The police chief of Rochester, N.Y., and several of his department’s highest ranking officials resigned on Tuesday in the aftermath of the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who suffocated after he had been placed in a hood by city police officers and pinned to the ground.
The resignations of the police chief, La’Ron D. Singletary, the deputy chief, Joseph Morabito, and, according to Mayor Lovely Warren, others in the department, came three days after the state attorney general, Letitia James, announced that she would impanel a grand jury to consider evidence in Mr. Prude’s death.
“As a man of integrity, I will not sit idly by while outside entities attempt to destroy my character,” the police chief said in a statement. He later added: “The mischaracterization and the politicization of the actions that I took after being informed of Mr. Prude’s death is not based on facts, and is not what I stand for.”
Officials in Rochester had not publicly disclosed the death of Mr. Prude, 41, until a public records request by his family revealed officers’ body camera footage showing his struggle, naked and hooded, to the public for the first time. Mr. Prude’s family in recent days has accused officials of covering up his death to protect the police officers involved.
Mr. Singletary denied any wrongdoing on the part of the officers, even as seven were suspended last week. As recently as Sunday, he vowed to work to improve community relations in the department “to prevent this from ever happening again.”
Mr. Singletary was promoted to chief last year after serving 19 years with the department. Just 38 years old at the time, he was among the youngest police chiefs in the city’s history.
“He’s been — his whole life — wanting to be a police officer,” his cousin, Karen Frazer Crawford, said at the time.
Mayor Warren announced the departures in a video call to the Rochester City Council. “The entire Rochester Police Department command staff has announced their retirement,” she said. The mayor said she had not requested the chief’s resignation, and said it followed “new information that was brought to light today that I had not previously seen before.” She did not elaborate.
The resignations are the latest development in an explosive week in Rochester since the release of the body camera footage and the revelation, in stark images, of Mr. Prude’s encounter with the police.
Mr. Prude arrived in Rochester by train from Chicago and to his brother’s home on March 22. He was behaving so erratically, paranoid and hallucinating, that his brother, Joe Prude, had him admitted to a hospital for evaluation. But Mr. Prude was released hours later, and early the morning of March 23, he bolted from the home and into the streets.
Officers found him naked and ranting; a witness said he heard Mr. Prude claim he had the coronavirus, then on the sharp rise in New York. He was handcuffed without incident, seated in the street. But when he began spitting and ignored orders to stop, officers pulled a so-called spit hood over his head.
Mr. Prude became agitated and tried to rise, and officers restrained him by pushing his head into the street and placing a knee on his torso, according to footage from the body cameras. He stopped breathing and his heart stopped beating. Paramedics revived him and took him to a hospital, where he died March 30.
Hours after the incident, Mr. Singletary told Ms. Warren that a person had suffered a drug overdose while in custody, Ms. Warren said last week. But a county autopsy report labeled Mr. Prude’s death a homicide caused by complications of asphyxiation in a prone position.
Protests have taken place in the streets since the release of the video. On Tuesday, Melanie Funchess, a leader with the Greater Rochester Black Agenda Group, part of the Black Lives Matter movement, learned of the chief’s resignation when she saw the news on her phone.
“Wow, he didn’t survive,” she said. “My question is, with him retiring, will a whole story come out?”
Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting from Rochester, N.Y.
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