NYC Rikers officer cleared of wrongdoing after city pays $9 million to detainee who nearly died in jail attack

After stopping a violent attack by a mentally ill Rikers Island prisoner on another inmate in November 2019, corrections officer Charlie Bracey returned home satisfied that he had saved a life.

Bracey pulled Jorge Gutierrez off Sean McDermott when Gutierrez punched McDermott 185 times with a cast in the corral at the Anna M. Cross Center. “I reacted as quickly as possible … I don’t see what I could have done differently,” Bracey told Daily News.

But after the city paid a $9 million settlement to a detainee with horrific injuries, Bracey nearly lost his job.

“Sometimes when the city pays, they want someone else to pay. And they wanted it to be him,” his lawyer, David Kirsch, told the city administrative law judge who heard Bracey’s case and decided to reinstate him in late 2022.

Correctional officer Charlie Bracey with his lawyer David Kirsch in Long Island.

Kirsch called the attack “Rikers Island’s absolute systemic failure” caused by a lack of personnel.

“All Charlie Bracey did was save this prisoner who may have died that day. The city should have praised him,” Kirsch said.

Bracey, now 53, joined Cross Center, Rikers Island’s largest prison, on November 27, 2019, in his regular “screening” position, in charge of moving inmates held in two pens to medical appointments. clinic.

He learned that there was no officer who could work as a “clinical forwarder” – a separate post that notifies detainees when it is their turn to escort them to an appointment and oversees two detainee pens. Gutierrez and McDermott were in one of those paddocks.

Bracey alerted his boss, Captain Mohammad Shanu, just as he had before when he was appointed to two different posts.

Anna M. Cross Center

Shanu told him to get by.

“The institution was always understaffed, and I advised Bracey to do everything possible to fill both positions,” Shanu later testified at Bracey’s trial.

Staffing issues have gripped the Department of Corrections even before the known absences and shortages of workers that occurred during and after the Covid pandemic.

The number of uniformed DOC employees decreased by 6% in the pre-pandemic years, from 10,862 in 2017 to 10,189 in 2019. But according to figures released by the city comptroller, that year there were about 2,250 more officers than detainees. In 2019, the average daily prison population was 7,938.

“We had a shortage of personnel, and I don’t think anyone realized how bad it was. People were retiring or retiring and there was a period when the academy didn’t have classes to replace them,” Bracey said.

“It was becoming a common situation,” Bracey said in court testimony. “At this point, the guards were gambling. After all, something had to go wrong. I knew that in the end something would go wrong.”

New York Correctional Commissioner Louis Molina

While Bracey performed his tasks, Gutiérrez began attacking McDermott in the No. 2 corral, hitting him in the head and face with a plaster cast covering his right arm and slamming him against the metal railing.

According to his testimony, Bracey accompanied the detainees to the clinic and did not immediately learn about the attack. According to Kirsch, the clinic is a large area, and there were walls and doors between the place where Bracey was located and the detainee pens.

More than a minute after the attack, Bracey walked past the pens to pick up another detainee and saw that the attack was continuing.

He pulled Gutierrez away from McDermott. Bracey said he did not think anyone would have stopped Gutierrez from attacking McDermott, but he believed that his “intervention would have come sooner if the position of clinic forwarder had been filled.”

Correctional Officer Charlie Bracey outside of Rikers Island in 2015.

Bracey did not hear from the incident again until about a year later, in November 2020, when he received several disciplinary actions for allegedly failing to respond to the attack.

It’s not the first time Bracey has been charged. In 2015, he was arrested on smuggling charges when a multi-tool was found in his backpack. The Bronx District Attorney’s office dropped the charges, but Bracey lost 15 compensatory days in a 2017 fine. Bracey said he left the tool in his backpack by mistake.

Lawyers for McDermott sued the city in Manhattan Federal Court in February 2021, alleging that Department of Correction officials knowingly placed the dangerous Gutierrez in McDermott’s cell and then failed to protect McDermott from the heinous attack, court records show.

Another year has passed. On February 22, 2022, during a pre-trial hearing in the Gutierrez assault disciplinary case, the Department of Corrections offered Bracey a plea deal for 25 lost vacation days. He agreed to make up 18 days of vacation lost.

The deal was formally signed by lawyers from the Department of Corrections and then by the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Judicial Affairs.

It then landed on the desk of Commissioner of Correction Louis Molina.

Meanwhile, on March 15, 2022, McDermott settled his $9 million lawsuit against the city, one of the largest settlements of its kind in the city’s history.

In April 2022, Molina rejected Bracey’s plea deal without a written explanation and insisted on Bracey’s firing.

In order for Bracey to keep his job, he had to stand trial.

“They wanted to show that they had done something,” Bracey said. “But I am the only breadwinner for my family. My wife had to give up her education career to take care of my daughter. So it was very stressful. You think you’re about to lose your livelihood.”

Bracey’s trial before Jonathan Vogel, a judge for the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, began September 22 and lasted three days in October and November.

“This is a very simple case. Can someone be in two places at the same time? I submit no. And that is why this man is innocent,” Kirsch said in his opening remarks.

During the trial, the three Department of Corrections lawyers assigned to the case relied on CCTV footage of the incident and called only one witness, Jason Walker, a city corrections officer and investigator with six years of experience.

A recent picture shows New York Correctional Officer Charlie Bracey who was accused of not being on duty while one inmate was nearly beaten to death by another inmate in 2019.

“Officer Bracey did not react quickly enough to stop the threat or to prevent the strangulation and/or assault on prisoner McDermott,” Walker testified.

But at a pivotal moment, Walker admitted that he had not interviewed all of the responding officers and did not fully understand the difference between the two posts, as the court transcript shows.

The case involved a nearly second-by-second analysis of surveillance video.

Lawyers for the Department of Corrections said the beating lasted for one minute and 17 seconds before Bracey intervened.

But Kirsch used the video to show that Bracey was able to intervene 29 seconds after first spotting the attack “out of the corner of his eye.”

Department of Corrections lawyer Nicole Tartak said in her closing remarks on November 10 that Bracey was slow to enter the cell and made a half-hearted attempt to separate the two men.

“What the court saw in this video is an officer who saw a deadly fight and chose to do nothing. Period,” said Tartak.

But the judge upheld Kirsch’s claim that Bracey acted in 29 seconds, not the minute the Department of Corrections claimed.

In his opinion, Kirsch called the Department of Corrections’ investigation “lazy and incompetent” and used a swear word to suggest that the Department made Bracey the scapegoat after having to pay McDermott so many millions.

Anna M. Cross Center

“I don’t want to swear, but this case is complete nonsense, the way it really is,” Kirsch said in court. “That’s really the only way I know how to characterize it.”

Judge Vogel recommended on December 29 that the charges be dropped.

“(Bracey’s) actions helped save McDermott’s life and prevented serious injury,” Vogel wrote. “Of the three officers present in the chamber, (Bracey) did the most to reduce the escalation of the attack. … He is an experienced officer who has shown common sense at the moment.”

On February 7, 2023, Molina signed the Vogel decision without comment. No punishment was imposed, which means that in the end, Bracey did not lose a single day of vacation and did not suffer any other punishment.

Department of Corrections officials did not answer a number of questions regarding why Molina pursued Bracey’s firing.

According to Kirsch, no one else has been charged and no official has been prosecuted for the personnel error that gave Gutierrez the opportunity to beat McDermott nearly to death and put Bracey’s career on the ice for three years.

Now without a disciplinary case, Bracey works at the cash register at the Cross Center, waiting to be brought back to work at the clinic where he once worked.

“I felt great relief. The decision showed how much the judge paid attention to every word spoken. I felt I was treated fairly in court,” Bracey said.

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