Outside the Fishkill Correctional Facility in upstate NY.

Samuel Harrell was a 30-year-old, nonviolent drug offender serving an eight-year sentence when he was killed at Fishkill Correctional Facility in April of 2015. According to numerous other inmates, Harrell, who had bipolar disorder, died after being beaten by a group of state prison guards known as the “beat-up squad.” The Orange County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide. Yet state and federal prosecutors declined to charge anyone in Harrell’s death, dismissing the inmates’ accounts as “inconsistent and contradictory.”

Nearly five years after Harrell’s killing, a career prison medical officer has stepped forward to offer his account of what happened that night.

Frederick Belanger was the highest-ranking medical officer at Fishkill when he found guards hiding an unconscious and dying Harrell, blocking him from receiving potentially life-saving medical treatment.

Belanger said that guards’ hid Harrell “at the end of a tunnel.”

“I was the one who found him,” Belanger told Gothamist.

Because of the guards’ actions, Belanger said it took at least 30 minutes for Harrell to receive the medical attention he needed. “A case like that, you need medical equipment and you gotta move fast. Every second counts,” Belanger explained. “He was in bad shape. He barely had a pulse.”

Belanger, who is named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by Harrell’s wife, said he gave written statements to state and federal officials, but he was never called before a grand jury.

“I thought for sure I was going to get called for a grand jury” Belanger said. “So did my union rep.”

Belanger said he was interviewed by FBI agents, but nothing came of it. (The FBI declined to comment.)

After 25 years working for the state prison system, Belanger retired in 2018. Many of the guards who were with Harrell the night he died are still working in state prisons, some despite their involvement in other inmate deaths. One was hired by the NYPD. It’s unclear if any were disciplined.

“They killed him,” Harrell’s widow, Diane, told Gothamist. “And everybody in that prison knows they killed him and they’re still getting away with it.”

Samuel Harrell and his wife, Diane Harrell. 

Harrell was diagnosed as bipolar in 2010, and his killing was rooted in his mental illness, according to Diane Harrell’s lawsuit. The complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan by attorney Jonathan Moore, is largely based on inmate eyewitness accounts.

According to the lawsuit (below), Harrell woke up on April 21st, 2015, convinced he was going to be released. In fact, he had several years left to serve on his sentence, and was suffering a mental health crisis. When the delusional Harrell started packing his belongings around 8 p.m., inmates told guards that he needed psychiatric help.

Guards alerted their supervisor, Sergeant Joseph Guarino. One also telephoned a mental health nurse, who told the officer to bring Harrell to the clinic. Instead, Guarino sounded an emergency alarm, typically used when prison staff are attacked or feel threatened, according to the lawsuit.

A group of around 20 guards responded, including another supervisor, Sergeant Terry Shultis. “All of whom are white. Some of these officers are members of the notorious ‘Beat up Squad,’” the lawsuit alleges. Fishkill prisoners also called them “team beatdown.”

The squad tackled and handcuffed Harrell, the lawsuit claims. Then they allegedly kicked and punched the handcuffed Harrell “about the head and body.”

Guarino allegedly ordered them “to throw Mr. Harrell down the stairwell,” and some officers complied. Harrell’s motionless body was then rolled away in a wheelchair.

Belanger did not see anyone beat Harrell, but what he says came next corroborates a key detail of the inmates’ reports and the lawsuit: that guards used a wheelchair to roll away a dead or dying Harrell.

According to Belanger, he was making rounds in a special unit for cognitively impaired prisoners when the alarm triggered by Sergeant Guarino was broadcast. Belanger responded to the medical clinic. Within minutes, Belanger said, a total of 15 guards entered Fishkill’s medical clinic seeking treatment, claiming to have been injured during the encounter with Harrell.

Only one had a potentially serious injury, Belanger said, but that turned out to be a bruised rib. Ambulances were summoned for some of the officers, and nurses treated them.

“The COs were being treated,” Belanger recalled. “I took a walk around to make sure everyone was being treated.”

He left the medical clinic and walked down a passageway, where he saw “maybe seven COs” standing in “front of a door to the specialty clinic. That’s only open during the day. No one is supposed to be there at night.”

“They’re outside the door, looking in,” Belanger recalled. “They were standing there watching him in the room.”

Instead of speaking, one guard pointed into the room. Belanger looked inside: there was Harrell, seated in a wheelchair and slumped over — the wheelchair inmates said guards used to roll a dead-looking Harrell away in.

“I see this guy sideways, looking like he’s dead,” Belanger said, and recalled how he felt for a pulse. “I felt it. Slow, slow, light.”

Belanger raced back to the medical clinic to get help and equipment. When he returned to where guards were holding Harrell, with nurses and the crash cart, Harrell stopped breathing.

Nurses performed CPR, Belanger said, but Harrell died “as we were putting him into the ambulance.”

According to Belanger, whenever a prisoner is seriously injured and needs prison medical providers, guards are supposed to broadcast what is called a Code Green.

“There was no Code Green called,” he said.

Belanger added that while he was in the medical clinic supervising the officers’ treatment, he overheard a sergeant order that Harrell not be brought to the clinic while guards were being treated there: “I don’t want him to come down here next to these guys.” He could not name the sergeant.

After Harrell’s killing, the union representing Fishkill’s guards allegedly circulated a flier falsely claiming that Harrell was “stoned” on K2, or synthetic marijuana, the night he was killed, according to Diane Harrell’s lawsuit.

Belenger acknowledged that “we all thought it was K2. Because that’s what was happening at that time.”

He added that the nurse who called an ambulance for Harrell told the dispatcher that Harrell was on K2, but that “she said it in his best interests. So they would know what to expect.”

In truth, Harrell’s homicide was actually caused by “Cardiac arrhythmia due to hypertensive cardiovascular disease following physical altercation with corrections officers,” the Orange County Medical Examiner wrote in Harrell’s autopsy report, obtained by Gothamist.

The autopsy report confirms that Harrell was bipolar and that he suffered “blunt impact injuries of head and extremities.”

Testing of Harrell’s blood by the Orange County Medical Examiner did not indicate the presence of K2. It only revealed a byproduct of nicotine and naloxone — an emergency medicine typically used to counteract opioid overdoses.

It took more than two years for federal and state investigators to conclude their investigation into Harrell’s killing. In August of 2017, the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and the Dutchess County District Attorney announced that they weren’t pursuing any charges.

While they found that physical force was used on Harrell, there was reasonable doubt his death “resulted from the use of excessive force.”

Denying medical treatment can also be legal grounds for a homicide charge independent of excessive force. For instance, parents who fail to seek medical attention for dying children and are charged with murder. Like parents, Correction Officers are legally responsible for preserving the lives of human beings in their custody.

Now that he’s speaking publicly, Belanger thinks prosecutors have to re-investigate Harrell’s killing. “They’re going to reopen,” he said.

The prosecutors would not say whether they considered if the guards who beat Harrell were criminally responsible for his death by denying him medical treatment. US attorney Preet Bharara, and his successor, Joon Kim, conducted the investigation.

A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office declined to comment because “your inquiry relates to either a grand jury, which is a secret proceeding, or investigative questions regarding uncharged parties.”

A spokesperson for Dutchess County DA William Grady referred us to the US Attorney’s office.

“I wish these people to be charged with what they did to my husband,” Diane Harrell said.

Samuel Harrell 

Some of the guards involved in Harrell’s killing were involved in beatings and deaths of other inmates at Fishkill.

Sergeant Guarino was sued at least twice for allegedly using unjustified force against prisoners at Fishkill before Harrell’s death, court records show. He retired in 2017, according to state payroll records. He did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.

In one of the cases, Guarino and Fishkill guards “tried to ram” inmate Orrie Wilson’s head into a wall, according to one of the lawsuits. Instead, Wilson landed on the floor and Guarino and Correction Officers Shawn Johnson and Patrick McKenna stomped on his back and ribs—cracking two of them, the suit alleged. New York State paid $60,000 to settle the case, according to court records.

Sergeant Shultis was also alleged to have contributed to the death of another mentally ill prisoner at Fishkill in 2014. Benjamin van Zant was a schizophrenic 21-year-old inmate who witnessed the beat-up squad attack another mentally ill prisoner and told a prison counselor what he saw.

Shultis allegedly confronted van Zant and told him he was a “troublemaker and a liar, and called him a ‘punk ass bitch,’” van Zant’s mother, Alicia Barraza, said in a 2016 interview. Shultis threatened her son that he was going “to tell everyone that he was a snitch” if Ben didn’t “keep his mouth shut,” Barraza said; van Zant hung himself days later.

After his death, his parents filed lawsuits like the one filed by Diane Harrell in both federal court and the state Court of Claims. The lawsuits were settled for $800,000 in July 2019, according to court filings.

The previously-unreported $800,000 payout is almost double the most previously paid to a prisoner held at Fishkill or in one of two other state prisons in Dutchess County between 2010 and 2015, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal.

Shultis ignored multiple messages seeking comment. He was promoted to lieutenant in 2018, state payroll records show.

“It’s unreal that they would reward him,” Diane Harrell said.

It does not appear that any prison guard or officials were disciplined for Harrell’s killing.

James Miller, a spokesperson for the union that represents New York’s state prison guards, declined to answer whether any union members were disciplined in connection with Harrell’s death.

“Both Federal and local prosecutors closed their investigation in August of 2017 citing the lack of evidence for any criminal charges against staff,” Miller said.

A review of state payroll records found that most of the guards named in Harrell’s lawsuit still work for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS, which runs the state’s prison system.

Miller referred the question to DOCCS “since the department would be the one administering any discipline.”

DOCCS’ spokesperson, Thomas Mailey, ignored multiple requests for comment.

One of the guards named in the federal lawsuit got a job as a police officer after Harrell’s death.

Rutger Rivera was hired by the NYPD in mid-2016, city payroll records show.

While Rivera was effectively cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the joint federal and state criminal investigation, that happened a year after Rivera was hired by the NYPD.

“I was a responding officer,” Rivera said in a phone call, referring to Harrell’s death. He added that he couldn’t say more “until I talk with my lawyers” but didn’t return subsequent calls.

Asked about Rivera’s hiring, an NYPD spokesperson said that “NYPD candidates are thoroughly investigated prior to being hired by the NYPD.”

Diane Harrell called Rivera’s hiring “scary.”

“Law enforcement gets away with a lot. And they definitely did with Sam’s murder,” she said. “Nothing happened to them.”

“The big picture here is that this kind of violence goes on on a daily basis in our prisons,” Moore, Diane Harrell’s attorney, said.

“Nobody cares about it,” Moore explained. “No law enforcement agencies care about it. The Attorney General doesn’t do anything about it. Cuomo doesn’t do anything about it. Nobody cares.”

A spokesperson for Gov. Andrew Cuomo ignored multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for Attorney General Leitia James declined to comment.

Talk to, text or tip JB Nicholas at 914-564-0826; email him at [email protected].

Harrell First Amended Complaint – (to FILE) by John Del Signore on Scribd