CORREX DEPT. FAILURES CITED IN REPORT ON INMATE DEATH
Cells not properly checked night of suspected OD
A correction officer responsible for checking cells at Rikers Island failed to properly tour the jail unit where a Nepali man died of a suspected drug overdose, the city Board of Correction says in a preliminary report obtained by the Daily News.
The officer didn’t do required rounds and check inside each cell with a flashlight over three predawn hours Oct. 5 before Manish Kunwar, 27, was found dead in his cell in a mental health observation unit at the Eric M. Taylor Center, the board’s report said.
The officer was suspended, and a correction captain was placed on desk duty following Kunwar’s death.
The records also show there was no suicide prevention aide in the observation unit when Kunwar died. A suicide prevention aide is a detainee responsible for checking the unit’s cells.
Because there was no such aide, the unit’s floor officer was supposed to tour every 15 minutes.
For hours, those tours didn’t happen, says the Board of Correction report.
The board’s “staff review of [security video] confirmed the B post [floor] officer failed to walk the unit to perform checks of signs of life” between 1:34 a.m. and 4:34 a.m., said the report, which The News obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request.
Kunwar was finally discovered at 5:37 a.m. when other officers arrived to distribute breakfast and knocked on his cell door, the report said.
They could not see inside the cell because Kunwar had placed a sheet over a window.
Officers opened the cell door and found him lying faceup on his bed unresponsive.
Medical staff arrived within five minutes and gave him four doses of Narcan, but it was too late.
He was pronounced dead at
6:20 a.m., but he likely had died much earlier.
When they flipped him over, fluid and blood poured from his mouth onto the bed and floor of the cell, the report said.
The last time Kunwar was seen alive outside his cell was before the 9 p.m. lock-in on Oct. 4, a detainee told Board of Correction investigators.
The detainee’s statement to the board tracks with findings of the city medical examiner conveyed to The News by a friend of Kunwar — that the detainee was last seen alive on video at 8:26 p.m.
A search of Kunwar’s housing area conducted 12 hours after his death found no contraband, the report said.
The report said Board of Correction investigators could not determine the last time the unit was searched. A logbook did not show any searches from July 1 up to the day Kunwar died.
The city medical examiner’s office has yet to issue a cause of death.
Correction Department spokeswoman Annais Morales declined to comment on the Board of Correction report, saying an investigation was ongoing.
She did not respond to a question about the extent to which suicide prevention aides are generally present in the jails.
Following the suicide of Erick Tavira in October 2022, it was revealed there were no suicide prevention aides checking cells in Tavira’s unit as well.
Kunwar’s death was the ninth and most recent in the jails in 2023, following 19 in 2022 and 16 in 2021.
He immigrated to the Big Apple from Nepal in 2016 after winning a diversity visa, a program in which the U.S. makes 50,000 visas a year available in a lottery, a relative previously told The News.
From there, he moved from place to place and developed drug and mental health issues. He was also homeless for periods.
“He had been fighting the illness and drugs and alcohol a long time. He always wanted to do something to better his life,” said Kunwar’s friend and fellow countryman Anup Thapaliya, 55.
He was arrested in Queens in July 2022 for involvement in a knifepoint robbery.
He did not show up for court and ended up in Baltimore then Delaware, where he was arrested on the warrant and sent to Rikers Island on Sept 28.
Seven days later, he was dead.