Matthew Raymond has waited nine years for some semblance of justice.
When he first accused upstate prison guards of waterboarding him and delivering a beating so vicious he now uses a catheter to pee, an internal investigation concluded there was no wrongdoing.
Even after he insisted that one of the officers who attacked him at Auburn Correctional Facility had recorded the Sept. 14, 2016 incident on video, no one seemed to care.
Despite Raymond’s injuries and pleas, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision determined the allegations were unfounded in a one-page report by the Office of Special Investigations.
“OSI investigation revealed insufficient evidence to corroborate the allegation,” the report said.
When another prisoner made an identical complaint months later, OSI opened a new investigation into the accusations. Once again, the office found nothing wrong.
But Raymond filed a lawsuit, which meandered through the courts for years, and last late last month his lawyers and attorneys for DOCCS and New York state reached an agreement that will pay him $1.2 million plus legal fees.
“It’s not about the money,” Raymond told THE CITY last week. “But the settlement is important to me, because New York state needs to know that this sh-t is not okay. There are consequences when you violate someone’s civil rights and destroy their life.”
In April 2018, two years after the traumatizing incident, the Daily News (in an article co-written by this reporter) gave front page coverage to Raymond’s case, highlighting how one of the officers involved in the alleged attack, Lt. Troy Mitchell, had already cost the state nearly a million dollars in lawsuit payouts over prior assault and sex harassment allegations.
Raymond, now 36, believes that coverage “saved his life” because it put correction officers on notice.
“You saved me, whether from another beating or death, that article made them think, if we touch this kid, it’s going to hit the New York Daily News, and whoever is connected to that is going to burn,” he told THE CITY last week.
The settlement made official last Thursday comes as Gov. Kathy Hochul has vowed to “strengthen” the prison system’s internal investigation unit known as OSI.
That includes $7 million to “reorganize and expand the capabilities” of the unit “with a focus “on both data analytics and expanding the unit’s capability to proactively identify potential risks,” according to DOCCS spokesperson Thomas Mailey.
Hochul has also committed $418 million to expand the number of fixed cameras in prisons and the use of body-worn cameras by officers.
She promised those reforms after video footage emerged of a group of guards brutally punching and kicking a handcuffed Robert Brooks while they held him down on a medical bed inside Marcy Correctional Facility on Dec. 9.
Brooks, 43, died hours later at Wynn Hospital in Utica. In February, six correction officers were charged with second-degree murder and first degree manslaughter.
Multiple former prison guards were indicted on murder charges in the death of Robert Brooks at the Marcy Correctional Facility. Credit: Screengrab via New York State Attorney General
Raymond, from Buffalo, said he knew Brooks, who was from Rochester, from the “streets” and the two had become friends in prison.
“I’ve known Brooks for 15 years,” said Raymond.
He’d watched body camera videos of Brooks being beaten and felt it mirrored his experience — with one exception.
“Same situation. He died, and I lived,” Raymond told THE CITY.
He added, “Rob Brooks was a good guy. He was not an evil person and did not deserve to f-cking die.”
Raymond had to go back to “intensive counseling” after watching the attack: “I started having nightmares, again, everyday,” he said.
Attacked During Seizure
Raymond, 29 in 2016, had been locked up in Auburn on a 4-to-8 year sentence following a 2015 burglary charge. The day of the attack, he suffered a seizure stemming from a brain injury from a prior fall, according to court records and his own account.
Prison guards took him to Auburn Community Hospital where they kept him handcuffed, prison records show.
He was in a “postictal state,” which is where a patient is disoriented and sleepy after a seizure, Raymond said. It can take anywhere from five to 30 minutes to fully regain consciousness.
When he first woke up briefly, he says he heard officers talking about how they didn’t want to work overtime.
He dozed off again.
When he woke up later, a guard was holding him down and accusing him of spitting blood at them, according to Raymond, who said he was confused by the accusation.
A Corrections Emergency Response Team then came to the hospital room and “dragged” him to a prison van, he said.
“Somebody hit me in the back of the head and I ended up having another seizure.”
When he started to regain his bearings, he was on the floor of the van with a guard’s hand on his throat, he said. The officers then brought him to a medical unit in the prison, still handcuffed.
“The next thing I know the lieutenant is pouring water over my head,” he recalled. “They then commenced beating me.”
He initially thought a lieutenant present, identified by his white supervisor’s shirt, would break up the beatdown.
But that lieutenant, later identified as Mitchell, also hit him in the face and neck with a baton, according Raymond, who said other officers then joined in.
Raymond said Mitchell also told one of the officers to spread his legs and “grabbed and squeezed my genitals.”
He describes it as a living nightmare.
“I couldn’t say anything because I was still postictal,” he said. “But in my mind I was screaming.”
Raymond said the beating stopped after one of the officers said he was really having another seizure. They then dragged him down a hall by his hair into an elevator, according to Raymond.
One officer in the elevator suggested that they kill him to cover their tracks, Raymond said. A sergeant nixed that idea, but then ordered officers to toss him in the solitary “box,” according to Raymond.
“I truly almost lost my life,” he said. “They were just going to kill me like I was some rabid dog.”
In the following days, Raymond received minimal medical attention, even though he reported swollen genitals and blood in his urine, the lawsuit states.
Raymond also said he was hit with bogus charges of assaulting staff “to provide cover” for the officer’s abuse.
When DOCCS initially probed his allegations, an OSI staffer interviewed him for only about five to 10 minutes, according to Raymond.
“In the conversation he [the OSI investigator] made sure to let me know that Troy Mitchell was a friend of his,” Raymond said. “I felt there was no recourse. They made me feel completely powerless.”
In December 2018, DOCCS launched a new investigation with the FBI into the allegations.
That probe was triggered after a former prison staffer “changed their story from the first investigation,” according to Mailey, the state prison spokesperson.
OSI and the FBI collected all the records tied to the case and “conducted several investigative steps,” he added.
But Raymond said he was never interviewed again by OSI or the FBI.
The case and all the evidence collected was presented to the federal prosecutor covering that region, according to Mailey.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office determined there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a grand jury and/or further investigation,” said Mailey, who declined to comment on the million dollar settlement.
‘No Real Investigations’
Meanwhile, DOCCS has previously failed to reform its internal investigations process.
In 2016, then-governor and current mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo announced that the unit would bring on additional investigators and hire from outside agencies.
Current DOCCS Commissioner Daniel Martuscello III, who was a deputy commissioner at the time, led that revamp. His brother, Chris, has long held leadership roles in the unit as well as several other friends of the Martuscello family, a New York Focus investigation revealed last month.
Raymond and prison-reform advocates contend the unit should be moved to an outside agency or a new department to avoid conflicts.
“Their investigators were correction officers for many years before,” Raymond said. “There are no real investigations. The facts don’t matter.”
Mitchell, who has denied any wrongdoing in multiple depositions, was suspended in 2017 after allegations of another excessive use-of-force, according to internal DOCCS personnel records.
He was forced to resign months later but allowed to keep his health benefits and pension, prison records show. He did not respond to a call and text seeking comment.
While at DOCCS he was listed in at least five lawsuits by prisoners who accused him and other officers of physically abusing them. Those cases have settled for a total of $204,700, court records show.
Additionally, in 2012, Penny Collins, a female corrections officer at Auburn, received a $787,837 judgment against DOCCS plus $150,000 in backpay, five years after filing a lawsuit accusing Mitchell and other officers of sexually harassing her.
Collins also said she was so worried about Mitchell’s track record of violence and harassment to co-workers and prisoners that she wrote a Nov. 17, 2006, letter to a senior investigator at DOCCS’ inspector general’s office, warning that incidents were going unreported, the Daily News reported.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochuls speaks at her Midtown office alongside Attorney General Letitia James, Nov. 6, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Katie Rosenfeld, Raymond’s lawyer, cited that letter and the other settlements.
“There are in this case many, many other incarcerated people who were abused by this defendant, both before and after, Mr. Raymond,” she said.
Those victims filed grievances and lawsuits against Mitchell but were for the most part ignored, she added.
“They did everything they could do to raise the alarm and DOCCS was not willing or able to do anything. There was no intervention to stop the repeated abuse,” she said.
Raymond, for one, told DOCCS investigators that his entire beatdown was videotaped by an officer holding a handheld camera.
Yet DOCCS officials and lawyers representing the state repeatedly argued in court that no such tape existed.
But Aimee Hoppins, a nurse in the prison infirmary, said she saw a video camera being used to tape the incident, according to an August 2021 deposition in the Raymond case.
Mitchell later also showed her some sections of the tape, Hoppins testified.
She also said Mitchell sexually harassed her by texting lewd photos of himself and repeatedly asking her out.
“He sent me a picture of him naked with a wine bottle where his penis would be,” she said. “He sent me a picture of his naked girlfriend. And he sent me texts asking if I wanted to go out to dinner, you know, can I stop over? He didn’t even know where I lived.”
As for outstanding attorney fees, Rosenfeld said that’s still being calculated but noted the firm spent around 2,000 billable hours on the case.
Raymond just wants state and prison leadership to take longstanding complaints about abuse seriously.
“I know what it’s like to be Robert Brooks,” said Raymond. “I know what it’s like to be on a f-cking table, chained up, immobilized and to be beaten nonstop. It’s not OK. It ruined my life.”
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