By The newspaper
19 Jul 2024, 12:34 PM EDT
Edwin Cordero, a 36-year-old inmate, died in a fight at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn (NYC), where he had been waiting for almost a month to be transferred out of the federal prison plagued by problems, his lawyer, Andrew Dalack, said.
Cordero died Wednesday after a fight broke out at Sunset Park prison around 2:50 p.m. He is the second inmate to suffer a violent death there in the past six weeks. The previous victim was Uriel Whyte (37), stabbed in a fight at that jail on June 7, he said. Daily News.
“Regardless of the circumstances [de sus cargos]“He had a long life ahead of him. He had a young family. (He was) a young man. This should never have happened,” reiterated Dalack, of the nonprofit group Federal Defenders. “And it’s devastating. His children’s lives are ruined. They’ll never really know him. His wife’s life is ruined. It’s just completely tragic.”
The city’s Medical Examiner’s Office (OCME) was still conducting an autopsy yesterday to determine the cause of Cordero’s death.
“It’s inexplicable to me why he wasn’t transferred, other than to say that this is not unusual,” Dalack continued. “The reality is that people are held at MDC for several weeks after they are sentenced and before they are transferred. If it’s about alleviating the problem of overcrowding, the easiest thing for me to do is to get the sentenced people out… get them out as soon as possible.”
Dalack and other defense attorneys have long criticized conditions at the chronically understaffed MDC, which has endured an eight-day blackout in the middle of winter in recent years, repeated lockdowns, a long list of episodes of medical mistreatment and a variety of other problems that have earned the ire of multiple judges. “It’s one of those things where history will judge us on our collective failure to put an end to all of this,” Dalack insisted.
Cordero had served an 18-month sentence for a federal wire fraud case in New Jersey and began his supervised release in December 2022, but a violent episode in the Bronx in February led to his new arrest.
In that case, he was walking home from a bodega when a boy threw a snowball at him and he responded by slashing the face of one of the boy’s friends, a 17-year-old with autism, according to federal prosecutors. That led to charges in state court, and in May, Judge Ronnie Abrams of Manhattan Federal Court ruled that he had violated the terms of his supervised release. He sentenced him to two years on June 21, and at the time of his death, Cordero was awaiting transfer to another facility to serve that sentence.
A Bureau of Prisons spokesman declined to comment on why it took nearly a month to transfer him, saying only that “designations [a otras prisiones] are handled on a case-by-case basis and vary in timeframe,” based on a number of factors.