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J. B. Nicholas runs a news website called The Free Lance from his home in upstate New York, and, near the end of last year, he started obsessively tracking one story: a man confined at a state prison outside of Utica had died in early December after an encounter with correction officers. Reporting on a prison death can be tricky, but, in this case, there was evidence that rarely exists—video footage.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, promised to release the footage, and, shortly before noon on December 27th, Nicholas was seated at his computer, waiting for James’s virtual press conference to begin. Nicholas, who is fifty-five, brought unusual expertise to this story: he had spent twelve years in the state’s prison system, from 1991 to 2003, serving time for manslaughter.
James appeared on his computer monitor, framed by the U.S. and the New York State flags. She explained that the videos were from body-worn cameras that the officers had on “at the time of the incident.” The cameras had been powered on, but not activated, so the officers did not realize they were recording. “These videos are shocking and disturbing,” James said. “I encourage taking caution before viewing.”
In the footage, a forty-three-year-old Black man named Robert Brooks appears in prison greens. It is 9:21 P.M. on December 9th, and Brooks is outdoors, on a walkway at Marcy Correctional Facility. He is surrounded by officers. At 9:22 P.M., three of them carry him by his limbs—wrists cuffed behind him, head hanging down—into a building, and then into a room in the infirmary. Two stethoscopes hang on the wall by the door, next to a poster about how to aid a choking victim. The guards place Brooks on a gurney covered by exam paper. And then a group of officers, all of whom appear to be white, start beating him.
Most of the officers are dressed in blue uniform shirts and navy uniform jackets, with a U.S.-flag patch on one arm. At 9:25 P.M., one officer shoves what appears to be a rag into Brooks’s mouth. Another lifts him by the neck and repeatedly drops him on the gurney. A third officer strikes Brooks with Brooks’s own boot. An officer steadies himself by placing his hand on a counter, then stomps on Brooks’s groin. At 9:26 P.M., another officer enters the room and locks a pair of cuffs around Brooks’s ankles.
As the minutes tick by, and the beating continues, Brooks becomes increasingly bloodied and unresponsive. More than a dozen people either participate in or witness what is happening, but nobody intervenes. Nobody even seems particularly surprised or distraught. Two male nurses watch from the hall, and a camera captures them smirking.
At 9:32 P.M., the nurses enter the room. One stands next to Brooks’s limp body and attempts to find a pulse. The other reaches into a cupboard for an Ambu bag—a resuscitation device—that he will hook up to an oxygen tank. The nurses’ smiles have vanished. By “approximately 9:40,” it was later disclosed, Brooks was “clinically dead.”
Watching the footage at his desk, Nicholas was incensed. “It’s a snuff film—state-sanctioned, -sponsored, -broadcast snuff film—that should make everybody fucking furious!” he told me. “It was just confirmation of what we—we, meaning formerly incarcerated people—have known for decades: that this goes on regularly.”
Nicholas wrote quickly and decided on a headline:
In the weeks that followed, Nicholas worked non-stop. He heard that Attorney General James was seeking court orders to seize the firearms of some of the officers who had been involved, so he borrowed his girlfriend’s car and drove several hours to cover the proceedings. When he found himself far from home with no money for a hotel, he pulled out a tent and a sleeping bag and camped outdoors, in the middle of winter.
James had released two hours of video footage from four body-worn cameras, but, because it had been recorded in standby mode, there was no audio. In early January, Nicholas studied the footage second by second and published a “visual investigation” on YouTube—a fifteen-minute compilation, which he narrated, identifying each person by name and detailing his role in the assault.
Of all the correction officers who appear in the footage, one stands out: a tall man with a shaved head named Anthony Farina. At a certain point in Nicholas’s narration, he says, “There’s Farina stuffing the rag in Brooks’s mouth and then punching him repeatedly in the face.” (Months later, Farina’s lawyer claimed that his client had been trying to “wipe the face of Mr. Brooks,” to clean off pepper spray—not “stuffing something down his throat.”) At another point, Nicholas says, “There goes Farina stomping on Brooks’s genitals.”
James had promised to investigate Brooks’s death “thoroughly and swiftly,” but, on January 2nd, she recused herself from the case, because of a conflict of interest. Her office defends correction officers in civil lawsuits, and it was already representing a sergeant and three officers who had been present during Brooks’s beating and who had been sued by other incarcerated men alleging brutality. (In one instance, from the fall of 2024, the three officers were allegedly involved in a beating so violent that the victim was hospitalized for almost two weeks.) James referred the Brooks case to a special prosecutor, William Fitzpatrick, the longtime district attorney of Onondaga County.
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Jennifer Gonnerman
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