World
December 29, 2024 23:12
united states - Disturbing footage of a prisoner being beaten to death by correctional officers in the US has shocked the nation. The inmate, Robert Brooks, passed away a day after the brutal assault at Marcy Correctional Facility in New York.
The United States was shaken by the footage of correctional officers brutally beating a prisoner to death. Robert Brooks, a prisoner at Marcy Correctional Facility in northern New York, died on December 10th after being fatally beaten by prison guards.
Following an internal investigation, New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered the suspension of 13 officers and a prison nurse involved in the incident. New York Attorney General Letitia James has launched an investigation into Brooks' death, with police body camera footage of the incident leaving the nation deeply disturbed.
Released on Friday, the footage shows the 43-year-old inmate handcuffed in a medical examination room. Officers are seen trying to force something into the man's mouth before repeatedly hitting his face. Another officer punches the inmate in the groin and continues to strike his abdomen with a shoe. The torture escalates as one officer strangles the man, lifts him back up, and others continue to beat him.
Subsequently, two officers drag Brooks to the back right corner of the room, lean him against the wall, and at the video's end, the prisoner is no longer handcuffed, lying motionless on the table in his underwear while officers check his consciousness.
Brooks died a day after the officers' torture. Dr. Jeremy Faust, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, suggested that Brooks may have suffered a fatal spinal cord injury when officers lifted him off the table by his shirt. The cause of death is reported as "asphyxia due to neck compression" by BBC.
Brooks, who had been serving a 12-year sentence for first-degree assault since 2017, had no apparent reason for being taken to the prison's medical facility. There is no audio recording in the videos.
According to prison records, Brooks closed-circuit cameras were reportedly worn by the four police officers involved in the incident, but they did not activate the cameras, resulting in a lack of audio recordings of the incident.
Attorney Elizabeth Mazur, representing Brooks' family, stated, "Robert deserved to live, and everyone at Marcy Correctional Facility should not have to live in fear of the violence from prison staff."