Messiah Nantwi’s cellmate had to wipe the blood off the floor of their room.
Officers at Midstate Correctional Facility, the state prison in Central New York where the two men were incarcerated, had stormed in and beat Nantwi until he was unconscious. The cellmate had watched: One of the guards pinned him against the wall as the blood splattered, then ordered him to clean it up, he said. Hours later, the then-sanitized cell became a crime scene; Nantwi was dead. It was a week before his 23rd birthday.
It was the second high-profile case of New York state prison guards allegedly killing an incarcerated person within three months. Since the fatal beating of 43-year-old Robert Brooks in December, caught on video at a facility across the street from Nantwi’s, the state’s prison system has descended into chaos. Last month, amid nationwide calls for reform and the indictment of guards allegedly involved in Brooks’s killing, most of the system’s corrections officers walked off the job, launching a wildcat strike that lasted three weeks…