Two years after man hanged himself on Rikers, family says city failed him
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Erick Tavira died on Rikers Island in 2022. An amended lawsuit filed this week claims his death was not only preventable but the result of the failures of several city agencies. Photo via Kaishian & Mortazavi LLC
By Jacob Kaye
Multiple city agencies failed to help a man suffering from a mental health crisis in the lead up to his death on Rikers Island in 2022, an amended wrongful death lawsuit claims.
The family of Erick Tavira, who was 28 years old when he hanged himself on Rikers two years ago this week, said in a lawsuit that it wasn’t only the city’s troubled Department of Correction that failed to keep the Bronx man alive, but also the city’s hospital system, which allegedly failed to treat Tavira when he was both in and out of the dangerous jail complex.
According to the amended lawsuit filed in the Bronx’s Civil Court this week, Tavira was not only turned away from a city hospital when he came in search of mental health care, but was forcibly removed from the health facility by two security guards who later lied about the interaction. While incarcerated at Rikers Island a short time later, the DOC and Correctional Health Services failed to get Tavira, who had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, over 100 doses of his medication.
It all led up to Tavira’s death in October 2022, the suit alleges.
“This isn't a one-time failure,” said S. Masoud Mortazavi, a partner at Kaishian & Mortazavi LLC, the firm representing Tavira’s family in the case. “It's kind of like a locomotive. They failed him once back in 2021, and then again, and then again, and then again and again until it gets to a point where the failures are all leading toward a very foreseeable ending.”
The lawsuit, which was originally filed in January but updated with a complaint against Correctional Health Services and New York City Health + Hospitals on Tuesday, claims what a handful of other lawsuits filed on behalf of those who have died on Rikers in recent years claim – systemic failures within the DOC and the city’s criminal justice apparatus largely contributed to a preventable death.
“It wasn't just the fact that [DOC officers] didn't do tours [of Rikers’ housing facilities] correctly,” Mortazavi said. “It wasn't just the fact that a few months before that, they put him in restrictive housing. It wasn't just that. It was all of these things.”
“There were signs that were ignored and that built upon the previous one, the previous failures to ultimately get to Oct. 22,” he added.
The events that led to Tavira’s death began in June 2021, according to the suit.
On June 6, Tavira went to Metropolitan Hospital in Manhattan while suffering a mental health crisis. Video surveillance footage from that day showed Tavira, not wearing a shirt or shoes, sometimes pacing in the waiting room.
“[Tavira] was visibly in distress and in need of medical care,” the lawsuit claims.
At one point when Tavira was seated, two security officers walked up to the 28-year-old and violently put him in handcuffs, the lawsuit alleges. During the takedown, one of the officers twisted his ankle, though he later allegedly told prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office that Tavira had intentionally injured the officer. The claim resulted in Tavira’s arrest and arraignment.
After being arraigned, Tavira was released. He had yet to receive any treatment for his worsening mental health crisis.
Several days later, Tavira was arrested again on a misdemeanor charge. Though the charge alone was not a bail-eligible charge, because of the incident in the hospital, a judge was able to set bail and did just that. Tavira was sent to Rikers Island on June 13.
According to the lawsuit, staff at both Correctional Health Services and the DOC knew that Tavira had more than 10 inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations in the previous five years and that he had taken 15 trips to the emergency room for mental health reasons during that same period of time. They also knew about his mental health diagnoses and his previous attempts at self harm, the lawsuit said.
Still, during Tavira’s 16-month stay in the jail complex, he struggled often to get the city agencies to deliver his medication and to bring him to doctor appointments.
About a year before his death, the DOC failed to get Tavira his required daily dose of medication for three weeks straight, the lawsuit claims.
Overall, Tavira allegedly missed over 100 doses of his medication and dozens of medical appointments. In the four-month period preceding his death, Tavira missed a little more than 50 doses of what was supposed to be daily medication.
Tavira was hardly the only detainee the DOC and CHS allegedly failed to treat during his incarceration and in the years that would follow.
According to an August report by the Board of Correction, officers with the DOC 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.
Tavira was also subject to a number of other systemic failures facing the DOC, the lawsuit alleges. During his incarceration, Tavira was sprayed with pepper spray multiple times, a practice the BOC recently found has been deployed with unnecessary regularity in recent years.
Tavira was also placed in punitive segregation, despite the fact that his risk for suicide should have prevented him from being placed in the segregated cell, the lawsuit said. Earlier this month, a former social worker told the BOC that the DOC regularly “deadlocks” detainees with mental health issues in segregated cells where they are prevented from receiving mental health treatment.
“I want the world to see what happened to Erick, and how the system completely failed him in his time of need,” said Tavira’s mother, Haydeth Tavira. “Erick had many struggles, but he was a human being who deserved care, not a jail cell on Rikers Island. He is now gone from our family forever and this is a void we will never fill.”
A spokesperson for the city’s Law Department said the city was reviewing the updated filing.
