Rikers detainee denied medical care after DOC driver crashed jail bus, suit alleges
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A former Rikers detainee accused the Department of Correction of failing to provide him medical care after the driver of a DOC bus crashed while the detainee was on his way to court. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
A Brooklyn man says he was denied medical care on Rikers Island after he was knocked unconscious in a car crash caused by the driver of a Department of Correction bus taking him to court, a new lawsuit filed in Queens alleges.
Terrence Wilkerson, a 31-year-old from Brooklyn, said in a lawsuit filed last week in Queens Supreme Court, Civil Term, that despite suffering a head injury and generally getting banged up in a crash allegedly caused by a DOC staffer, he was not taken to scheduled medical appointments on 19 different occasions, “denying him essential care and exacerbating his injuries.”
The lawsuit claims that Wilkerson, who has since been released from pre-trial detention, “still suffers from ongoing and worsened neck, back, and head pain [and] he is not able to move or exercise as he did prior to the bus accident.”
Wilkerson wouldn’t be the first to claim that he was denied medical care on Rikers Island. Since the start of the pandemic, the number of detainees not brought by officers to scheduled medical appointments skyrocketed. Last year, a Bronx judge found the DOC in contempt of court for its failure to bring detainees to their medical appointments, ordering the city to pay $200,000 in fines for a group of detainees not taken to a doctor for a month-long span at the end of 2021 and start of 2022.
Several months after the judge’s orders, on Oct. 5, 2022, Wilkerson says he was on a bus being driven to a Brooklyn courthouse from Rikers Island, where he was being held on robbery and weapons charges. The detainee had been shackled to a metal cage inside the bus for the trip, the lawsuit says.
According to the filing, the driver of the DOC bus was driving “erratically,” when they hit the driver of a sedan.
The impact of the crash sent Wilkerson flying into the metal cage he was locked to. He allegedly hit his head and lost consciousness.
After the crash, the detainee was taken to NYU Langone, where he was treated for his head injury and discharged back into DOC custody “with instructions to receive follow up care,” according to the lawsuit.
But medical care was hard to come by on Rikers, the suit says.
On various dates from Oct. 13, 2022 until Jan. 18, 2023, Wilkerson said correction officers failed to get him to appointments with doctors including neurologists and radiologists.
In all, he missed 19 appointments, according to the lawsuit.
The Department of Correction declined to comment on the lawsuit and directed the Eagle to the city’s Law Department.
A spokesperson for the Law Department said that the city had yet to receive Wilkerson’s complaint but “will review once we have.”
In December 2022, the furthest back DOC has made data on medical appointments publicly available, there were 9,857 missed medical appointments on Rikers Island.
According to the DOC, a vast majority of those missed appointments came after detainees refused for one reason or another to be taken by a correctional officer to the doctor, however that claim has been widely disputed by defense attorneys, lawmakers, detainees, advocates and judges.
The number of missed medical appointments, which had begun to rise during the pandemic, continued to rise throughout much of 2023.
In August 2023, the number of missed medical appointments reached an apex, with 16,446 total appointments missed.
The DOC began having issues getting detainees to the doctor at the start of the pandemic, when correctional officers began to miss work in large numbers – detainees cannot go to visit a doctor on their own and must be escorted by an officer.
Though the staffing crisis on Rikers Island isn’t acute as it was in 2020, 2021 and 2022, the total number of staff on the DOC’s books has steadily been decreasing for the past several years, including in 2023.
Additionally, the DOC has continued to have issues bringing detainees to the doctor.
There were 13,557 missed medical appointments in the city’s jail complex in September 2023, the latest month data is available for.
