The Cause Of Roberto Grant’s Death In Notorious Manhattan Jail Was Deemed “Undetermined.” Experts Now Say It Was A Homicide

It was May 2015, and Roberto Grant had pleaded guilty to taking part in a series of luxury watch store heists. He was awaiting sentencing at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal jail in lower Manhattan, when he died a violent death. An autopsy released a year and a half later listed his cause of death as “undetermined.”

Grant’s family says MCC administrators and their superiors at the federal Bureau of Prisons misled them about what really happened the night he died. And they are demanding answers.

"I don’t know how they did it,” said Crecita Williams, Grant’s mother, who is certain her son was murdered but admits she doesn't have all the facts about what happened. “I don’t even like thinking about it because it hurts to know that he couldn’t help himself, or no one was there to help him. At least have his back.”

Unlike the suicide of MCC’s most infamous resident, globetrotting pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Grant’s death garnered no international headlines and prompted no public consequences for the guards on duty at the time.

With the help of transparency advocates the Gumshoe Group and attorney M.J. Williams, Gothamist/WNYC has obtained over two hundred pages of medical and investigation records regarding Grant’s death. The documents show that, contrary to an official’s early claim that Grant overdosed, the 35-year-old had no drugs in his system when he died. He did, however, have extensive injuries to his neck that some medical experts say indicate he was choked to death.

“In society, you’re only as good as you treat people who are most vulnerable,” said Andrew Laufer, the lawyer representing Grant’s mother and ex-wife, the mother of their twin daughters, in a federal lawsuit against the jail. “Prisoners are most vulnerable. They should be safe doing their time in prison. They shouldn’t have to worry about being murdered.”

Nestled among Manhattan’s grand federal courthouses, behind the iconic Municipal Building, MCC is easy to overlook with its brown, brutalist walls and narrow, dark windows. The building houses hundreds of people, most of whom have yet to be convicted of a crime.

In recent years Gothamist investigations and other reports have revealed the torturous conditions inside: overcrowding, cells that flood with sewage, windows caked in mold, severe rodent and bug infestations, and medical assistance that is paltry, if it comes at all.

On May 19th, 2015, at around 11:40 p.m., prisoners in Grant’s unit, 11 South, yelled to guards to come help “an inmate passed out,” according to a jail captain’s memo. Officers wrote that they found Grant on his bed without a pulse. According to their accounts, they administered CPR, transferred him to a stretcher, and shocked him with a defibrillator. Nothing worked.

Paramedics drove Grant to New York-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital, just under the Brooklyn Bridge entrance from the jail. Doctors there pronounced him dead just after 12:30 a.m.

Grant’s mother says that when she went to MCC, jail spokesman Lee Plourde told her Grant had died of a K2 overdose. (The BOP declined through its Washington, D.C. press office to make Plourde available for questions.)

For the next year and a half, that was all the information the family had. The Medical Examiner’s Officer only released the autopsy around New Year’s 2017, after family attorney Andrew Laufer says he filed notice that they intended to sue the BOP in federal court. Medical examiners are typically expected to complete autopsies within 90 days, and delays beyond 90 days are something the National Association of Medical Examiners considers when deciding whether to provide accreditation.

The labs that ran toxicology tests on Grant’s body found no drugs in his system. What the autopsy does show are extensive injuries to Grant’s neck, among other injuries that medical experts tell Gothamist are typical of strangulation.

Undated, handwritten notes released by the BOP as part of its investigation records include a reference to the city’s former deputy chief medical examiner, Jennifer Hammers, who performed the autopsy. Those notes lay out several of Grant’s injuries and state that they are “NOT CPR RELATED” and “CONSIST. OF BEING CHOKED.”

And yet, the autopsy lists the cause and manner of death as, “Undetermined.”

Hammers is now in private practice in Pennsylvania. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner spokeswoman Aja Worthy-Davis said that Grant’s official cause of death is still undetermined, and that the agency does not discuss specific autopsies. Hammers declined to comment, referring questions to OCME.

Listen to Nathan Tempey discuss Roberto Grant's death on WNYC:

“There’s nothing undetermined about this,” said Tara Godoy, a forensic nurse who runs a national medical forensics firm and regularly testifies about strangulation in court. Godoy reviewed Gothamist’s files. “It’s very, very clear it’s a homicide,” she said.

Moreover, it’s very clear that Grant was choked to death, according to Godoy.

“I don’t think there’s any pathologist that would look at that and say it’s anything other than strangulation,” she said.

Priya Banerjee, a private forensic pathologist in Rhode Island, reviewed the autopsy and toxicology reports as well. Emphasizing that she had not seen additional records such as investigation reports or Grant’s medical history, Banerjee also said the medical examiner’s findings point to homicide.

“The autopsy showed extensive deep neck injuries, and that to me indicates external trauma inflicted by another person or persons,” Banerjee said. She explained that it’s not a medical examiner’s job to identify the perpetrator, “but when I interpret the injuries in this fashion, the manner of death would be homicide, not ‘undetermined’ as the autopsy has stated in this case.”

Notes from the BOP’s interviews with prisoners in the days after Grant’s death don’t mention violence, but they do seem to show a focus by investigators on the possibility of Grant using synthetic marijuana, or K2.

“Heard dude passed out from smoking K2,” one unidentified inmate is noted as saying.

“Dude just passed out,” another said.

A third describes Grant, who some of the prisoners knew by the nickname Panama, as “smoking with his cellie,” and states that someone whose name was redacted “got k-2 on the unit.”

Synthetic marijuana consists of cannabis-like chemicals made in labs that can be sprayed onto anything smokable. The substance can go undetected by drug tests, although a lab specifically tested Grant’s blood for it as part of his autopsy. These properties, and the drug’s cheapness, make it popular among people under state supervision. Indeed, a current and a former New York City correctional officer were charged in February with allegedly smuggling K2 into Rikers Island using comic books and court papers soaked in the stuff.

The illicit nature of K2 manufacturing means that any chemical can be in the concoction, including potentially deadly ones, such as an ingredient in rat poison, which was blamed for K2 overdose deaths in 2018.

“Heard over the last few days that there is real strong k2 going around,” another prisoner told BOP investigators after Grant’s death. “They been calling it death.”

Still, drugs weren’t found in Grant’s system. And, Banerjee said, “Even if the drugs were present, to me it would not explain the extent of the injuries in the neck.”

“What it comes down to is it seems like Roberto was choked out by another prisoner,” said Laufer, Grant’s family’s attorney. “Everybody doesn’t see anything, hear anything, doesn’t want to say anything.”

Whoever did the strangling, the BOP ultimately bears the blame, Laufer said. In depositions, he explained, MCC guards said that they were supposed to patrol Grant’s tier every 30-40 minutes. But there were only two guards monitoring Grant’s area, and a guard on duty the night of Grant’s death said they only patrol a few times per eight-hour shift, according to Laufer.

“This could very well have been prevented,” he said.

The Bureau of Prisons declined to say how many MCC inmates have died in custody over the past decade. But 897 people died in federal custody nationwide in 2016 and 2017, the most recent period for which figures are available, during which an average of about 189,000 people were federally incarcerated. 87 of those deaths were from suicide and homicide. The government classified 18 deaths in the same period as “unknown” or “other.”

This past year, the coronavirus pandemic swept through federal correctional facilities including MCC, where 118 staff members and inmates have come down with the virus, according to BOP data. The agency declined to share the facility’s current testing positivity rate. Nationally, of about 109,000 tests performed in BOP facilities since the pandemic started, over 46,000, or about 43% were positive; 232 of those infected have died, all but four of them prisoners.

MCC’s sister federal facility, the Metropolitan Detention Center, across the river in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, has fared worse, suffering 472 confirmed infections and one death, that of prisoner Edwin Segarra, 46. Public defenders recently faulted MDC administrators for initially failing to count Segarra’s death as COVID-related in its twice-weekly reports.

Now that vaccines are available, a return to some semblance of normalcy could be on the horizon for the country. A BOP spokesman said that all of the agency’s facilities now have first doses on hand, but declined to say how many people have been vaccinated at MCC. A question for newly confirmed Attorney General Merrick Garland and for Congress, now controlled by Democrats, is whether the new normal will be as callous as the old.

The Bureau of Prisons is part of the Justice Department and subject to oversight by Congress, which sets its budget and writes the laws it’s supposed to follow. But the agency’s wardens and correction officers make less noise in the news than, for example, their peers in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And when BOP crises do flare up, as in the winter of 2019 when MDC in Brooklyn lost heat and power and locked out the public for a week, the agency can seem immune to accountability, even when legislators and judges are clamoring for it.

Many longtime observers of the BOP say they aren’t optimistic that anything will change, in part because the Justice Department, which ostensibly oversees the BOP, is also responsible for defending the agency against lawsuits such as the one brought by Mr. Grant’s family.

“Of any agency I’ve ever been involved with, the BOP is the most impervious to any sort of real oversight or accountability,” said David Patton, executive director of the Federal Defenders of New York for the Eastern and Southern Districts. “Because the people who are charged with doing it are their coworkers within the Department of Justice. It’s truly the definition of the fox guarding the henhouse.”

The people most directly responsible for BOP oversight wouldn’t speak to us for this story. The offices of Garland and California Rep. Karen Bass, who heads the congressional Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, a subsidiary of the House Judiciary Committee, didn’t respond to interview requests. A spokesman for New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he wasn’t available to speak before our deadline.

Born in Brooklyn to parents who soon separated, Roberto Grant was the second oldest of six children. He grew up going back and forth to Panama, where his father lived. Grant’s mother and Roberto Sr. remained on good terms, and in the winter of 1989, she was planning to reunite the family by moving to Panama permanently. Grant was set to fly there for Christmas when word came that the U.S. had invaded to depose Panama’s ruler, Manuel Noriega. Roberto Grant Sr., by then a Panamanian military officer, died in the fighting.

Roberto Jr. stayed with his mother, Crecita Williams, growing up first in Crown Heights, then in Brownsville. As a teenager, Grant played basketball and loved showing off, playing pranks, and performing his own brand of street gymnastics.

“He was famous at flipping,” Williams said. “He could flip down the whole block, like three blocks. Flip off a roof, off a building, off a car.”

As Grant got older, he told a federal judge in January 2015, he started “hanging with the wrong crowd.”

By the time he gave his final statement to the court, Grant had spent all but a few years of his adult life in prison. Released from state custody in 2012 for a robbery he had committed at 23, Grant got back together with his ex-wife, Nicole Morrison, whom he’d known since they both attended P.S. 316 in Brooklyn. The pair moved to Silver Spring, Maryland for what Grant called “a new start,” and shortly thereafter they had twins. Grant got a job cleaning offices, only to lose it within several months. Then, starting in the summer of 2013, Grant and a few associates set out on a string of thefts up and down the East Coast.

These robberies, while audacious, were not the stuff of Ocean’s Eleven. In each, the men hit jewelry stores while they were open: walking in, smashing display cases with hammers, and running out with handfuls of high-end watches. During one raid in New Jersey, a store owner shot at them. During another, in Richmond, Virginia a member of Grant’s crew used a stun-gun on a store worker and knocked her out, according to prosecutors.

The spree culminated in a brazen January 2014 smash-and-grab at the flagship Cartier watch store in midtown Manhattan that netted the men $700,000 worth of watches. Using information from the feds, NYPD cops pulled Grant and codefendant Allen Williams over in Brooklyn that night. They were both wearing Cartier timepieces hot off the shelves, prosecutors said.

Nicole Morrison says she believes Grant was impatient to create a comfortable life for his new family.

“I think that’s a lot of what Roberto dealt with, feeling as though he had to catch up or make up for what was lost while he was in jail,” she told Gothamist/WNYC. . “And when one thinks like that, it can take you down a different road. When he came home, when he tried to do something outside of what he knew and it didn’t work, he just resorted back to where he was comfortable. “

Grant spent 2014 in federal custody at MCC. Late that summer, Grant pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit robbery. In January 2015, he appeared before Judge Robert Patterson. “I had to support my family,” Grant told the judge, attributing his crimes to his job loss “I went about it the wrong way. I take full responsibility for my actions. I just want a chance, another chance, to prove that this is not my life anymore.” His lawyer asked for a 10-year sentence. Prosecutors called for 12-and-a-half to-15.

Patterson died of cancer in April 2015, before making a decision. Grant remained at MCC, waiting to appear before a new judge for sentencing. That day in court never came.

Grant’s case echoes the much higher-profile death of Jeffrey Epstein in MCC in August 2019. Indeed, according to Laufer, one of the BOP investigators initially assigned to Grant’s case also worked on the Epstein death before the Federal Bureau of Investigation took over. In Epstein’s case, probers found that two guards assigned to monitor Epstein, who were subject to the same requirements that they make rounds every half hour, instead shopped online, napped, and never entered his area during their overnight shift.

As with Epstein, the FBI seems to have taken over the investigation into Grant’s death. Responding to a public records request seeking documents from an inquiry into the matter, the FBI said it had identified over 700 pages of potentially relevant material. The latest estimate for when it will turn anything over is November 2022. The FBI press office did not respond to inquiries about this.

Unlike Grant, who was in general population, Epstein was assigned to solitary confinement in MCC’s Special Housing Unit after coming off of suicide watch. And unlike Grant’s captors, who have so far avoided any public accounting, the feds arrested the guards who were supposed to monitor Epstein within months for their alleged negligence. The facility is now on its fourth warden since Epstein’s death.

If MCC administrators learned anything from Grant’s demise, they aren’t saying.

“For safety and security reasons we do not discuss internal security procedures,” BOP spokesman Scott Taylor said when asked whether MCC has changed protocol since the incident.

Taylor also declined to discuss the specifics of Grant’s case, citing, “safety, security, and privacy reasons,” and saying, “The official cause of death is determined by the medical examiner and not the Bureau of Prisons.”

Grant’s family alleges that Michael Kearins, an MCC guard who has since retired, repeatedly threatened Grant and accused him of using K2 in the months leading up to his death. Kearins called this reporter back late on a Saturday night, then declined to comment.

“Yeah, I can’t talk about none of that,” he said.

Laufer and lawyers for the BOP are wrapping up interviews of each other’s experts. If the BOP and Grant’s family don’t settle, the case could go to trial later this year.

“I personally want to sue, not for the money, because it cannot bring my son back, but for this to show them to never let this happen again,” said Williams, who works in a school cafeteria. “Money can’t bring him back. It only brings me to the cemetery as often as I can.”

Grant’s twin daughters are now seven. Whatever happens with the case, Williams plans to add a bench to her son’s funeral plot, and a tree.

“I want the tree to be the same age as the girls so it can grow up with them,” she said, “and him.”