Family of man who committed suicide on Rikers sues city
/
The family of Curtis Davis, one of nine people to have died in Department of Correction custody in 2023, sued the city this week. AP file photo by Seth Wenig
By Jacob Kaye
The family of a man who committed suicide on Rikers Island last year said in a new lawsuit that the city and its Department of Correction should be held accountable for the man’s death.
The family of Curtis Davis, who was the seventh person to die in DOC custody in 2023, filed a wrongful death suit against the city this week, claiming officers on Rikers Island violated a number of DOC policies and procedures in the lead up to Davis’ July death.
According to the wrongful death suit, the agency failed to get Davis to a number of medical appointments, despite warnings from the detainee that he had not only previously attempted to kill himself but that he was considering doing so upon his entry to the troubled jail complex at the start of June 2023. The suit also claims that on the day of his death, Davis was left alone and not seen by officers for hours, despite requirements that officers frequently walk around housing areas to check on detainees.
The department also initially gave a misleading telling of Davis’ death, according to the suit.
At first, an officer said he found Davis unconscious and that he had died of a suspected overdose or heart attack. It wasn’t until a subsequent investigation was completed that it was discovered that the officer found Curtis unresponsive, leaning against a wall with a sheet around his neck. An autopsy later confirmed that Curtis had died of suicide by hanging.
Davis was incarcerated on Rikers Island for a little over 50 days before his death.
“The Department of Corrections and thus the City of New York failed to provide even a basic level of care for Mr. Davis,” said the family’s attorney, Adam Konta, a partner at Konta Georges & Buza. “They failed miserably…to keep Curtis safe and give him the medicine and care he plainly asked for many times.”
A number of the DOC’s alleged failures, which have also been confirmed by a report on Davis’ death by the Board of Correction, have also been found as contributing factors in a large number of other deaths on Rikers Island – over 30 people have died while in the DOC’s care in the past two and a half years.
Three detainees who died around the same time that Davis did also missed a number of medical appointments prior to their deaths. They also were nearly all held in facilities where officers failed to take regular tours of housing areas, leaving them unsupervised for long periods of time.
“The Department of Corrections clearly allowed a deadly event to occur because officers and wardens did not do their job and there was what can only be described as a total breakdown of the system,” he added. “We all know Riker’s is underfunded, rife with management and personal issues, and simply not safe for anyone at this time.”
Davis entered the jail complex after having allegedly stabbed a 29-year-old man in the eye in 2023.
According to the lawsuit, during Davis’ initial mental health screening, he told the DOC and Correctional Health Services that he was having thoughts of killing himself. Though he was initially prescribed psychiatric medications for his mental health issues, he was not taken to an appointment with CHS to re-evaluate the medication’s effectiveness two weeks after it was initially prescribed to him.
About a week after the missed appointment, Davis unsuccessfully attempted suicide, according to the lawsuit.
Still, he missed his June 29 appointment with CHS to re-evaluate his psychiatric medication because he was “not produced” by the DOC.
Davis was hardly the only detainee not to be brought to a medical appointment by the DOC in 2023.
According to an August report by the BOC, officers with the Department of Correction failed over 35,200 times to get detainees to their medical appointments scheduled with Correctional Health Services in 2023. The number of missed appointments accounted for just under 37 percent of all medical appointment requests made by people in custody that year.
On July 10, Davis told a CHS worker that he believed the strength of his medication needed to be increased, but was told that CHS could not do so, according to the suit. Davis was not brought to another psychiatric re-evaluation appointment three days later, the suit alleges.
Over the course of one week in July, the DOC allegedly failed to bring Davis to six medical appointments that he had requested.
On July 23, the day of Davis’ death, a DOC log filled out by officers showed that an officer walked the floor of Davis’ housing unit every 30 minutes to make sure that every detainee on the floor was alive and well.
However, the lawsuit alleges that records were fraudulent.
According to the suit, an officer left the housing unit around 2 a.m., and did not return until after 4 a.m. Even then, the officer waited until after 5 a.m. to check on Davis, who had placed a sheet over his cell’s window – officers are supposed to take down any coverings concealing the inside of a cell. At some point during the hours he spent alone, Davis hung himself.
Two officers were suspended following Davis’ death, one for 30 days and the other for 15 days.
Davis’ family are not the only ones to bring a wrongful death lawsuit against the DOC this year.
The family of Joshua Valles, who died after a short stay in the city’s notorious jail complex in May 2023, sued the DOC in May.
Like Davis, the DOC initially reported that Valles had died of a suspected heart attack, only to have that narrative later disputed.
The DOC’s original account of Valles’ death left out a number of details that were later unveiled by autopsy reports and investigations by the DOC’s watchdog group, the Board of Correction, and the federal monitor assigned by a federal judge to keep track of conditions on Rikers.
Records later showed that Valles had suffered a major brain injury that the DOC failed to mention on a number of occasions.
In the lawsuit, Valles’ family’s attorney Milene Mansouri claimed that Valles’ death was a symptom of a number of larger issues plaguing the DOC, many of which have been behind the call for a federal takeover of the city’s jail.
“It's a broken system, it's a corrupt system, it's a horrible system, and it's about time that the city does something about it,” Mansouri told the Eagle earlier this year.
