Seven police officers were suspended Thursday for involvement in a fatal arrest of a black man in the city of Rochester, New York, in March.
The Mayor of Rochester Lovely Warren calls Daniel Prude’s fatal arrest a racist act.
“Daniel Prude has been abandoned by our police, mental health, our society and by myself,” said Mayor Warren. “I am very angry and sad at myself for all the failures that led to his death.”
Police Commissioner La’Ron Singletary said on Wednesday that an internal investigation is underway into the agents involved. Relatives of Prude want the officers in question to be prosecuted for murder.
Prude got an anti-spit cap on
Prude was found in a confused state on the street and arrested. While officers handcuffed him, put on a so-called anti-spit hood and pressed it to the ground, he lost consciousness and stopped breathing.
Seven days after that arrest, on March 30, Prude was taken off a ventilator in hospital and died, his family said. The coroner said his death was a murder of “complications of asphyxiation from physical coercion.”
Prude, 41, died two months before George Floyd, the Minneapolis man whose death sparked a wave of national and international protests against police violence.
Relatives of Prude and activists accuse the police of a cover-up because the images were only released two months after the date and there seems to be little progress in the investigation. Police Commissioner La’Ron Singletary denied that on Wednesday.
About 100 protesters gathered at a police station in Rochester on Wednesday. Skirmishes broke out, in which police used pepper spray against protesters trying to penetrate crush barriers.
– .
