An inmate who died in a brawl in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center was waiting for nearly a month to be transferred out of the problem-plagued federal jail, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Edwin Cordero, 36, died Wednesday after a fight broke out in the Sunset Park jail at about 2:50 p.m. He’s the second inmate at the jail to meet a violent death over the past six weeks.
“Regardless of the circumstances [of his charges], he had a long life ahead of him. He had a young family. He’s a young man. This just should have never happened,” said his lawyer, Andrew Dalack of the Federal Defenders. “And it’s devastating. His kids’ lives are ruined. They’ll never know him really. His wife’s life is ruined. It’s just completely tragic.”
Dalack added, “It’s one of those things where history will judge us for our collective failure to bring an end to all this.”
The city Medical Examiner’ office was conducting an autopsy Thursday.
Dalack and other defense lawyers have long railed against the squalid conditions at the chronically-understaffed MDC, which in recent years has seen an eight-day blackout in the dead of winter, constant lockdowns, a laundry list of medical mistreatment episodes, and a variety of other problems that have earned the ire of multiple judges.
In January, Manhattan Federal Court Judge Jesse Furman refused to send one of Dalack’s clients — Gustavo Chavez, a 70-year-old convicted drug dealer — to the MDC ahead of his sentencing because of conditions at the jail.
Cordero had wrapped up an 18-month sentence for a federal wire fraud case in New Jersey, and started his supervised release in December 2022, but a violent episode in the Bronx this February led to his re-arrest.
He was walking home from a deli when a young boy threw a snowball at him, and he responded by slashing one of the boy’s pals, a 17-year-old autistic teen, in the face, according to federal prosecutors. That led to state court charges, and in May, Manhattan Federal Court Judge Ronnie Abrams ruled he violated the terms of his supervised release.
The judge sentenced him to two years on June 21 – and he was been waiting to be transferred to a different facility to serve out that sentence.
“It’s just sort of inexplicable to me as to why he wasn’t transferred — except to say that this is not unusual,” Dalack said. “The reality is that people are held at the MDC for several weeks after they’re sentenced and before they’re transferred out. If you’re trying to ease the overcrowding issue, to me, the easiest thing to do is the people who are sentenced … get them out as soon as possible.”
A Bureau of Prisons spokesman declined to comment why it took nearly a month to transfer him, except to say that “designations [to other prisons] are handled on a case-by-case basis and vary in timeframe,” based on a number of factors.
Cordero spent much of his time at MDC under a “seemingly indefinite lockdown,” after another inmate was killed there on June 7, Dalack wrote in a June 14 letter to Abrams. That inmate, Uriel Whyte, was fatally stabbed in the neck, and his death has been ruled a homicide, according to the city medical examiner’s office.
“This sort of underscores how fraught the environment is there, and how it can be a dangerous place because there’s no real security. The chronic under-staffing I think just makes it impossible to actually run a safe facility,” he said. “At any given moment, people are sort of under threat. It’s like a tinderbox.”
The jail houses just over 1,300 inmates as of Thursday, according to the Bureau of Prisons website. A court filing from Nov. 28 showed at the time that the jail filled only 200 of its 301 correction officer positions, and of those 200, 28 were on extended leave.
In a letter to the judge, Cordero’s wife, Ashley, called him a great father and husband.
“We’ve spoken on the phone recently since he’s been in jail and I can tell he’s depressed and upset,” she wrote. “We just had a baby and the baby just turned 8 months so he’s missing out already on the baby’s life…. I know that whatever is going on in there is affecting him mentally because he’s not around his kids and his family.”
