A man awaiting trial was found unresponsive in a notorious Brooklyn federal jail and later died. Two months later, no one will say how.
Carlos Alberto Guerrero Mercado, a 47-year-old Mexican citizen awaiting trial, died in Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center; two months later, no official cause of death has been released despite its history of dangerous conditions.
A man awaiting trial was found unresponsive in a notorious Brooklyn federal jail and later died. Two months later, no one will say how.
Carlos Alberto Guerrero Mercado, a 47-year-old Mexican citizen awaiting trial, died in Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center; two months later, no official cause of death has been released despite its history of dangerous conditions.
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.
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