Suicide at fed jail
Med examiner says inmate hanged self
An inmate at Brooklyn’s federal jail whose death in May was shrouded in mystery hanged himself, the city’s medical examiner determined Tuesday.
Kenneth Houck, 44, who was being detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center on possession of child porn charges, died May 19 at NYU Langone Hospital.
Houck’s family told the Daily News in June they’d been left in the dark by the federal Bureau of Prisons about Houck’s condition, and weren’t even aware he was in the hospital until they were notified by an organ donor representative.
Family members rushed to the hospital and were able to see Houck before he died. Even then, the family told The News, they felt his death was suspicious.
Houck, who was gay, had previously been beaten by other inmates at a federal jail in Philadelphia in 2011. He sued the Bureau of Prisons for $40 million in that case.
“The [Bureau of Prisons] allowed a brutal assault of me to occur by not giving me protection,” Houck wrote in court papers in 2015, alleging that he was reading an LGBT book when two other inmates came into his cell and assaulted him.
The report from the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner determined Houck’s death was a suicide by hanging; it provided no further information.
In May, the Bureau of Prisons reported Houck was discovered by jail staff “unresponsive” on May 15, and that he died four days later in the hospital. The press release didn’t mention that Houck hanged himself.
“Houck’s death — a pretrial prisoner charged with a sex offense and held in solitary confinement who dies in ‘unknown circumstances’ later ruled to be suicide — raises the same questions as Jeffrey Epstein’s death,” said Federal Defenders lawyer Deirdre Von Dornum.
“But this time, Attorney General [William] Barr has not come to the prison. This time, no investigation has been announced and the warden has not been transferred. The [Bureau of Prisons} could not hide Epstein’s death, as they are trying to do with Houck’s.”
Weeks after Houck’s death, Jamel Floyd, another Metropolitan Detention Center detainee, died hours after after he was pepper-sprayed in his cell. The medical examiner has not yet ruled on the cause of Floyd’s death.
Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor Houck’s family immediately responded to requests for comment on the findings.