation, but the hospital released him hours later.

“So, PCP can cause what we call ‘excited delirium,’” she said, as recorded on an officer’s body camera. “I guarantee you that’s how he coded. It’s not you guys’ fault. You’ve got to keep yourselves safe.”

No one disagreed.

Later that day, the Rochester police chief, La’Ron Singletary, told Lovely Warren, the mayor, “that Mr. Prude had an apparent drug overdose while in custody,” Ms. Warren said in a statement this week. “Chief Singletary never informed Mayor Warren of the actions his officers took to forcibly restrain Mr. Prude,” the statement said.

The Rochester Police Department did not return repeated calls and emails for comment on Friday. Chief Singletary insisted on Wednesday that the police were not hiding anything.

“I know that there is a rhetoric that is out there that this is a cover-up,” the chief said. “This is not a cover-up.”

While Mr. Prude was in the hospital, his brother — forbidden to visit because of concerns over the coronavirus — could find out little about his condition.

He called a lawyer’s office, and on April 3, the family filed an open records request with the Rochester Police Department seeking footage from the body cameras and a request that any evidence in the encounter with Mr. Prude be preserved, according to the lawyer, Elliot Shields.

Ms. James’s office bluntly denied that.

“There was never a request from the attorney general’s office to the City of Rochester corporation counsel to withhold information about the events surrounding the death of Daniel Prude, plain and simple,” a spokeswoman for the office said in a statement.

Mr. Shields, the Prude family’s lawyer, was still awaiting the videos he had requested from the Rochester police when he and family members, including Mr. Prude’s father, were invited to view those same videos in the attorney general’s office on July 31. The footage was horrifying, Mr. Shields said.

“It was honestly the most difficult thing I’ve ever done as an attorney,” he said. “I thought the father was going to die of an asthma attack. He had the inhaler out. He couldn’t breathe. It was horrible.”

On Aug. 4, the Rochester corporation counsel reviewed the camera footage before releasing it to Mr. Shields and the Prude family, and shared it with the mayor for the first time. It was the first time she learned officers had struggled with Mr. Prude, more than four months after that night, she said this week.

The release of the videos on Wednesday brought the first public comments from Mr. Cuomo and Ms. James.

But Ms. Warren, a lawyer, also blamed herself, saying that she had approached the case — and the investigation — in “the mind-set of an attorney, and not necessarily the mind-set of a human being.”

“What I saw in that video,” the mayor said, “was a man who needed help, a man who needed compassion, a man who needed humanity, a man who we should have respected, a man who was in crisis.

“Our response to him,” she concluded, “was wrong.”



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