Man held on Rikers for 19 months becomes first to die in jails in 2025
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A 38-year-old man named Ramel Powell became the first person to die on Rikers Island in 2025. The Department of Correction said he was found dead inside the Otis Bantm Correctional Center early Wednesday morning. AP file photo by Ted Shaffrey
By Jacob Kaye
A 38-year-old man died on Rikers Island on Wednesday morning.
Ramel Powell, who had been held in the city’s jails for nearly two years as he awaited trial, was found dead inside the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers around 2:14 a.m., according to the Department of Correction.
The DOC, which announced Powell’s death Wednesday morning, gave no details about the circumstances surrounding the detainee’s death.
Powell is the first person to have died on Rikers in 2025.
The 38-year-old’s death has allegedly been reported to the Board of Correction, the state attorney general’s office, the State Commission of Correction, the city’s Department of Investigation and the federal monitor tasked with tracking violence in the jails as part of the ongoing detainee civil rights case, Nunez v. the City of New York.
“I, and the entire NYC Department of Correction, express our deepest sympathy to the loved ones of Mr. Powell,” DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginely-Liddie said in a statement. “We are conducting a full investigation into this tragic event.”
Powell was first brought to Rikers Island in July 2023 after violating his parole, according to court records. He was arrested on assault charges in Manhattan and sent to the jail on $50,000 cash bail.
Powell was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in order to determine whether or not he was fit to stand trial. He eventually was found mentally fit to stand trial and had seen his case slowly move in Manhattan Criminal Court over the last 19 months.
He was next scheduled to appear in court in early March.
Around 100 people have died on Rikers Island in the past decade, including 34 who have died while Mayor Eric Adams has been in office.
Five people died in DOC custody last year, nine in 2023 and 19 in 2022. Sixteen people died the year before Adams took office as a number of compounding crises on Rikers Island made worse by the pandemic came to a head.
Advocates largely blamed the mayor for Powell’s death, accusing Adams – who was in federal court on Wednesday seeking to have the bribery and corruption charges brought against him last year dismissed – of fueling the violent and dangerous conditions in the jail complex.
“It is unconscionable that the mayor continues to avoid putting in the work necessary to close the pipelines that feed incarceration and expedite the closure of Torture Island,” Daren Mack, the co-director of advocacy group Freedom Agenda, said in a statement. “Mayor Adams only believes in due process for himself and his cronies. He could care less what happens to the rest of us, and now another family has to see that firsthand.”
Lah Franklin, a member of the Katal Center, said the death toll mounting under the mayor’s watch was “so sad and outrageous.”
“This is unacceptable,” Franklin said in a statement. “The death of a person detained shows why Adams should be removed, and the city must shut down Rikers.”
The city is legally required to shut down Rikers Island as a jail complex by August 2027 and replace it with four new borough-based jails. However, the city is wildly off track of its plan to close Rikers after steps to shutter the jails have largely come to a halt under Adams.
The earliest of the four new jails is not expected to be completed by 2029 and at least one won’t be completed until 2032, five years after Rikers is supposed to be shuttered.
Complicating the closure of Rikers is the potential takeover of the jails by a court-appointed authority known as a receiver.
Federal Judge Laura Swain, who found the city in contempt of court for failing to tamp down violence in the jails over the past decade in November, is currently considering whether or not the city should remain in control of Rikers.
Last month, the city told Swain that should she appoint a receiver, she should tap Maginley-Liddie to serve in the role. The unusual proposal was blasted by the Legal Aid Society – which represents all detainees on Rikers Island in the case – and federal prosecutors who instead called for Swain to appoint an independent authority who currently does not work with the DOC.
