The mother of a dead prisoner is crying foul after a Westchester County corrections officer said his supervisors asked him to sign a report about the fatality that he says he did not author.
"Something is not right. What are they trying to hide?" said Lydia McNulty, whose son Rashad McNulty died of a heart attack while he was behind bars.
McNulty, an alleged gang member, was awaiting sentencing on a drug charge in 2013 when he complained of chest pains and dizziness for three hours while locked up at the Westchester County Correctional Facility.
In a lawsuit, McNulty's family claims the jail and its private medical contractor, Correct Care Solutions, failed to help the dying inmate. The episode was captured on closed-circuit video.
"I've seen the video. To see my son like that, it kills me," said Lydia.
During deposition testimony, corrections officer Kevin Grant said he witnessed McNulty repeatedly calling for medical help and wrote two reports about the incident. But two weeks later, Grant said jail supervisors brought him a third report, with different wording, to endorse.
"It was brought to my residence," he told lawyers. "They asked me to sign it."
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Grant, who has filed a disability claim associated with the stress of witnessing McNulty die, said he doesn't know what became of the original report he authored, but he said that document had more detail about McNulty's death than the report supervisors brought to his home two weeks later.
When asked why he didn't sign the document delivered to his home, Grant testified that he refused "because it wasn't the Special Report that I submitted."
Jared Rice, the attorney representing Rashad McNulty's family, said he was troubled by Grant's testimony.
"You would never expect a public official, a corrections officer or anybody, to go lengths of that nature to have somebody sign a report that was not his or hers," Rice said.
After the inmate's death, the state's Commission of Corrections, a panel of regulators overseeing all New York jails, issued a scathing report concluding that McNulty might have been saved had jail medical staff not ignored obvious signs of cardiac distress.
In court filings, both Westchester County and Correct Care Solutions denied Rashad McNulty received deficient medical care while incarcerated.
After learning that one of Grant's original reports describing the death had not been turned over as evidence in the wrongful death case, Rice filed a letter with the court demanding Westchester County cough up the original document and asking the judge to impose penalties if it turns out jail employees destroyed or disposed of it.
"We're going to hold those who did this accountable to the fullest extent," Rice said.
Hours after the I-Team reached out, a lawyer for Westchester county and its jail medical provider filed a letter with the court expressing concern the publicizing of Grant's deposition could taint the jury pool, and suggesting there had been a misunderstanding that would be cleared up by Wednesday.
"There is no 'missing report,'" said the letter.
