By Jon Moss
syracuse.com
ALBANY, N.Y. — State officials are moving to fire four more employees as authorities continue to investigate the death of an inmate who was brutally beaten by guards at a Central New York prison.
The four employees were identified Thursday by the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision as Sgts. Christine Ploss and Evan Thisse, corrections officer Jared Popiel and nurse Patricia Matos. The employees have been sent notices of discipline and suspended without pay.
Gov. Kathy Hochul had previously ordered 14 state employees involved in the beating — one a nurse, the rest corrections officers — to be fired. One of the corrections officers has resigned.
Multiple corrections officers were caught on video repeatedly punching and kicking the inmate, Robert L. Brooks, in the groin, abdomen, face and back in the infirmary at Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County on Dec. 9 . He was left bloodied and died six hours later at a Utica hospital.
The beating was recorded on video by body cameras worn by four of the guards that was later released by the state Attorney General’s Office. None of the officers had turned on the cameras, but 30 minutes of video was passively recorded without audio.
Several of the officers are defendants in lawsuits alleging other cases of abuse against inmates, including one contending the Marcy prison has a “beat-up squad.”
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An autopsy conducted Dec. 11 by the Onondaga County Medical Examiner’s Office showed Brooks suffered extensive bruising, a broken nose bone and bleeding in his genitals and neck. It also showed “concerns for asphyxia due to compression of the neck as cause of death, as well as the death being due to the actions of another,” troopers wrote in a court filing.
A final cause and manner of death has not been released.
Hochul visited the Marcy prison last month and named a new, permanent superintendent for the facility. She also announced a variety of initiatives to improve the larger state prison system.
A criminal investigation had been led at first by the state Attorney General’s Office, but has since been taken over by Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick. He was appointed last week as a special prosecutor in the case.
Multiple federal and state agencies have opened investigations into the beating.
Brooks, originally of Greece in Monroe County, was sentenced in 2017 to 12 years in prison on a first-degree assault charge. He was arrested after stabbing his girlfriend multiple times.
He had been held in the Mohawk Correctional Facility, records show, but was moved the day of the assault to the Marcy prison. State prison officials have declined to say why the transfer happened.
The prison is a medium-security facility located in Oneida County, about seven miles west of Utica. It had 846 inmates as of Dec. 1, records show.
An independent monitoring group, the Correctional Association of New York, has identified issues in the past at the prison.
The group interviewed more than 100 inmates in fall 2022 and said inmates reported rampant abuse by employees. A “pervasive culture of fear and retaliation” was observed, the group wrote in its report.
The 14 employees previously ordered to be fired by the governor were corrections officers Mathew Galliher, Nicholas Anzalone, David Kingsley, Nicholas Kieffer, Robert Kessler, Michael Fisher, Christopher Walrath, Michael Along, Shea Schoff, David Walters and Anthony Farina; Sgts. Michael Mashaw and Glenn Trombley and nurse Kyle Dashnaw.
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