Listen to this story
On the morning of October 18, 2021, Lonnie Hamilton walked into a courtroom in Utica, New York, for the first day of a trial over a lawsuit that he had filed. The room was nearly empty. There was a judge, Hamilton’s two lawyers, and a lawyer representing the state of New York, but there were no rows of spectators or reporters. Hamilton, who lives in the Bronx and works as a chef, had travelled more than two hundred miles to be here. “Sir, can you please step up onto the stand?” a court officer asked. As Hamilton walked to the front of the room, he steeled himself for what he knew was coming: an interrogation about the most painful moments of his life.
In 2016, Hamilton’s oldest son, Lonnie Hamilton III, had been serving a prison sentence at Marcy Correctional Facility, fifty miles east of Syracuse. (Lonnie, who was twenty-two, had been arrested at the age of nineteen, for robbery, and had received a sentence of two-to-six years.) At first, Lonnie had been sending letters home regularly, but that spring Hamilton realized that several months had passed since he had heard from his son. Hamilton called the prison and “finally got through to someone,” he said on the witness stand. “But they basically ping-ponged me, meaning they kept shifting the calls.” He went on, “The last . . . person that they pushed me to—that individual told me my son passed away.” He added that the person on the phone had told him to “basically calm the F down,” then hung up on him.
Hamilton’s son had died two months earlier, but the family had not been notified. After more phone calls, Hamilton was told that his son had hanged himself. He also learned that Marcy officials had already buried Lonnie in a prison cemetery. Hamilton wanted his son’s body back. He started looking for an attorney, and hired Richard and Zachary Giampá, a father and son with a law practice in the Bronx. It took four months of legal wrangling, but prison officials eventually agreed to exhume Lonnie’s body.
On the witness stand, Hamilton recounted that day. “We watched as the backhoe dug him out,” he said. His son’s body had been buried in a “flimsy” wood box made by other incarcerated men. As it was lifted, he said, “you can hear the box cracking, praying it doesn’t break.” The box was placed in the back of a truck and later taken to the Bronx so that the family could hold a proper funeral. “I hugged the box,” Hamilton testified. “I stood over where they exhumed him for a while, and I then left.”
Hamilton had been present when his son had arrived into the world. (“He was born into my hands,” he had said earlier, during a deposition. “I cut the cord.”) When Lonnie was a child, Hamilton used to call him “my shadow.” At Lonnie’s basketball games, Hamilton would be the loudest parent on the sidelines, hollering every time Lonnie and his teammates stole the ball and scored. Now, on the witness stand, he described seeing his son’s dead body after it was exhumed—the “bad, decomposing smell” and a face that was “ate up”—an image that has haunted him ever since. “That shouldn’t be my last memory of him, but now it’s the only one, because that’s something you can’t shake,” Hamilton testified. “You don’t get over that.”
A few months after the funeral, in February, 2017, Hamilton filed a lawsuit against New York State, alleging negligent supervision, wrongful death, and “loss of sepulcher”—the chance to bury one’s loved one. Among the lawsuit’s many revelations was that prison officials had buried Lonnie in someone else’s prison uniform: that of a man who had served time for attempted rape. “It was almost to me like they were pouring on the disrespect,” Hamilton testified. “You bury my son in the clothes of a rapist!”
Because Hamilton was suing New York State, his lawyers had been required to file the lawsuit in the state’s Court of Claims, which, as his attorney Zachary Giampá later explained, was not the ideal venue. “You’re going to the Court of Claims, which is a state court, and you’re before a judge, who’s an employee of the state, about whether the state is liable,” he said. “You don’t have a jury of your peers. You have an older white man from upstate New York.”
Hamilton’s lawsuit would be decided by Judge Francis T. Collins, who had been appointed by a Republican, the former governor George Pataki, in 1997. As Hamilton watched the judge in court, he started feeling pessimistic about how he might rule. He thought that Collins seemed impatient with his lawyers. “Everything just seemed to bother him,” Hamilton told me later. His prediction: “We’re probably going to walk away with a bag of popcorn and a soda.”
Two months after Lonnie Hamilton III died inside Marcy prison, the news station NY1 reported on his death and his father’s quest to retrieve his body. Afterward, a twenty-one-year-old man from the Bronx named Dayvon saw the NY1 story online and wrote a comment:
“I Was There With This kid I was his neighbor in the box in marcy I Came Home March 25th I know Everything.”
Somebody told Hamilton about the comment, and he told his lawyer. Now, more than five years later, Dayvon was testifying virtually at the trial, his image appearing on a screen in the courtroom. He explained that he had known Lonnie by his nickname: “We call him Country.” (The moniker referred to the fact that Lonnie had spent part of his childhood in Georgia and had a Southern accent.) Davyon recalled that the two had met in January, 2016, in the gym at Marcy prison. They had recognized each other “because he’s from my area” in the Bronx, Dayvon testified, and, as they kept talking, “we grew a bond.”
In late February, 2016, Dayvon was sent to the Special Housing Unit (SHU), where men are locked in their cells all day; they refer to it as “the box.” Housed in C Wing of the SHU, Dayvon discovered that Lonnie was there, too, when he heard his voice. The two could not see each other, but they could communicate by speaking. According to Dayvon, however, the men held in the SHU at Marcy were told not to talk. If they violated this rule and got too loud, the officers threatened them. (“They always tell us that [if] we get talking, they will take a meal from us, that they won’t feed us no meal,” Dayvon had said earlier, in a deposition.)
On the morning of March 18, 2016, Lonnie was in Cell 30, and Dayvon was in Cell 26. Lonnie, who had a history of mental illness, had been taken off suicide watch two days earlier, and that morning, Dayvon recalled, he seemed very agitated, shouting inside his cell. At first, Lonnie was angry that the officers had not let him out that morning for “rec,” which in the SHU means standing in a cage outside for an hour. “He was screaming he wanted his recreation,” Dayvon testified. Lonnie hollered inside his cell for about forty-five minutes, Dayvon recalled. At one point, he stopped, but before long he started up once again.
At lunchtime, when a correction officer with a meal cart walked by, Lonnie became even more agitated. “I know from him screaming that he didn’t get his lunch,” Dayvon said. “He was saying, ‘Officer, I didn’t get my food! You’re playing with my food.’ . . . He was screaming, kicking on the door.” Dayvon testified that he heard Lonnie shout, “I don’t get my food, I’m going to kill myself!” According to Dayvon, an officer told him, “Save your breath. If you’re going to kill yourself, you’re going to die anyway.” (Earlier, in a deposition, another man in a nearby cell had said that he had heard an officer deliver a similar line: “Aren’t you supposed to be killing yourself?”)
At one point, Lonnie ceased his shouting at the officers, and he and Dayvon yelled to each other. “I said, ‘What’s going on?’ ” Dayvon testified. “He said, ‘Yo, I’m really glad I met you.’ So I’m, like, ‘I’m glad I met you, too. What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I can’t do it no more. They playing with me—they want me to kill myself.’ And I’m, like, ‘You got people to live for outside. You’ll be home soon.’ . . . He’s, like, ‘No, I can’t do it no more.’ ”
When an officer walked closer to his cell, Dayvon stopped talking, because he knew he was supposed to keep quiet. Five minutes later, Dayvon tried to restart the conversation with Lonnie. He testified, “I’m, like, ‘Yo, Country, do you hear me? Yo, Country!’ And I’m calling him, and I’m not getting no response from him.”
Zachary Giampá, the attorney, asked, “Did you ever hear Mr. Hamilton say anything else?”
“No, sir.”
Lonnie’s father sat in the spectator section of the courtroom, listening to the testimony about his son’s last minutes, and tried to remain composed. The following day, he faced another, even more difficult test of his ability to control his emotions, when Joseph Mead, who had been working as a correction officer on the day his son died, entered the courtroom. To keep himself calm, Hamilton slid off his shoes. (“That’s like a mechanism for me,” he explained later. “Just to relax myself.”) Taking off his shoes was also a strategy to help deter himself from doing something he had fantasized about: “I’m going to let him testify. . . . When he comes off, I’m going to grab him, and I’m going to choke him,” he told me later. “That’s my mind-set.”
Officer Mead had entered the state’s training academy for correction officers when he was about thirty years old, after working in construction and as a truck driver. By the time of Lonnie’s death, he had been in the job for nearly twenty years. On that day, he testified, he was one of two “floor officers” working in the SHU. At 10:45 a.m., he had announced that it was time for “chow,” then walked with a cart through the SHU, stopping at each cell to slide a meal tray through a slot in the door. But he had skipped Lonnie’s cell, he testified, because at the moment he passed by Lonnie “was not on his door” to receive his tray.
A lawyer for the state asked, “Did you hear him yell anything about not getting his lunch meal?”
“I remember him yelling. I don’t recall exactly what he was saying,” the officer said.
At 11 a.m., after Officer Mead had finished distributing the lunch trays, he did a routine cell check, walking through the SHU to, as he put it, “make sure the inmates are alive and well.” When he peered inside Cell 30, he saw Lonnie standing on his bed. Officer Mead did not speak to Lonnie—did not ask him what he was doing or tell him to get off the bed—“because he really wasn’t doing anything wrong,” he testified.
The officer walked through again, to conduct another cell check, at 11:24 a.m., and this time, when he glanced into Cell 30, he saw Lonnie suspended from the ceiling. “One of his feet was touching the ground with just his toes—the other foot was on the bed. He had some kind of a sheet, what appeared to be a sheet or pillowcase, wrapped around his neck, tied to the [ceiling] vent,” Officer Mead testified. He recalled shouting out his name: “Hamilton!”
“Did he move in any way?” a lawyer for the state asked.
“No,” the officer answered.
“Did he say anything?”
“No.”
Officer Mead called over his co-worker, Officer Alfred Zeina, and both men stared into Cell 30, but they did not demand that the door be opened. (A third officer, working in an enclosed area known as “the bubble,” controls the cell doors.) Instead, the two officers called for their supervisor, a sergeant, and waited for him to come over. Mead testified that it took about “thirty seconds, a minute,” for the sergeant to arrive. (In an earlier deposition, he had estimated that it took “one-and-a-half, two minutes.”) Then the cell door was opened. Mead testified, “Myself and Sergeant Marshall lifted the inmate, and Officer Zeina cut . . . the linen that was holding him up.” Mead described their efforts to revive Lonnie: chest compressions, a defibrillator, an Ambu bag to “push air into his lungs.” Prison medical staff soon arrived and took over, Mead said, and “we backed out of the cell.”
As Mead spoke, Hamilton listened from the spectator section, and sometimes closed his eyes; at other times, he glanced over to catch the eye of his younger brother, Alexander, who sat across the aisle from him. At one point, the judge asked Officer Mead if he recalled making a statement like “Save your breath. Aren’t you supposed to be killing yourself?” “No, absolutely not,” the officer said. When one of Hamilton’s lawyers asked if there is “any circumstance under which a correction officer is permitted to deny an inmate lunch,” Mead replied, “No.” About Lonnie, he testified, “I didn’t give him his lunch because he didn’t want it.”
To Hamilton, the testimony did not make sense. He knew that a counsellor—who had spoken to Lonnie through his cell door that morning, just before lunch—had written in a memo that when she left the SHU Lonnie had been “banging on his cell door wanting his ‘chow.’ ”
Later, one of Hamilton’s attorneys asked Officer Mead why he had not gone into Lonnie’s cell immediately after seeing that the young man was hanging. The officer said that one of Lonnie’s hands had been clenched into a fist, and he thought that it might hold a weapon. “Inmates do that,” Mead testified. “It’s a trap.” He added, “They will fake a hanging and you come in and then there’s [an] assault on staff.”
In the spectator section of the courtroom, Hamilton guffawed. “Are you serious?” he said later. “A trick? I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was Houdini or Copperfield, where he can just like levitate with a rope around his neck.”
After four days and nine witnesses, on October 21, 2021, the trial concluded. Hamilton and his brother drove back home to the Bronx. Six months passed with no news about the outcome, but finally, on April 25th, the call came. Hamilton was driving home after shopping for sneakers, when he answered his cell phone and Zachary Giampá relayed the news: Judge Collins had declared in his decision that the state was “100% liable for Lonnie’s pain, suffering, and death,” and had awarded Hamilton one and a half million dollars.
Hamilton was stunned. “In a million years, I would have never guessed that judge giving that decision,” he said. “I said, ‘What? A hundred per cent? He said a hundred per cent? Wow.’ I’d never seen that coming. . . . I kept saying the same thing over again. Like, ‘Are you serious? Are you serious?’ ”
From the perspective of Hamilton’s attorneys, it was an unusual legal victory, for a few reasons. “Inmates have a hard time finding lawyers,” Zachary Giampá said. “If you knew the number of letters I get—almost daily—and we take very few cases.” But, when Hamilton had initially come to him for help retrieving Lonnie’s body, he agreed to represent him because he knew that Hamilton had a strong claim for loss of sepulcher. At the time, the Giampás had no idea if there were other claims that could be made. But they went on to investigate and uncovered evidence of negligence and wrongful death. “We were able to prove it—and many can’t,” Zachary Giampá said, noting that they’d had strong evidence, including multiple witnesses who were willing to speak.
Judge Collins’s decision ran twenty-six pages and cited Dayvon’s trial testimony, and also earlier depositions given by two other men who had been imprisoned with Lonnie in C Wing on the morning that he’d died. “No reason is apparent why these incarcerated individuals would lie and the similarity in their version of events is persuasive,” the judge wrote. “Correction Officer Mead’s testimony, on the other hand, was problematic.” Collins detailed inconsistencies between what Mead had said at the trial and statements that he had made earlier to investigators. But, the judge concluded, “the Court finds it unnecessary” to “resolve any credibility issues, because the facts otherwise establish a shocking dereliction of duty on the part of the correction officers involved.”
Judge Collins cited the state prison agency’s Directive 4101, which requires that “all suicide threats, attempts, or indicators are to be taken seriously given the potential risk to the life of an inmate.” He wrote that Officer Mead knew Lonnie “had been under suicide watch and had only recently been released”; that, although the officer insisted that “he could not hear what Lonnie was yelling,” neither the officer nor his co-worker had spoken “to Lonnie to inquire what was the matter or to determine his state of mind”; that the correction officers had not contacted the prison’s mental-health staff on Lonnie’s behalf; and that, when Officer Mead had seen Lonnie standing on his bed, he “did not speak or otherwise interact with Lonnie.”
A few weeks after the judge issued his decision, I sat down with Hamilton in his lawyers’ office, off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. I had met him for the first time in the same office in 2017, and he told me then that his mother had encouraged him to see a psychiatrist. After his son’s death, Hamilton had stopped eating, changing his clothes, visiting the barber, and going to work. (At the trial, Hamilton’s younger brother, Alexander, had testified: “I never seen a human in such a psychological mental stupor in my life.”) Hamilton had been doing better in recent years, but he never did seek therapy, because, he testified, “In our community, meaning Black community, [seeing a] psychiatrist—it’s . . . like a no-no. It’s like a sign of . . . mental weakness.”
When I met with Hamilton recently at his lawyers’ office, he had just finished a shift at a job that he has held since 2019, as an executive chef overseeing the kitchens at two senior centers in the Bronx. Six years have passed since his son died, but, when he spoke about him, it seemed as if no time at all had gone by. Occasionally, he stared at the ceiling as he spoke, his eyes filling with tears, and I was reminded of something that he had said at the trial: “Every day is a struggle for me. . . . I never feel good.”
It bothered him that, as far as he knew, the two officers who had been on duty in the SHU that day—and who had stood outside his son’s cell door and watched him hanging—had never been punished. Mead had recently retired, after twenty-five years; the other officer, Zeina, had since been promoted to sergeant. (The state prison agency said, in a statement, “The Department’s Office of Special Investigations conducted an investigation following the death of Lonnie Hamilton that concluded staff acted immediately and appropriately in their response. There were no referrals for discipline.”)
In his lawyers’ office, I asked Hamilton how the experience of sitting through the trial—and getting the chance to tell his story on the witness stand—had left him feeling. “Doesn’t make you feel better, that’s for sure,” he said. “Maybe that works for some people, but not for me.” He went on, “Money is not justice, right? . . . There’s no justice. My son, he’s dead. So where is the justice? . . . I don’t get to see him get married. I don’t get to see his first kid.” After the judge had awarded him a seven-figure sum, he said, some people he knew had told him, “You should be happy.” But it was evident that he was not. “I’m not money-driven,” he said. “I could care less. Give me my son back.” ♦