Police body cam video shows officers hooded, pressed Black man's face to ground before he died: family

Warning: This story contains graphic details. 

A Black man who had run naked through the streets of a western New York city died of asphyxiation after a group of police officers put a hood over his head, then pressed his face into the pavement for two minutes, according to video and records released Wednesday by the man's family.

Daniel Prude died March 30 after he was taken off life support, seven days after the encounter with police in Rochester. His death received no public attention until Wednesday, when his family held a news conference and released police body camera video and written reports they obtained through a public records request.

"How did you see him and not directly say, 'The man is defenceless, buck naked on the ground. He's cuffed up already. Come on.' How many more brothers gotta die for society to understand that this needs to stop?" Prude's brother, Joe Prude, asked at a news conference on Wednesday.

CBC News has chosen not to show or share the full video because of its dehumanizing and disturbing nature. 

The videos show Prude, who had taken off his clothes, complying when police ask him to get on the ground and put his hands behind his back. Prude is agitated and shouting as officers let him writhe while he sits on the pavement in handcuffs for a few moments as a light snow falls. "Give me your gun, I need it," he shouts.

They then put a white "spit hood" over his head, a device intended to protect officers from a detainee's saliva. At the time, New York was in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Prude asks them to remove it. "Trying to kill me!" he says before making muffled, anguished sounds under the hood.

The officers slam Prude's head into the street. One officer holds his head down against the pavement with both hands, saying "stop spitting" as Prude's shouts turn to whimpers and grunts. Another officer places a knee on his back. The officers appear to become concerned when they notice water coming out of Prude's mouth.

"My man. You puking?" one says.

Held down for 2 minutes

Prude stops moving and falls silent. One officer notes that he's been out, naked, in the street for some time. Another remarks, "He feels pretty cold."

His head had been held down by an officer for just over two minutes.

Medics can then be seen on the video performing CPR before Prude is loaded into an ambulance.

Spit hoods have been scrutinized as a factor in the deaths of several prisoners in the U.S. and other countries in recent years.

A 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.

Prude was from Chicago and had just arrived in Rochester for a visit with his family. He was kicked off the train before it got to Rochester, in Depew, "due to his unruly behaviour," according to an internal affairs investigator's report.

Rochester police officers took Prude into custody for a mental health evaluation around 7 p.m. on March 22 for suicidal thoughts — about eight hours before the encounter that led to his death. But his brother said he was only at the hospital for a few hours, according to the reports.

Police responded again after Joe Prude called 911 at about 3 a.m. to report that his brother had left his house.

Investigation continues

The city halted its investigation into Prude's death when the office of State Attorney General Letitia James began its own investigation in April. Under New York law, deaths of unarmed people in police custody are often turned over to the attorney general's office, rather than handled by local officials.

James said Wednesday that investigation is continuing.

"I want everyone to understand that at no point in time did we feel that this was something that we wanted not to disclose," Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said at a press briefing. "We are precluded from getting involved in it until that agency [the attorney general's office] has completed their investigation."

One officer wrote that they put the hood on Prude because he was spitting continuously in the direction of officers and they were concerned about coronavirus.

Still, activists demanded that officers involved with Prude's death be prosecuted on murder charges and that they be removed from the department while the investigation proceeds.

"The police have shown us over and over again that they are not equipped to handle individuals with mental health concerns. These officers are trained to kill and not to de-escalate. These officers are trained to ridicule, instead of supporting Mr. Daniel Prude," Ashley Gantt of Free the People ROC said at the news conference with Prude's family.

Protesters gathered Wednesday outside Rochester's Public Safety Building, which serves as police headquarters. Free the People ROC said several of its organizers were briefly taken into custody after they entered the building while Warren was speaking to the media.

They were released on appearance tickets, said Iman Abid, regional director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who was among those taken into custody.

Father of 5

Prude, known to his big Chicago-based family by the nickname "Rell," was a father of five adult children and had been working at a warehouse within the last year, said his aunt Letoria Moore.

"He was just a bright, loving person, just family-oriented, always there for us when we needed him," she said, and "never hurt or harmed anybody."

Prude had been traumatized by the deaths of his mother and a brother in recent years, having lost another brother before that, Moore said. In his last months, he'd been going back and forth between his Chicago home and his brother's place in Rochester because he wanted to be close with him, she said.

She knew her nephew had some psychological issues. Still, when he called two days before his death, "he was the normal Rell that I knew," Moore said.

"I didn't know what was the situation, why he was going through what he was going through that night, but I know he didn't deserve to be killed by the police," she said.