21
No Mercy
As the small Conservation Corps helicopter appeared directly above the prison walls, many of the nearly 1,300 men in D Yard and up on the catwalks watched for some indication of what it was going to do. Some continued casting about for a weapon; others just dove into and under anything that might offer them protection. Suddenly, everyone stopped in their tracks as the outline of an entirely different, much larger, helicopter became visible on the horizon. Since this might be just a way to intimidate them, one prisoner thought, it was important to be calm and “Stand your ground.”1 A few others wondered if the chopper might be delivering Rockefeller to the prison to finally meet with prisoners. Most men, however, had no such illusions, particularly when the second helicopter began dumping a thick powdery fog into the yard. It was obvious that an attack had begun. Within seconds the air in D Yard was opaque with a combination of CS and CN gas—a thick and powdery substance that quickly enveloped, sickened, and felled every man it touched. In fact CS gas, chemical name orthochlorobenzylidene, wasn’t “really a gas at all, but a fine white powder. Once dispersed, it hangs almost suspended in the air, causing tearing, nausea and retching in those who inhale it.”2
When the first helicopter flew over, Carlos Roche was one of the men who thought that it might actually be Rockefeller, and, as he remembered, some of the “guys started hollering, yelling, you know cheering.”3 But when the air began to vibrate anew as the second, much bigger helicopter began its tour over the yard, a deep fear seized them. Before they could run or hide anywhere, they found themselves engulfed in a white cloud that immediately made people throw up.4 “I brought up everything that I ate…and then I…started bringing up blood,” recalled Roche.5 Another prisoner began vomiting violently when a canister of the gas exploded right next to him, and the powder also caused “his eyes to swell closed, and his lips, nose, and lungs to burn as if on fire.”6 So powerful was this substance that even the observers felt its effects over in the prison’s administration building, in a room where the windows were completely shut.7
If the Rockefeller administration’s goal had been, as General O’Hara later testified, to completely immobilize “persons exposed to the CS gas,” so that prison officials could walk in and, with no one capable of stopping them, calmly retake control, they had succeeded in mere minutes.8 The gas was, however, accompanied by a violent assault. At 9:46 a.m., pursuant to both an official proclamation and an executive order issued by the governor, the New York State Police broadcast over its radio system the long-awaited command: “Tell all your units to move in!”9
As prisoners and hostages began stumbling and crawling through the thick, noxious air, phalanxes of gas-mask-shrouded troopers poured onto the catwalks with guns blazing.10
The troopers had removed their identification emblems—the badges affixed to their collars that indicated which troop they belonged to as well as their name and rank—just before they went in.11 Trooper Captain William Dillon not only took off his nameplate and his captain’s bars, but as he later recounted, he “told [his] people to take them off too…[because] we weren’t stopping traffic where a citizen would have the perfect right to know who they’re being stopped by…it was a different thing.”12 Trooper Gerard Smith explained it even more bluntly: “Everybody started taking off their things…so they couldn’t identify what troop or identify to pinpoint the individual in case something happens.”13
Whereas some of the troopers now heading into D Yard were excited finally to take control and to show the prisoners who was boss, Tony Strollo was going in for one reason and one reason only: to rescue his brother, hostage Frank Strollo. Either way, these were men with much ammunition and only the flimsiest of plans as to how they were going to secure the facility let alone actually retrieve the hostages unharmed. Worse, these were men who had spent the last five days being inundated with rumors about the “animals” inside who would kill them if they could.14 According to later blotter entries and store clerk records submitted by the State Police, a total of thirty-three rifles had been sent to Attica in preparation for the retaking, and 217 shotguns had been passed out to the troopers from various troop supply trucks. There were also uncounted numbers of personal weapons. All this added up to an extraordinary concentration of firepower in the hands of members of law enforcement now buzzing from a toxic cocktail of hatred, fear, and aggression.15
On September 13, there was an astonishing number of men waiting outside of Attica to wield these weapons. In addition to the 550 uniformed men from the New York State Police, “augmented by BCI [Bureau of Criminal Investigation] personnel for a total force of approximately 600,” there were “232 Sheriff’s Deputies at Attica Correctional Facility” armed and ready to enter the prison, on top of which there were sheriffs from Genesee County and park police from Genesee and Schuyler counties.16 Although state officials later insisted that these other members of law enforcement had joined the assault against the state’s wishes, both sheriffs and park police insisted that they had been invited in. One officer from Genesee State Park explained that when “the state police found out we had rifles…they asked us if we would stand by a window there [in C Block] and be there if needed for any reason.”17 What is more, he explained, it was a NYSP trooper who gave them the okay “to pick a target” and to shoot to kill—to help them “to eliminate a threat to the hostages.”18 COs from Attica as well as some from Auburn also felt welcome to join the assault and, armed with personal as well as state-issued weapons, they stationed themselves on the second and third floors of A Block in firing position.19
Although it was reassuring to many of these men that they had so much firepower supporting them, they realized that this also meant a danger of being caught in some crossfire. Troopers like Tony Strollo were especially concerned about this because so many were wielding shotguns loaded with buckshot, which, “because it scattered,” could be disastrous.20 Another real concern was visibility. For starters, there had been “no discussion of the amount of time that the gas was supposed to be allowed to work,” and so the men all proceeded out into air so thick with powder it was hard to see a thing—particularly through the thick plastic of a gas mask. One trooper was so taken aback by the power and density of the gas that had just been dropped that, years later, he still couldn’t believe his superiors had sent him in through such “a heavy fog.”21
Despite the troopers’ impaired vision, from the instant they entered the prison and began moving out onto the catwalks above Attica’s yards, they began shooting.
The hostages up on the catwalks were right in the line of fire. Hostage Richard Fargo felt almost faint with fear when he realized how wrong the prisoners had been to think that the presence of hostages on the catwalk “would prevent police from shooting in the area.”22 Civilian hostage Ron Kozlowski felt his stomach lurch as he heard the unmistakable sounds of guns fired all around him. Seconds before, there had been a prisoner right next to him with a handmade knife at his neck, and the next thing he knew that man had been hit and “wasn’t there anymore.”23 As the bullets hit him, the prisoner’s body jerked and fell backward and the knife that he had been holding sliced an erratic gouge from Ron’s neck up to his hairline and then back down across the shoulder blade. Horrified, Ron “dropped to the floor, curled up in a ball and laid still” so that no one would shoot at him.24 But to his dismay, “the bullets were coming like rain” and, because so many of them were ricocheting off the catwalk, his face was also being blasted by jagged shards of cement.25
Mike Smith felt the impact of the prisoner on his right being shot twice, the last shot literally catapulting him over the railing of the catwalk. In a futile attempt to save both himself and Mike from being hit, Don Noble pulled him to the left as the man immediately behind him received a fatal volley of gunfire. But the shots reached them anyway. Mike’s abdomen was on fire as four bullets ripped across it in a straight line. He was also shot in the arm, which felt as if it had been torn from hi
s body.26 The bullets that entered Mike’s stomach, dead center right between his navel and genitals, exploded upon impact, which sent shrapnel downward to his spine. One exiting slug took the base of Mike’s spine along with it, leaving “a hole about the size of a grapefruit” in his intestines.27 All Mike could hear around him as the shooting kept going on was “people crying, people dying, and people screaming.”28 As he lay curled up, bleeding profusely, Mike suddenly found himself looking up into the eyes of a trooper who had a shotgun pointed directly at his head. Somewhere close by, he heard a correction officer yell to the trooper, “He is one of us,” and started to breathe a sigh of relief. Then, he realized sickeningly that the trooper had simply resighted his weapon on Don Noble, who also lay bleeding next to him. Weakly Mike tried to tell the trooper, “He saved my life.”29 To his relief, as he faded in and out of consciousness, he saw that Noble seemed to have been spared.
Nearby, hostage Dean Stenshorn tried desperately to see what was happening around him through the blindfold over his eyes. He wanted to get shelter from the bullets whizzing around him, but could only stand there frozen. He could hear a prisoner say “Don’t kill him” and realized in that moment that he had much more to fear from the troopers barreling over the catwalk toward him than from the men who had counted on his life being a bargaining chip with the state.30 As hostage Curly Watkins suddenly found himself on the ground with a prisoner lying heavily on top of him, it dawned on him as well that, though this prisoner could very well have killed him should he have wanted to, he was still alive. And yet, ironically, he still might die from so-called friendly fire.31
John Hill, known in the yard as Dacajewiah, was one of the prisoners holding a hostage on the catwalk of B Block when the gunfire erupted. In that second he realized how completely the men in D Yard had failed to grasp the state’s intentions. “We felt somewhat protected by the presence of Dunne, and even the media….We felt, I think, that there just couldn’t have been a massacre with media watching.”32 As he came up from under a barricade the prisoners had built on B catwalk where he had been crouching for cover, he was shot. He was then hit with the butt of another trooper’s weapon, which hurled him over the catwalk railing onto the cement handball court below.
As Hill fell all he could hear was “people screaming and crying”—people like Edward Kowalczyk.33 In the first few seconds of the retaking, prisoner Kowalczyk was shot seven times as he tried desperately to find cover on A Catwalk.34 After he fell to the ground in agony with gunshot wounds to the chest, abdomen, back, and base of his penis, he stared up in horror to see a state trooper looming over him.35 The trooper threw him a knife and “ordered that I stab my fellow Brother, Carlos, who was a prisoner laying just to the right of me, and who appeared to be also seriously injured. When I refused to do so, the trooper laughed and tried to put the knife in my hand. But I wouldn’t hold it and threw it back down. The trooper then picked up the knife, gave it to another trooper and left”—after which Kowalczyk passed out.36
Prisoner Jose Quinones was also up on a catwalk when the gas dropped and the shooting began. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing and seeing. Even as bullets rained down into D Yard, with many hundreds of state troopers, COs, and officers from the BCI firing from the roof of A Block alone, a State Police helicopter hovered overhead, broadcasting a message through a loudspeaker: “Surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed. Surrender peacefully, you will not be harmed.”37 Suddenly, “someone grabbed the back of his neck and forced him to stand, then struck him with something behind his ear…[whereupon] State troopers tear gassed him directly in the face and began to beat him in the head,” leaving him screaming in pain from second- and third-degree chemical burns.38
Even some of the troopers were overwhelmed by how quickly this retaking had disintegrated into chaos. Tony Strollo “just kept stepping over the bodies” as he tried to find his brother, while trooper Gerard Smith felt almost paralyzed by the sheer madness around him.39 Smith found himself staring incredulously as men trying to avoid the fusillade of bullets “slid underneath the bottom rail” of the catwalks, dropping a full fifteen feet to the ground below.40 Not that that took them to safety. Looking over the railing, Smith saw a trooper approach a prisoner who was lying still on the pavement and shoot him in the head.41
Strollo and Smith’s fellow troopers, the correction officers, and the other members of law enforcement were just getting started. After clearing the catwalks so that there wasn’t a single man left standing on any of them, the NYSP launched its ground assault. It was instantly clear to everyone huddled there that troopers and COs were no longer merely trying to regain control of the facility. This was already done. They now seemed determined to make Attica’s prisoners pay a high price for their rebellion. A twenty-two-year-old prisoner who had remained locked in C Block for the duration of the uprising later recounted how two C Block guards came to his cell as the retaking began simply to abuse him. According to this man, these COs “slammed his face against the window bars, and ordered him to watch ‘and see what happens to fucking convicts who didn’t obey the rules and try to run something.’ ”42 As he was being hurt he was horrified also to learn that other prisoners out in the yard were “being shot in spite of the fact that they were waving their hands high in the air and begging that their lives be spared.”43
The New York State Police in the fog of gas, out on the catwalk (From the Elizabeth Fink Papers)
Frank “Big Black” Smith simply couldn’t believe the horror unfolding around him either. Big Black had suspected that the state might “come in there and knock some heads and bust some heads,” but once he started “seeing people get opened up with shotguns,” he understood that they never remotely anticipated this level of savagery.44 To Jomo Joka Omowale it was “like a war zone”—a phrase that would be heard again and again in later descriptions from those who lived through the retaking—and the callousness of the shooters was hard for him to comprehend. “It was very painful to see all these old and crippled guys getting shot….They were in D Yard because they had no place else to go.”45
Carlos Roche was also overwhelmed by the horror of the assault. He looked over at “the negotiating tables, and everything over there was down,” and then he could see wounded and dead men scattered around the yard and also piling on top of one another in the confusion.46 One man spoke of falling on top of other men right after being hit with gunfire and then feeling other wounded men falling on top of him. “I couldn’t breathe….You know, people was on top of me and…they keep telling us, keep your head down, so I’m trying to crawl and I’m trying to get the person off of me.”47
Nineteen-year-old prisoner Melvin Marshall just couldn’t believe that he had landed in this nightmare simply for violating parole. He lay on the ground, gasping for breath in the gas that still hung like a heavy blanket over the yard, then a trooper kicked him and brought a gun butt crashing down on his head.48 Prisoner Rodney Zobrist, who’d hit the ground for safety the minute he heard the choppers overhead, dared to peer out from under his arms only to see troopers all around him “shooting at random” and to watch as several men he knew were “hit by gunfire.”49 To his horror one of those troopers spotted Rodney, marched over to him, and shoved a shotgun in his mouth and then walked away.50 Lorenzo Skinner, like Jomo, was caught “in an unbelievable barrage of gunfire that seemed to be coming from everywhere.” As he fell to his knees and tried to cover his face against the tear gas canisters that still were exploding around him, a trooper pushed his “face down into a mud puddle and told him not to move or he would be killed.” Forced to suck in “large amounts of water through his mouth and nose” in order to breathe, this young prisoner felt that he was drowning.51
Even the men who scrambled to surrender were subjected to unspeakable abuse. One prisoner who’d already been shot in the back was ordered “to stand up with his hands over his head. Because of the wound, he was unable to raise his hand to his head.” Nevertheless, ano
ther trooper ordered him to remove the football helmet that he had been wearing for protection. When the wounded man couldn’t do that either, the officer “proceeded to kick the helmet off of his head.”52
As cruel as these events were, it was the acts of cold-blooded killing, and attempted killing, that made the scene especially terrifying. One prisoner watched in disbelief as two troopers aimed their guns at a man trying to take cover in a trench. The troopers instructed the man to climb out of the hole with his hands on his head, which he did. Then, “he was shot in the chest by the trooper who [had] told him to keep his hands on his head.”53 Another prisoner who had been shot in the abdomen and in the leg was ordered to get up and walk, which he was unable to do. “The trooper then shot him in the head with a handgun.”54 Trooper Gerard Smith watched his fellow officers storm through the tent city and happen upon foxholes that prisoners were trying to hide in, and then witnessed one of these troopers as he “just stuck the rifle into the hole and pulled the trigger.”55
Twenty-one-year-old Chris Reed was gunned down with four bullets, including one that “exploded and took out a big chunk “of his left thigh. He listened in terror as troopers debated in front of him whether to kill him or let him bleed to death. As they discussed this the troopers had fun jamming their rifle butts into his injuries and dumping lime onto his face and injured legs, until he fell unconscious. When he awoke, he found himself “stacked up with the dead bodies.”56 “I never saw human beings treated like this,” another prisoner later recalled. He couldn’t understand: “Why all the hatred?”57 But it wasn’t just any hatred—it was racial hatred. As one prisoner was told by a trooper who had a gun trained on him: he would soon be dead because “we haven’t killed enough niggers.”58 Everywhere there were cries of “Keep your nigger nose down!”59 “Don’t you know state troopers don’t like niggers?”60 “Don’t move nigger! You’re dead!”61
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