Talked to News, put in solitary
An inmate at Brooklyn’s federal jail was thrown into solitary confinement for speaking out to the Daily News about the COVID-19 outbreak that has ravaged his unit in the lockup, his lawyer and the district’s top public defender said.
Felix Collazo, 40, spoke with The News on Dec. 10, days after he tested positive for coronavirus at the Metropolitan Detention Center. The News ran a story on Collazo the next day, detailing the conditions Collazo said he and other inmates were facing in Unit 73, the hardest-hit unit in the facility. Since then, his lawyer, Robert Radick, has gotten radio silence from his client — despite a scheduled legal phone call — and says in a letter to a Brooklyn Federal Court judge that he heard through “independent means” Collazo had been tossed into a solitary housing unit in the jail.
“There appears to be a straightforward but deeply concerning rationale behind the transfer of Mr. Collazo into segregation, especially during a time period when he needs medical attention,” Radick wrote in the Friday filing. “It appears that Mr. Collazo was moved into administrative segregation almost immediately after (and likely as a result of) the publication of an article in the New York Daily News [that] recounted Mr. Collazo’s candid first-hand observations of the conditions in the jail, the lack of adequate medical care, and the absence of preventative measures amidst the recent COVID-19 outbreak.”
Radick went on to argue that solitary confinement was the jail’s way of retaliating against his client “for having exercised his First Amendment right to openly discuss what is an important matter of public concern.”
The federal Bureau of Prisons did not respond to requests for comment.
Before he went dark, Collazo painted a disturbing picture of the troubled jail. He claimed that inmates were getting little to no medical treatment in his unit, with jail staff taking temperatures but doing nothing else.
Collazo — who pleaded guilty to a narcotics distribution charge last year — was tested twice for COVID-19, testing negative on Nov. 30, then positive on Dec. 4, he told The News.
He detailed how jail staff tried to separate sick and healthy inmates by moving the negatives to the upper tier of Unit 73 and the positives to the bottom tier. His desire to shed light on the situation got him punished, said the district’s top public defender. “After the Daily News story ran, clients on Unit 73 told us that Mr. Collazo was taken off the unit and placed in the SHU by officers who were talking angrily about the story,” said Deirdre Von Dornum of the Federal Defenders in Brooklyn.