Mazzeo said officers deal far too often with these types of situations and need more help.ĭemonstrators have taken to the streets of this city of 210,000 three nights in a row. Seven Rochester police officers involved were suspended Thursday by the city’s mayor. New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office is investigating, as is typical is such cases. Temperatures hovered around freezing that morning and a light snow was falling.Ī medical examiner concluded that Prude's death was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” The report lists excited delirium and acute intoxication by phencyclidine, or PCP, as contributing factors. “He feels pretty cold,” says one officer. Prude’s anguish cries become muffled under the hood and fade into whimpering. One apparently white officer holds his head down against the pavement urging Prude to “calm down.” Another officer places a knee on his back. When he tries to stand, he is shoved down. Prude is enraged and demands that they take it off. Just as it arrives, police cover Prude's head with a hood designed to protect them from being spit on. He repeatedly shouts for a gun, prays to Jesus, and asks the officers to let him get up. Police videos show Prude sitting on the street, hands cuffed behind his back. on a commercial street blocks from his brother's house. Joe Prude said his brother left the house wearing no shoes and no coat, just a tank top and long johns on a cold night. He worried his younger brother was under the influence of PCP and might hurt himself. “I don’t know if he was playing with me the whole time,” Joe Prude told an officer who responded to his call. He seemed fine when he got back but then suddenly bolted from his brother’s house. He was taken to a hospital that evening for a mental health evaluation, though he was released a few hours later, according to police reports and body camera videos.
Joe Prude had to pick his brother up at a shelter in Buffalo.ĭaniel Prude began acting out at his brother’s house, going under furniture, jumping down stairs head-first and accusing his relatives of wanting to kill him. Just before his encounter with police, he was living with his sister in Chicago, but was having mental health problems for the first time in his life, so he headed east to his brother’s house in Rochester, said attorney Elliot Shields, who is representing Joe Prude.īut he was thrown off the train at a station about an hour short of Rochester. In most of the cases, Illinois Department of Corrections records show that he was paroled out of prison after serving less than a year. Police said there was nothing on his record suggesting he was particularly violent. Chicago Police reported 37 arrests and nine convictions since 1995, eight for drug- and alcohol-related charges and one for burglary. Prude had been behind bars several times over the decades. He was the person that made everybody laugh. But the man that I knew prior to that was not like that. “The man on a video is presented as helpless and in need of support. “It’s painful beyond words for people to know him as just a man on the video because there was so much more to him,” Tashyra Prude said in an interview. His 18-year-old daughter Tashyra Prude said he was happy the last time she saw him on March 18. They said he was generous and liked playing basketball and Call of Duty. Prude lived in Chicago, and relatives said he worked at a bakery and a factory. “If there’s a problem with that, let’s change it.”įamily members insisted the man seen shouting in muffled anguish does not capture the loving one they knew.
“To me, it looks like they were watching the training in front of them and doing step by step what the training says to do,” said Michael Mazzeo, president of the Locust Club.
And that’s what they did.”Ī union leader on Friday defended the officers involved in the encounter, saying they were strictly following department training and protocols, including using the mesh hood to stop Prude from spitting. “He wanted somebody to grab him up and help him, not sit here and mock him and taunt him, laugh at him like a piece of meat. “That was was a distress call for help,” said his older brother, Joe Prude.
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