Daniel Prude's Death Leads to No Charges for Police - The New York Times

Prude, a Black man who was having an apparent psychotic episode, died after police officers placed a mesh hood over his head and pinned him to the ground.

On a snowy night last March, Daniel Prude sprinted shirtless out of his brother’s home in Rochester, N.Y., seemingly in the grip of a psychotic episode.

James said, her voice growing emotional at a news conference at Aenon Missionary Baptist Church in Rochester.

James said she planned to meet immediately with the Prude family, as well as the family of a 9-year-old Black girl who was handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by police in the back of a police car in Rochester last month.

The officers had placed what they said was a protective covering over his head after he spit at them.

James said she was “extremely disappointed” that there would be no charges for the seven members of the Police Department involved: Officers Josiah Harris, Francisco Santiago, Paul Ricotta, Andrew Specksgoor, Mark Vaughn and Troy Taladay and Sgt.

The Rochester Police Locust Club, the union that represents the city’s 700 law enforcement officers, declined to comment on the grand jury’s decision.

Though there have been notable exceptions — four Minneapolis officers were fired and charged criminally in the death of Mr.

James noted Tuesday that legal standards can make prosecuting police officers particularly challenging.

Prude, 41, lived in Chicago but had been visiting his brother in Rochester.

Friends said that before his death, Mr.

He began to use drugs, they said, to cope with the 2018 death by suicide of his nephew, with whom he had lived.

It failed him when he was released from the hospital, it failed him when the police responded and used deadly force against him and it failed him again today,” Elliot Shields, a lawyer for Joe Prude, said on Tuesday.

At points, police officers in riot gear fired chemical irritants at the demonstrators, including those who remained peaceful.

Records released in an internal review of the episode in September appeared to show that Rochester officials had tried for months to suppress video footage of the encounter and had misrepresented the cause of his death.

“We certainly do not want people to misinterpret the officers’ actions and conflate this incident with any recent killings of unarmed Black men by law enforcement nationally,” a deputy Rochester police chief wrote in a June 4 email to his supervisor, advising him not to release the footage to the Prude family’s lawyer.

Prude’s death had been presented in police accounts as a fatal drug interaction: The police said Mr.

Mayor Lovely Warren, who had already suspended the seven officers, fired the police chief and suspended several city staff members shortly after the revelations.

Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan, the city’s interim chief of police, said Tuesday that she understood “the community’s collective pain at this moment.” She urged any demonstrators to be peaceful.