Rikers detainee’s death disputed
/
A 31-year-old man died following a disputed incident on Rikers Island. Department of Correction’s officials say he suffered a heart attack, but an autopsy shows he died of an apparent skull fracture. The DOC has denied any wrongdoing. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
For the third time this year, and the 22nd time since Mayor Eric Adams and Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina took office, a person held at Rikers Island has died.
The circumstances of 31-year-old Joshua Valles’ death have yet to be confirmed and have been disputed. Department of Correction officials say that he suffered a heart attack while being held on Rikers Island on May 20 and later died at Elmhurst Hospital on Monday. The embattled agency has denied any wrongdoing in Valles’ death.
But according to a Wednesday letter to federal Judge Laura Swain from the federal monitor appointed to oversee conditions on Rikers, Valles was found to have died of a fractured skull.
Valles was one of four men mentioned in a special report filed in court by Steve Martin, the federal monitor, on Friday. Like the other four incidents detailed in the report, the circumstances that led to his death were not properly reported by the Department of Correction, according to Martin.
In the Friday report, which was filed before Valles’ death, Martin said that DOC Commissioner Louis Molina denied that Valles’ decline in health was attributable to any actions taken by Rikers staff.
But the DOC has yet to account for Valles’ skull fracture, which was found by an autopsy to be his apparent cause of death. DOC press officials have declined to issue a statement on the death attributable to Molina, a normal practice when a detainee dies. Valles was “released on his own recognizance” just prior to his death, according to the DOC.
In the Wednesday letter to Swain, Martin said that the autopsy’s finding stood in “stark contrast to the headache or ‘non-incident related condition or injury’ that was reported in the unit logbook.”
On May 20, Valles allegedly told staff at the Anna M. Kross Center on Rikers that he was experiencing headaches, according to a logbook entry reviewed by the monitor.
Molina later told Martin that Valles “left the unit on his own power” before he “quickly took a turn for the worse,” according to the monitor’s report. He was taken to Elmhurst Hospital and was put on life support, before dying on Monday.
His condition was not reported to the monitor until May 22, after the monitor had received “an external allegation that this individual was in the hospital and on life support.”
Molina also told Martin that he believed that there was “no official wrongdoing” on the part of DOC officials, but added that they knew of few other details regarding the incident.
“It is unclear how the department was able to reach the conclusion that there was ‘no departmental wrongdoing’ given the limited information available about the underlying incident,” the monitor said in his Friday report. “As the monitoring team received no further details regarding the incident other than that which is stated herein, the monitoring team is unable to assess the incident and the veracity of the department’s claims.”
Martin doubled down on that claim in his Wednesday letter to Swain.
“[I]t remains unclear how the commissioner could have concluded in his letter to the monitor dated May 26, 2023 that there was no departmental wrong doing related to this incident, including that there is no evidence that anyone ‘submitted a false report or attempted to cover up wrongdoing,’ and that, more generally, this incident did not raise serious questions regarding security, supervision, and management of individuals in custody,” the monitor said.
“There is no question that investigation of this incident is necessary and that the commissioner’s conclusions about this incident reported to the monitoring team are premature, at best,” he added.
Valles’ confinement at Rikers Island began in April. According to the monitor, Valles got into a fight with other incarcerated individuals shortly after being admitted to the jail, but no injuries stemming from the event were reported.
According to reporting by Hell Gate, Valles was held on Rikers on a $10,000 bail, which was able to be set because of changes to the state’s bail laws pushed for by Governor Kathy Hochul and passed into law by the State Senate and Assembly in 2022.
Valles, who reportedly struggled with drug addiction, had an open case for two theft charges when he was arrested on April 7, again for theft related charges, Hell Gate reported.
Though all of the charges against him were non-violent offenses, and not bail eligible on their own, recent law changes allow for bail to be set against individuals who rack up a second offense that causes harm to someone else’ property.
On Wednesday, Swain granted a request made by attorneys with the Legal Aid Society to hold a conference to discuss Valles’ death, as well as the four other near-fatal and fatal incidents described by the monitor in last week’s report.
In ordering the June 13 conference, Swain called the incidents “disturbing” and said they “highlighted dangerous conditions and unsafe practices, as well as grave concerns related to transparency and the reporting of information to the monitoring team.”
The Legal Aid Society, which represents the plaintiff class in the civil rights case that resulted in the implementation of the federal monitor, has twice called for Swain to implement a federal receiver to take over day-to-day management of Rikers Island. The judge has twice denied that request, and has instead entrusted the DOC and the federal monitor to create and implement an “action plan” to improve conditions in the historically unsafe jail complex. Last year, 19 people died on Rikers Island, the highest death toll in a decade. Over three dozen detainees have died in the jail dating back to 2021, when multiple ongoing crises worsened by the pandemic began to mount.
But the Legal Aid Society said in a statement on Wednesday that the DOC can no longer be trusted to run the jails, citing the monitor’s report detailing the commissioner’s attempt to allegedly suppress the five serious incidents and a recent change in policy to revoke remote video access to the Board of Correction, the DOC’s oversight body.
“This administration has taken extraordinary measures in the last several months to keep secret the violence that it inflicts on people held behind its closed doors, and must be held accountable to the federal court and the public,” the Legal Aid Society said. “The attempts to hide the shocking brutality described in the monitor’s reports — by failing to report incidents through normal jail reporting channels, withholding information from a court-appointed monitor, prematurely claiming ‘no foul play’ in a death later revealed to be caused by a skull fracture — cannot be countenanced.”
“The culture of impunity and violence in New York City jails persists unabated and will continue to do so until an authority independent of the city, such as a federal receiver, is permitted to intervene and do what this administration cannot or will not do to address the ongoing catastrophe plaguing the Department of Correction,” they added. “We look forward to reading the city’s report ordered by the court and hearing an accounting for these atrocities at the conference.”
