Carlos Alberto Guerrero Mercado, a 47-year-old Mexican citizen with no criminal record, was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park in April. He died in a hospital ten days later. He had not been convicted of anything. Two months later, no one in the federal government will say how he died.
The basic facts, per reporting from the New York Daily News, are limited, because that is all anyone will confirm. Guerrero Mercado was a federal pretrial defendant, one of dozens of people surrendered to the United States in January as part of a drug-trafficking prosecution, and he was being held by the Bureau of Prisons at MDC Brooklyn while awaiting trial. He was found in his cell around 1:20 p.m. on April 18 and died on April 28.
The cause is officially undetermined and under investigation, and the two accounts that have leaked do not agree. A prosecutors’ filing referred to a “cardiac event.” Unnamed sources told reporters his cellmate found him hanging. Nobody has established which, if either, is true. Two months after a man died in federal custody, that question is unanswered.
The Metropolitan Detention Center has a long record of dangerous conditions. It has endured an eight-day blackout during a polar vortex while detainees banged on windows for help, and it is notorious for its violence and dire conditions. It is the same facility now holding the former Venezuelan official Nicolás Maduro, and the one public defenders have warned about for years.
“If the United States is going to just grab people from other countries with no legal process,” said Kannan Sundaram, an attorney with the Federal Defenders, “our government should have a better and safer place to confine them than MDC Brooklyn.” The jail has a documented record of dangerous conditions, and it is where the government holds people who, like Guerrero Mercado, have not been convicted of a crime.
There is no public cause of death, no detailed account of how a man in federal custody ended up dead, and a level of secrecy that people who work inside the system say is routine. The Bureau of Prisons investigation continues, and the federal court overseeing the underlying case could press for answers. So could anyone with subpoena power in Congress or the courts. A man found unresponsive in a Brooklyn jail is dead, and the public does not know how.
