Family of man who died after Rikers Island detention sues city for $100 million
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The family of Joshua Valles, a 31-year-old man who died after a short stay on Rikers Island, recently sued the city for $100 million as part of a wrongful death lawsuit. Photo via Milene Mansouri
By Jacob Kaye
The family of a 31-year-old man whose death in Department of Correction custody remains disputed over a year after it happened recently filed a $100 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city.
The family of Joshua Valles, who died after a short stay in the city’s notorious jail complex in May 2023, said in a recently filed lawsuit that the city’s Department of Correction and New York City Health and Hospitals not only failed to care for Valles in the brief time he was in the city’s custody, but also violated the detainee’s constitutional and civil rights.
“We want justice for Joshua and justice for Joshua’s family,” Milene Mansouri, the family’s attorney, told the Eagle.
“Joshua was a beautiful soul,” Mansouri added. “He should have never been at [Rikers] in the first place and he should have never died.”
Valles was the third detainee on Rikers Island to die in 2023, a year in which nine people died in the city’s custody. Valles was also one of several detainees whose deaths were not properly reported by the Department of Correction to various oversight agencies, effectively sparking an ongoing effort to take Rikers out of the control of the city and hand it over to a court-appointed authority.
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.
Though the agency initially said that Valles had died of a heart attack, records later showed that he had suffered a major brain injury that the DOC failed to mention on a number of occasions.
The circumstances surrounding Valles’ death remain disputed a little more than a year after the incident unfolded.
A spokesperson for the city’s Law Department told the Eagle that the lawsuit was “under review.”
The lawsuit, which was filed in late May, has not previously been reported.
Valles was arrested on non-violent, theft-related charges in early April 2023 and sent to Rikers by a judge who ordered he be held on $10,000 cash bail. The public defenders who were representing him at that time blamed his arrest on his ongoing struggle with mental health and substance abuse issues – health staff in the jail later confirmed a bulk of his self-reported diagnostic history, including his diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
On April 19, around two weeks after he first entered DOC custody, Valles told Correctional Health Services staff that a fellow detainee had thrown a bar of soap at his head and that he’d been experiencing extreme headaches as a result. A separate report filled out by a correctional officer on April 19 said that Valles had been punched in the face by a detainee during a fight, according to a Board of Correction report on Valles’ death. After a check up that day, health staff “noted that Mr. Valles had no visible or serious injuries,” according to the report.
The next day, correctional officers failed to take Valles to a scheduled medical appointment – the issue has plagued the department, and has been the subject of a lawsuit, since the start of the pandemic.
On May 19, Valles was placed in “lock in” after DOC staff said he was “exhibiting child-like behavior and attention-seeking and instructive behaviors” toward staff.
When locked in his cell, he began banging on the door. According to the BOC report, Valles hit the door with his hand and could have possibly banged his head against it, as well. However, the BOC said video footage of the incident doesn’t clearly show whether his head hit the door or not.
Later that day, Valles said that he was suffering from a severe headache, nausea and vomiting. When he left his cell around 2 p.m. that day, he was holding his head in his hands, the report claims.
Valles was examined by CHS medical staff, who called EMS to take the detainee to Elmhurst Hospital because he was experiencing decreased brain function, weakness and appeared to be extremely tired.
On his way to the hospital, Valles had a seizure. Though the correctional officers who were guarding him at the hospital claimed that he appeared to be moving around normally throughout the afternoon, Valles was unresponsive by the evening, the report said. His blood oxygen level had dropped to dangerously low levels and he suffered a heart attack.
A scan of Valles’ head ordered by hospital staff that day showed that he had a major brain injury. On May 21, hospital staff determined that Valles was brain dead.
According to Mansouri, the DOC didn’t contact Valles’ family until two days after he had been put on life support.
But it wasn’t only Valles’ family that wasn’t getting information about the detainee’s condition.
The DOC, which, at the time, was being led by former DOC Commissioner and current Department of Citywide Administrative Services Commission Louis Molina, did not communicate Valles’ incident with the federal monitor charged with overseeing conditions on Rikers Island.
The monitor, Steve J. Martin, only learned of Valles’ condition after he received “an external allegation that this individual was in the hospital and on life support,” Martin said in a May 2023 report on five incidents that Molina had failed to communicate to the monitoring team.
After Martin confronted Molina about the incident, the then-commissioner told the monitor 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 a May 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.”
Valles was pronounced dead on May 27 after he was transported to another hospital for an organ donation. His death was not announced to the media because he had been released from DOC custody by a judge after it had been determined that he was brain dead.
“The city failed him,” Mansouri said.
In the lawsuit, Mansouri claims 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 said.
The takeover, known as a federal receivership, is currently being considered by federal Judge Laura Swain in the ongoing civil rights case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.
Following Valles’ death last year, Swain said the incident was “disturbing,” and that it “highlighted dangerous conditions and unsafe practices, as well as grave concerns related to transparency and the reporting of information to the monitoring team.”
