The New York City correction officers and a captain stood by for nearly eight minutes as Nicholas Feliciano tried to hang himself in a jail cell.
For nearly eight minutes, more than a half dozen New York City Department of Correction officers stood by as an 18-year-old detainee named Nicholas Feliciano tried to hang himself in a Rikers Island jail cell, not intervening even when he flailed his arms and then went still.
When the officers finally cut Mr. Feliciano down on Nov. 27, 2019, they let his limp body drop to the floor.
Over much of the next three years, as a severely brain-damaged Mr. Feliciano received round-the-clock care at Bellevue Hospital, the guards remained on modified duty, allowed to collect their paychecks while working jobs that did not require contact with detainees. But on Monday, the Bronx district attorney filed felony charges against four of the jailers.
The arrests marked a rare instance of Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney who has jurisdiction over Rikers Island, filing criminal charges against correction officers whose inaction resulted in grave harm to a detainee.
Even as the conduct and decision making of jail staff members has been called into question in a number of deaths and injuries of incarcerated people in the past two years, including in eight other suicides since 2021, the charges stemming from Mr. Feliciano’s case were the first brought by Ms. Clark against correction officials since 2019.
Other prosecutors have been quicker to file charges as conditions in the Rikers Island jail complex spiraled in recent years, with hundreds of officers failing to show up for work and rising rates of violence and neglect.
In April, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York charged two correction officers with smuggling drugs and accepting bribes from gangs, and, in November 2020, the Manhattan district attorney charged a correction captain with criminally negligent homicide after the captain allowed a man to hang in a Manhattan holding cell for 15 minutes and stopped other guards from saving him. Those cases are pending.
A spokeswoman for the Bronx district attorney’s office said that the cases against the guards took nearly three years to prosecute because the city Department of Investigation brought them first to federal prosecutors before taking them to Ms. Clark’s office.