Blood in the Water

by Thompson, Heather Ann

  Underscoring just how much racial hatred was fueling trooper rage in D Yard, one prisoner, William Maynard, tried to carry Jomo to safety after he had been shot multiple times. As Maynard struggled along, a CO ordered him to stop and put his hands in the air. As he dutifully put his hands up, still trying to balance Jomo on his shoulders, the CO shot him twice in the forearms. As Maynard fell in a heap, with Jomo on top of him, this same officer “loaded up his gun and shot Jomo six times right on top of me and kicked me in the face and says both the niggers are dead and went on.”62

  To the shock of the hostages who had been left in the hostage circle and who were now, like the prisoners, trying to find cover, the prisoners were still trying to keep them protected even as their own were being shot. Minutes before the assault had begun, Herb Blyden had instructed Akil Al-Jundi and nine or ten other men to “stay in front of the hostages and not to let harm come to them.”63 Despite their terror at being left so exposed, these men held their ground, until they too were gunned down. Al-Jundi “was shot in the left hand by a .270 rifle while guarding the hostage circle,” and suffered an injury “so serious that he could see through his hand.” He was also hit by a bullet fragment under his right eye.64

  The hostages fared little better. When CO Dean Wright, huddled into the smallest ball he could make, suddenly felt somebody reach down and turn him over, he was relieved, thinking he was finally being rescued. Then he panicked. As he looked up he found himself staring into the “barrel of a twelve gauge shotgun” in the hands of a New York state trooper who looked like he was about to pull the trigger. Had somebody else not yelled “He’s one of ours, he’s one of ours” just then, he realized, with sickening clarity, he would have been dead.65 After being shot in the back, guard Robert Curtiss also felt the fear of imminent death when a trooper kept knocking him over every time he tried to sit up. He shouted as loudly as he could that he was an officer, but still had to beg the trooper not to shoot him.66 Hostage G. B. Smith might also have been shot dead had it not been for fellow hostage John Stockholm. As Stockholm remembered, “GB started to get out of the pile and a trooper tried to level his gun at him until I said he’s one of ours.”67

  So thick was the gunfire that morning that, just as Tony Strollo had feared, a member of the assault force couldn’t avoid being shot by his own. Hostage Don Almeter was stunned to see “a state policeman who was down and bleeding.”68 Since the prisoners had no guns, clearly his own men had shot him. That trooper was Lieutenant Joseph Christian and he had been running toward the hostage circle when, he later maintained, a prisoner tried to hit him—in response to which, he said, troopers up on B Catwalk “let loose their guns to save him.”69 Thanks to prisoner Vergyl Horace Mulligan, however, at least one hostage was pulled out of harm’s way when the bullets began spraying the circle. That hostage would later testify before Mulligan’s parole board that he had saved his life.70

  The overall situation in D Yard was astonishing devastation wrought in a remarkably short period of time. Prisoner James Lee Asbury recalled that merely ten minutes after the assault on the prison began, no matter where he looked, all he could see was blood and water.71 One nineteen-year-old prisoner, Charles Pernasalice, recoiled from the sight and smell of so much blood and the sound of so much screaming.72 Frank Lott, one of the authors of the original July Manifesto, shook his head in disbelief: “Guys were laying all over…they tried to get up and were shot down.”73

  Even though NYSP officials reported that Attica was fully secured by 10:05 a.m., the observers who had waited out the retaking locked in the Steward’s Room could still hear shots being fired inside the prison as late as 10:24 a.m., and others reported hearing gunfire from inside the prison even an hour later.74

  Ultimately, the human cost of the retaking was staggeringly high: 128 men were shot—some of them multiple times.75 Less than half an hour after the retaking had commenced, nine hostages were dead and at least one additional hostage was close to death. Twenty-nine prisoners had been fatally shot.76 Many of the deaths in D Yard—both hostages and prisoners—were caused by the scatter of buckshot, and still others resulted from the devastating impact of unjacketed bullets.77

  Casualties on the catwalk (From the Elizabeth Fink Papers)

  The hostages, both those who’d been taken to the catwalks to serve as bargaining chips and those who’d been held in a circle in the yard, paid a terrible price for the state’s excessive use of force. Correction Sergeant Edward Cunningham, a father of eight, lay dead, hit in the head by a buckshot pellet that then traveled and severed his cervical spinal cord.78 Mike Smith’s dear friend John D’Arcangelo, whose first child had just been born and who had transferred to Attica only seven weeks before, was killed by a .270 rifle wielded by a state trooper sniper who’d apparently been aiming at several prisoners.79 Guard Carl Valone, father of four, died from “traumatic shock and laceration of the brain” caused by a gunshot wound to the head, as well as bleeding from his abdominal organs caused by a wound to the chest.80 B Block captain Richard Lewis died when a bullet went through his back and destroyed his aorta.81

  CO John Monteleone died when he took a bullet to the heart from a personal weapon—a .44 Magnum.82 Among the civilian deaths were industrial foreman and father of eight Elmer Hardie, killed by a shot to the head, and senior account clerk Herbert Jones.83 Principal account clerk Elon Werner, as well as his nephew, CO guard Ronnie Werner, both perished from internal bleeding caused by gunshots.84 Ultimately, “five…died from Double-0 buckshot. The rest of the group was shot by State Police snipers firing .270 cal. rifles from the roofs and upper floors of A and C Blocks.”85

  The hostages who survived the attack suffered significant injuries. In addition to the horrific wounds Mike Smith sustained, Lieutenant Robert Curtiss suffered a gunshot wound to his back, while civilian employee Gordon Knickerbocker suffered a gunshot to the head and fellow civilian Al Mitzel received bullet fragments in his back.86

  The death and injury toll among the prisoners was much higher. Twenty-one-year-old William Allen had been killed, shot by bullets from a .38 caliber handgun as well as by .00 pellets, and Melvin Ware, age twenty-three, had died from multiple gunshots, including .270 caliber bullets from a trooper’s gun and .00 buckshot from an officer who had fired at him two or three times with a twelve gauge deer slayer shotgun.87 Twenty-nine-year-old Lorenzo McNeil died in D Yard after a trooper up on D catwalk shot him in the back of the head.88 Twenty-five-year-old Milton Menyweather was shot to death, riddled with .270 bullets to his back, chest, and right lung. Twenty-two-year-old Charles “Carlos” Prescott was felled by the .00 buckshot that pockmarked his body on A Catwalk.89 Perhaps no shooting was more brutal than that of Kenneth B. Malloy. Malloy was shot twelve times at close range, pumped full of bullets from both a .357 and a .38 caliber weapon, which led to “lacerations of the brain, and destruction of the lungs and heart.”90 Malloy was shot with such vicious abandon that his eyes were ripped apart from the shards of bone splintering in his head.

  A number of prisoners killed had, according to several witnesses, actually still been alive after troopers had control of the facility. One of these dead men was thirty-five-year-old Samuel Melville, the so-called Mad Bomber who spent time trying to educate his fellow prisoners in Attica’s classrooms and had penned the exposé of profits derived from prison labor in Attica’s laundry. Prisoners maintained that Melville had been “alive following the assault,” and had dutifully tried to surrender, but by day’s end he’d been shot to death from a one-ounce lead shotgun slug that had entered the upper left part of his chest, fragmented, and subsequently ripped through his left lung.91

  Then there was Thomas Hicks, who was riddled by .00 buckshot.92 He had been shot in the back with ammunition that perforated his right lung and heart, and also suffered a gunshot wound to his right buttock.93 Although his account was disputed by state officials, a National Guardsman who came into the prison to deal with the injured inmates in the immediate aft
ermath of the retaking insisted he saw Hicks alive after the prison was fully in the troopers’ control.94 He said that he remembered this prisoner in particular because he heard a correction officer grabbing him and saying to his fellow guards, “Look who we have here, we got Mr. Hicks,” and then, after forcing Hicks to his knees and telling him to put his hands on his head, he threatened to kill him while at the same time kicking him in the throat.95 Two prisoners, Larry Barnes and Melvin Marshall, also later described watching Tommy Hicks get shot “after the original shooting ceased.”96 According to Marshall, Hicks was “hit with a barrage of gunfire,” after which he saw troopers walk over to Hicks’s body, take “the butt end of the gun, pound the flesh in the ground, kick it, pound it, shoot it again.”97

  Twenty-one-year-old Elliot “L. D.” Barkley, who had been in so many respects the face of Attica with his wire-rimmed granny glasses and his impassioned speeches, was also said by various accounts, including those of fellow prisoners Frank “Big Black” Smith, Frank Lott, Carl Jones, and Melvin Marshall as well as New York Assemblyman Arthur Eve, to have been alive well after the police had ceased to have even a tenuous rationale for shooting anyone.98 According to a later autopsy report, L.D. was killed by gunshot wounds to his back from “a tumbling .270 caliber slug in the Southeast quadrant of D Yard.”99 When exactly L.D. had been shot to death, and whether the bullet that killed him was in fact “tumbling” or had been shot at him point-blank, would become major issues of contention in the years that followed. Many prisoners at Attica believed strongly, though, that the state had “murdered him.”100

  Back in the administration building the observers and state officials had no real idea what was happening in D Yard, but the sounds of gunfire and the fog of the gas did not bode well. At 11:46 a.m., State Senator John Dunne demanded to be allowed in to see “results of the assault.”101 Walter Dunbar and Rockefeller’s attorney Howard Shapiro reluctantly gave him a tour. What Dunne saw in the yard appalled him: “30 to 40 correction officers striking half a dozen inmates” who were being forced to run a gauntlet. As he recalled years later, “I observed naked men running in a direction toward me through a row of correction officers who were striking them with their batons on buttocks.”102 This abuse was so egregious that Dunne told Dunbar, “I shouldn’t be seeing [this] and it had better stop right away.”103 He was assured that it would.104

  The other observers did not hear any official news of the retaking until 12:16 p.m., when DOCS deputy commissioner Walter Dunbar finally came to the Steward’s Room to update them. He painted a picture of success: the State Police and correction officers had handled prisoners “with excellent discipline and without brutality,” he reported proudly.105 When Tom Wicker asked whether they could now go and see the prisoners, however, Dunbar told him quite brusquely that a visit would not be possible while the operation was still under way.106 Dunbar’s report only intensified the unease in the room but, to everyone’s relief, John Dunne, who had stayed with prison officials during the retaking, appeared about an hour later and also gave a relatively optimistic briefing, based on what he had been told by prison officials: the “place was completely under control,” the wounded prisoners were now in the prison hospital, the wounded staff were in local hospitals, and the rest of the prisoners were now being rehoused in cells.107

  There was, in fact, little reason to feel that this retaking had been a success or that things would now be all right. Although no numbers had yet been released—or would be for several days—everyone could assume from the sounds alone that the death toll must be high. Even from outside the prison, the cacophony of bullets hitting walls and flesh could be heard so loudly and clearly that African American reporter John Johnson found himself overcome with emotion as he tried to report the retaking to the nation far from Attica’s walls. “It’s an awful scene,” he said into the camera as he choked up. “I think that people are dying in there.”108 The observers were also quite certain that something horrific had just occurred. Reverend Martin Chandler recounted: “I saw them bringing out bodies, bringing out folks and just kinda, puttin’ ’em on the ground and…they were lined up all the way down the wall from the prison and from there to the gate.”109

  William Kunstler was sickened by what had just taken place inside Attica. He personally had experienced a level of hostility that left him stunned, including walking down the road outside the prison when “a car with four men in it came at us. They made a feint as if to run us down and I could see they were laughing.”110 He couldn’t even fathom what the men in D Yard must have suffered when law enforcement came in. In the hours to come, still awaiting word from inside the prison, Kunstler found himself sitting alone, unable to speak, with tears running down his face.111

  NYSP troopers and state officials review slain prisoners atop the catwalk. (From the Elizabeth Fink Papers)

  Inside the prison, Roger Champen also wept. Like many of his fellow prisoners, he couldn’t understand why this had happened: “Why didn’t someone say…they’re going to come in with guns and shoot you people to death?”112

  New York State Police troopers clad in gas masks and rain gear make their way to the prison entrance. (Courtesy of Don Dutton/Getty Images)

  22

  Spinning Disaster

  In contrast to the observers or prisoners like Champ, Rockefeller’s men on the scene seemed a bit startled, but largely unmoved by the carnage of the retaking they had authorized. To be sure, they were taken aback by how quickly the operation went. But, overall, they were relieved that everything had seemed to go so well, and that the performance of the State Police had been “magnificent,” as General O’Hara later described it to Rockefeller.1

  Douglass delivered his report of the retaking to Rockefeller late on the morning of the 13th, complete with a tally of the number of hostages who had survived. The governor seemed concerned, above all, with making sure that the nation understood what a success the retaking in fact was.2 Well aware that the assault he ordered could have resulted in all of the hostages being killed, Rockefeller was elated that so many had in fact managed to make it out of the prison alive.3 Commissioner Oswald, however, was finding it much harder to conjure up anything positive about what had just happened. He would have to go speak to the large crowd of family members and reporters now gathered outside the prison and even he could smell the acrid scent of blood in the air. Though he still believed that morning’s death and devastation unavoidable, it made him ill to think about it. “I think I have some feeling now of how Truman must have felt when he decided to drop the A-bomb,” he remarked to those around him that morning.4

  After consulting with Department of Corrections public relations director Gerald Houlihan and Deputy Commissoner Walter Dunbar about the wording, Oswald emerged from the prison to give a statement to the press at 10:40 a.m.5 First he reiterated his version of what had led to the retaking in the first place—namely that negotiations had reached a stalemate and, therefore, the state had no choice but to go in. He also made clear what he felt had been at stake that morning. As he put it, “To delay the action any longer would not only jeopardize innocent lives, but would threaten the security of the entire correctional system of this state.”6 Becoming more passionate, he went on, “The armed rebellion of the type we have faced threatens the destruction of our free society. We cannot permit that destruction to happen. It has indeed been an agonizing decision.”7

  Almost two hours later, with the air around the prison still thick with tear gas and the periodic sounds of guns still being fired, Houlihan and Dunbar gave additional press statements. This time offering more specifics regarding the fate of the hostages, since, according to the Gannett News Service, what every reporter was demanding to know was “How did they die?”8

  Without even blinking, Houlihan stated: “I understand several had their throats cut….Some of their throats were slit.”9

  “How many?” the reporter pressed.

  “Seven, seven or eight,” he cont
inued.10

  DOCS public relations director Gerald Houlihan addresses the press. (Courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle)

  “Were they all killed by prisoners? All nine of them?”

  “Yes,” stated Houlihan unabashedly.11

  A few hours later, Walter Dunbar provided his own bloodcurdling twist to the rumors of atrocities committed by the prisoners. During tours of the prison he conducted later that day with a group of legislators including Arthur Eve and Herman Badillo, and then with members of the press, Dunbar regaled everyone with a vivid tale of state officials yelling at the prisoners to “give up the hostages!” to which one of them responded, “This is your answer,” and then proceeded to stick a “knife in the hostage’s stomach.”12 After that, Dunbar went on, the awfulness only escalated. Not only did the other prisoners slit the throats of other hostages, but, worse, “one of them took a knife and grabbed young officer [Mike] Smith and castrated him…and took this man’s organs and stuck them in his mouth in clear view of us all…we saw it. We saw it.”13 Then, with a final flourish, Dunbar “took pains to point out the particular inmate who had stuffed hostage Michael Smith’s genitals in his mouth and slit his throat.”14 The prisoner he pointed to, now lying on a table and very obviously being tortured in full view of the group, was Big Black Smith. Arthur Eve and Herman Badillo, who had gotten to know Big Black during the time they spent in the yard, were dismayed but also so sickened by the tale they didn’t quite know how to react. Eve at least mustered the strength to ask Dunbar how they knew it was this particular prisoner who had committed the atrocity. “We saw it,” Dunbar replied. “We have it on film.”15