Daniel Prude’s son said that when his dad was lying naked on the streets of Rochester, N.Y., on a snowy night in March 2020, what he needed was help with a mental health crisis.
Instead, the police officers called to provide that help handcuffed Prude, shrouded him in a hood and jammed a knee in his back — pressing his chest into the pavement until he vomited inside the hood, stopped breathing and passed out.
Prude, 41, never woke up and died seven days later.
Now, more than 2½ years later, his family members said they have successfully held the city of Rochester and its police department accountable. On Thursday, city officials announced it had agreed to pay $12 million to settle a federal lawsuit filed by Prude’s family, who said his death exposed deep flaws in the way law enforcement responds to mental health crises. A federal judge in western New York approved the settlement on Thursday.
Seven police officers were suspended in Rochester, N.Y., after a video showed police officers placing a hood on Daniel Prude, who later died. (Video: The Washington Post)
“Nothing can ever truly compensate me and my siblings for the killing of our father by the Rochester police,” Nathaniel McFarland said in a statement to The Washington Post, but “resolving this case is a step in the right direction.”
“Communities need to know that there will be at least some accountability when police kill people like my dad, whose only crime was needing help,” he added.
Rochester’s mayor, Malik Evans (D), who was not in office at the time of Prude’s death, called the settlement “the best decision” for the city.
Seven police officers suspended after video shows hood placed on head of Black man who later died
About 3 a.m. on March 23, 2020, Joe Prude called 911 to report that his brother, while visiting from Chicago, had just bolted out into the freezing cold without shoes or a coat, according to a release from Prude’s family. Police found him about a half-hour later, walking naked in the street while he was “clearly both disoriented and agitated,” according to his family.
“He was also clearly unarmed,” the release states.
Body-camera video shows an officer ordering Prude to drop to the ground and put his hands behind his back. Prude obeyed and allowed police to handcuff him, but then got upset, according to the footage. When an officer came up behind Prude to put a spit hood over his head without warning, he started rolling on the ground and begging officers to take it off.
“They stood around telling jokes and mocking him while he remained naked on the freezing pavement crying out for help,” lawyers representing Prude’s family said in the release.
Multiple officers then pinned Prude to the asphalt. One placed his hands on Prude’s head, pushing down with his full weight, while another jammed a knee into Prude’s back.
After several minutes, Prude went quiet. Paramedics arrived and removed the hood and handcuffs before doing CPR. Eleven minutes after officers first came across Prude, paramedics took him — by then, unresponsive — to the hospital. He died March 30.
The release of the body-camera video five months later sparked a national uproar. Seven officers were suspended. Then-Mayor Lovely Warren (D) apologized at a news conference, saying that Prude was “failed by our police, our mental health system, our society and me.”
In September 2020, a 10-page report concluded that the Rochester Police Department’s reaction to Prude’s death revealed a “culture of insularity, acceptance and, quite frankly, callousness.” The officers involved displayed a “cavalier and unsympathetic attitude” toward the man they had killed, while their superiors did not seriously investigate their conduct, according to the report, which ultimately led to the police chief being fired and two top-ranking city officials being suspended.
Report: Daniel Prude’s death shows a culture of ‘callousness’ in Rochester Police Dept.
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Last year, Prude’s family members filed their federal lawsuit against the city, alleging civil rights violations, gross negligence and wrongful death.
“I placed a phone call for my brother to get help, not for my brother to get lynched,” Joe Prude said at a news conference in September 2020 while wearing a shirt that read “Justice 4 Daniel Prude.”
In February 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) announced that a grand jury had declined to indict any of the officers involved. James said she was disappointed in the outcome and denounced “a system that at its core is broken.”
On Thursday, Prude’s children said although their lawsuit against the city is over, their work on their father’s behalf is not. One of their lawyers, Adam Ingber, encouraged state lawmakers to pass a bill known as Daniel’s Law, legislation that would provide for trained mental health professionals, rather than police officers, to respond to mental health crises like the one Prude was going through on March 23, 2020.
“Passing Daniel’s Law is an essential reform of a broken system,” Ingber said.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/07/daniel-prude-death-lawsuit-settlement/