An Inmate Died After a Struggle With Guards. Here’s How We Found Out. - The New York Times

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The rapper Cardi B posted on social media earlier this year about an inmate who died in a prison in upstate New York. She and the man’s family suspected foul play.

I’m a reporter on The New York Times’s Metro desk covering criminal courts and jails, so my editor asked me to look into it. The rapper’s message was intriguing, and holding the criminal justice system accountable is central to what journalists do.

I reached out to a nonprofit that tracks abuses of inmates, but the executive director said she did not have much information about that inmate’s death. She had, however, received a prison letter about another man who had died under questionable circumstances: John McMillon. I added it to a list of things to follow up on.

That afternoon, I read through a stack of prison mail sent to The Times, searching for information about the first inmate. (We receive multiple letters a week from inmates.) Again, I ran across Mr. McMillon’s name: A fellow inmate wrote that Mr. McMillon had been the victim of a vicious beating by guards. Was it a coincidence?

Within hours, still seeking information about the first inmate, I phoned a civil rights lawyer, and he, too, mentioned Mr. McMillon’s death, saying one of his clients had called to tell him he witnessed the assault.

Deaths in prison are notoriously difficult to investigate, and figuring out what happened comes down to an officer’s word against an inmate’s. But three reports from three separate sources was a strong lead, so I spent the next several months trying to determine what exactly happened to Mr. McMillon. The answer? It depended on whom I asked.

On Jan. 22, according to a state autopsy, Mr. McMillon suffered a heart attack and died after a struggle with guards that evening at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility. The correction officers said Mr. McMillon had lunged at them and was behaving erratically. A local district attorney said video footage supported the guards’ account. But inmates said they saw a brutal beating by guards that left him bloodied and dead.

Mr. McMillon, 67, had schizophrenia and epilepsy, and had been previously disciplined for attacking a guard at another prison in 2017, state records show.

Great Meadow, where Mr. McMillon had been an inmate, is a maximum-security prison more than 200 miles north of New York City with a history of violence.

Nine inmates all said Mr. McMillon had been beaten, including four that I interviewed at Great Meadow and at another prison (though all were at Great Meadow at the time of the struggle). The others had spoken to prisoners’ rights groups and state investigators, and their statements to each matched.

Inmates are typically cautious about speaking out about brutality because they often fear retaliation by guards. I interviewed the inmates separately over several weeks to avoid arousing suspicion, traveling nearly four hours upstate toward the Vermont border each time. (The guards did get suspicious, and I stopped after speaking to four inmates for fear of making them vulnerable to retribution.)

I showed up to prison for interviews as a visitor instead of making a formal request as a reporter, in which case I most likely would have been assigned an escort. Because I was visiting as a general member of the public, I could not bring a pen and pad with me. I repeated questions and asked inmates to repeat their answers so that I could memorize their responses. Afterward, I would rush to get out of the prison and to my car to quickly scribble down what they had told me.

I waited in visiting rooms with mothers and their children, and parents waiting to see incarcerated loved ones. Each time an inmate arrived, I would lean in and say who I was and why I was there. I immediately asked the inmates if they were comfortable speaking with me and how they felt about going on the record with their names. One of them, Pernell Griffin, said he was retaliated against after he spoke to investigators, but still insisted I use his name.

My first interview was with Ricardo Rosado, the inmate who had written to The Times. I asked him why he felt compelled to say anything at all.

“If it had happened to me,” he said, “I would want someone to do the same thing.”

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