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Lawsuit: Inmate’s suicide followed brutal beating by corrections officers

Officers at the state's Wende Correctional Facility beat an inmate, tied him at the hands and feet and threw him down a flight of stairs, a new lawsuit alleges. It goes on to say that partly because of the beating, inmate Dante Taylor killed himself the next day.

Taylor, who was 22 years old, had been treated at Erie County Medical Center for blunt force trauma, returned to the prison and placed in an infirmary cell, the complaint explains. He was found dead the next morning, Oct. 7, 2017, in a seated position with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck.

Lawyers for Taylor's mother and grandmother, Darlene McDay and Temple McDay of Suffolk County, say in the court papers that prison officials knew or should have known that Taylor, a convicted killer, was at risk of suicide.

The lawsuit lists the warning signs: He had been sexually and physically abused as a child, placed in a psychiatric facility as a teenager and had made multiple suicide attempts, including one which got him discharged from the Marine Corps. Days after arriving at the prison in 2016 he said he wanted to kill himself.

Further, Taylor and his wife had recently divorced, and his grandfather had just died. Before the beating, he had been caught smoking synthetic marijuana, meaning he was going to be spending more time in solitary confinement, or "keeplock." In keeplock, he wouldn't be able to receive visitors, and his mother and grandmother were to arrive in days.

Taylor had been under the care of mental health professionals at the prison, which is in Alden. But in the run-up to his death, the staff "repeatedly ignored the glaring warning signs that Mr. Taylor was at exceptionally high risk for suicide," states the lawsuit, signed by attorney Katherine Rosenfeld of New York City.

In Albany, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said it had not yet been served and could not comment on the case. It was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Buffalo.

Among the risk factors cited: Taylor was serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. He had been convicted of a horrible crime, the rape and murder a 21-year-old mother on Long Island, Sarah Goode, according to the New York Daily News, which first reported on the lawsuit Monday. Goode had been stabbed more than 40 times in 2014.

Dante Taylor, photographed just hours before he committed suicide in the Wende Correctional Facility on Oct. 7, 2017. A lawsuit alleges corrections officers beat him. (Photo provided by Emery Celli Brinckerhoff and Abady LLP)

But Taylor's mother told the Daily News that the conviction didn't justify her son's treatment in the Wende prison. "He was a human being as well," she said. "Correction officers should do their job without inflicting pain on people."

The cascade of events that led to Taylor's death began on the night of Oct. 6, 2017. Around 10:20 p.m., the lawsuit says, he began having seizures stemming from his use of the synthetic marijuana known as K2. Inmates in nearby cells alerted corrections officers to his condition.

The lawsuit says Taylor had been harassed and bullied over previous months by a number of corrections officers. It says four took control of him that night: Sgts. Timothy Lewalski and Scott Lambert, and Corrections Officer Melvin Maldonado and an officer named McDonald, whose first name the lawyers have not yet ascertained.

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According to the lawsuit, the four "began to beat Mr. Taylor's head, face and body with their batons, fist and feet." Inmates nearby, the lawsuit says, heard "the sound of sticks hitting his body" and Taylor "screaming in pain."

The four then bound the unconscious Taylor with zip ties at the hands and feet and threw him down a flight of stairs head first, the lawsuit alleges. It goes on to say the attackers later said Taylor injured himself by banging his head against a wall.

He was treated inside the Wende infirmary before an ambulance took him to ECMC around 1 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2017. Doctors noted the bruises and swelling, and recorded that he felt pain throughout his torso. A few hours later he was returned to the Wende infirmary, where a nurse documented that he was sullen and unable to chew solid food.

He soon learned that because of the synthetic marijuana, he would be placed in isolation and would not be seeing his mother and grandmother 10 days later, nor could he call them.

The lawsuit suggests Taylor should have undergone a mental health assessment and been placed on constant watch. But he was placed alone in an infirmary cell where he soon used a bedsheet, anchored to the toilet's grab rail, to hang himself.