INSULT TO AGONY
Pols make ma of Rikers suicide vic wait to speak
The mother of a man who died in a city jail blasted the City Council on Thursday for making her wait seven hours to testify at a public hearing on the Rikers Island crisis.
When Tamara Carter finally got to speak Wednesday about the death of her son Brandon Rodriguez, high-ranking de Blasio administration and Correction Department officials — along with most Council members — had left the online-only hearing.
“It shows me they don’t care, and that breaks my heart,” Carter told the Daily News Thursday.
“At the end of the day, we are all grieving families. We should have been the ones to speak first. They didn’t care enough. It’s not about politics, it’s about the lives that are being lost on (Rikers) island.”
Five Council members and at least one Correction official were listening as she spoke, Councilman Keith Powers said during the hearing. Powers is chairman of the Council’s Criminal Justice Committee.
Carter’s endless wait was business as usual in Council hearings. Usually, Council members speak first, followed by city agency officials. Then, there are questions that can consume hours.
The regular folks are most of the time toward the bottom of the speaking list, as was the case for Carter — who says she learned of her son’s death on social media, before correction officials reached out to her.
Committee chairs sometimes move speakers up the order, a Council member explained to The News. The chair can make such a decision on the fly, the Council member said, or ask the Council speaker’s office to make the change.
“Usually, it’s negotiated with the speaker,” the member said. “If someone asks, the speaker can accommodate it.”
Rodriguez hung himself with a T-shirt in a shower stall where he was being held in the intake area at Otis Bantum center, officials and sources have said. His was one of 10 deaths on Rikers since December. The city medical examiner still has not ruled on his cause of death.
But an independent medical examination conducted by the family has determined Rodriguez’s body was also badly bruised and he had a fractured eye socket, their lawyer William Wagstaff told the Daily News.
Wagstaff said Rodriguez was violently extracted from his cell by correction staff and held for a long period in the shower stall despite his repeated pleas for medical attention.
“My understanding is that he was asking for medical care and he was refused medical attention,” Wagstaff said. “He was certainly in no condition to be in a shower cell on the floor. He should have been in a medical setting where he could convalesce.”
The Correction Department has yet to provide Rodriguez’s family
with its preliminary report into the circumstances around Rodriguez’s death — a document usually completed within a week after a death.
“Even if you don’t feel the report should be for public consumption, how can you justify claiming you care about families [if] the initial report is not available for the families to see?” Wagstaff said.
A correction spokeswoman said while preliminary reports are finished within five days, they are internal and are not released to families. Requests to release these documents have to be approved
by city lawyers, the spokeswoman said.
It was not lost on Carter that Mayor de Blasio didn’t appear at Wednesday’s hearing, though First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan did testify.
“He doesn’t come in to just say a few words, yet the night before he was at the Met Gala,” Carter said.
“How can he party the night before? It makes no sense. It’s been 35 days and my heart is still broken, and 35 days and we still have no answers.”