A man held in a Rikers Island jail died early Tuesday, the ninth city jail-related death in 2025, officials said.
The man, whose identity has yet to be released, was found unresponsive in a bathroom at the Eric M. Taylor Center and declared dead at 8:28 a.m., the officials said. The cause and circumstances are under investigation.
The jail-related death toll of nine in 2025 has now matched that of 2023 and came as advocates rallied at City Hall to protest the passing of another detainee, Christian Collado, on July 9. There were five jail deaths in 2024, 19 in 2022, Mayor Adams’ first year in office, and 16 in 2021, the final year of Mayor de Blasio’s tenure.
Collado, who had two open criminal cases, died of cancer in the Bellevue Hospital jail ward, officials and advocates said.
Though Department of Correction officials said Collado’s brother was with him at the end, Collado’s lawyer Judah Maltz told the Queens Eagle that he pleaded with authorities, including the Queens District Attorney’s Office, to support an earlier release as it became clear Collado was dying.
“For Christian Collado, imagine spending your last days with terminal cancer incarcerated,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said at the City Hall rally. “They denied Christian end-of-life care. That is inhumane and cruel. None of these people have been sentenced to cruel and inhumane treatment and none have been sentenced to death. Everyone must think about the human beings behind these names.”
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FILE – The Rikers Island jail complex stands in New York with the Manhattan skyline in the background June 20, 2014. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
Brendan Brosh, a spokesman for the Queens DA’s Office, countered that a judge ordered Collado held without bail despite the existing cancer diagnosis after his arrest for breaking into the home of an elderly woman and taking her wheelchair. Collado also had an open warrant from federal court in Pennsylvania.
Brosh said Maltz only made a formal application for Collado’s release on July 8, one day before his death.
Meanwhile, in the state prisons, the reverberations of the 22-day prison strike earlier this year continue to linger. On Tuesday, the Legal Aid Society accused state officials of ignoring a court injunction aimed at forcing the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to fully implement the HALT Solitary Confinement Act.
After the 22-day prison strike, which ended in early March, DOCCS officials suspended some elements of the law. Legal Aid sued in April, alleging inmates were being kept in their cells longer than the law allows, isolated and deprived of basic services, the lawsuit contended.
On July 2, Judge Daniel Lynch in Albany ruled DOCCS could not invoke emergency provisions to suspend elements of HALT and keep inmates in their cells more than 17 hours a day or suspend programming and recreation in the prisons.
Lynch set July 11 as the date the order became effective. But Legal Aid now claims in a letter sent Monday that DOCCS hasn’t identified prisons where HALT remains suspended or stated whether basic things, like minimum out-of-cell time, have been restored, plus has failed to “explain how current staffing levels amount to a genuine emergency.”
“DOCCS’s defiance of the preliminary injunction harms our clients and reflects a disregard for judicial oversight,” said Antony Gemmell, supervising attorney with Legal Aid’s Prisoners’ Rights Project.
Thomas Mailey, a DOCCS spokesman, responded, “The department [DOCCS] has complied with the judge’s direction, submitted the requested information, and the court’s decision is pending.”
