Blood in the Water
Page 25
Feeling pressured, Commissioner Oswald announced that information on the prisoners at Attica would be made available via various state phone numbers.74 The public was promised three phone numbers and were assured that “the numbers would be manned 24 hours a day.”75 Predictably, all of the lines were so jammed that it was almost impossible to get through.76 Meanwhile, back in the prison, their loved ones were in a desperate situation—bleeding, terrified, and even being tortured.
23
And the Beat Goes On
While President Nixon in the Oval Office reveled in the bold stand Governor Rockefeller had taken against the blacks trying to foment revolution, those who could actually see the devastation, and how traumatized the prisoners were from it, were sickened. Sergeant Frank Hall, a sheriff from Monroe County, was one of these who saw the retaking’s aftermath firsthand. Early on the morning of September 13, Sergeant Hall had personally assisted in loading the canisters of tear gas into the helicopter that had dropped them into the yard and had stuck around in case he could be of assistance as a litter bearer. By mid-morning, however, he felt “numb at the sight of more than a hundred injured men lying on the ground.”1 Disturbingly, Hall could still hear rifle shots coming from within D Block.2 And then he saw already injured prisoners being beaten so “unmercifully…it just brought tears to my eyes. I mean the prison riot was over and…they’re taking out all of their aggression on these people that were naked….It just really bothered me probably more than seeing some of the dead people because these people were alive [and] being subjected to this kind of abuse.”3
National Guardsman Franklin Davenport, who had also come to offer assistance as a litter bearer, was equally shocked by the carnage in D Yard. Looking at the empty casings now strewn about the ground of the prison, he felt strongly that the retaking had been, from the beginning, all about killing. Deer slug bullets were not, he knew, “a controlling or a disabling thing.”4
Another member of law enforcement on the scene was so stunned by the magnitude of the suffering and death in D Yard that he compared the scene he was witnessing—the dead bodies on the ground being labeled with toe tags and the screams of wounded men—to “wartime conditions in the Guadalcanal.”5 Even a seasoned captain from the National Guard on the scene struggled to process the bloodbath. He had worked before in a hospital where “mass casualty” was defined as three or four patients injured at once, this was, in his opinion, a full-fledged “disaster.”6
National Guardsmen carry an unidentified victim on a stretcher.
(From the Elizabeth Fink Papers)
According to a doctor who had been conducting medical research at Attica since 1960, even Superintendent Mancusi was “quivering” at the sight of so much trauma in D Yard.7 As the doctor saw it, Mancusi had simply not understood that, when they were sent in to retake his prison, troopers and COs alike were going to “really open up and start killing people.”8 And not grasping this meant that neither Mancusi nor any other state officials for that matter had made any prior arrangements with paramedics, ambulance companies, or physicians from local hospitals to be on hand in the wake of that bloody assault.9
When the shooting officially ended, there was but the usual skeleton crew of medical personnel at Attica—the reviled Drs. Sternberg and Williams, as well as “two nurses, an X-ray technician, three orderlies from Batavia hospital, and two veterinarians.”10 Because there was so little medical care on hand, according to National Guard and other medical workers and witnesses, “the wounded were twitching and in convulsions,” and eventually going “motionless.”11 Mancusi did not make any calls for additional medical assistance until after 11:00 a.m.—more than an hour after the assault was officially over. And, when he finally let some more doctors in, he was instructed by General John C. Baker, the governor’s chief of staff, to make sure that the prisoners weren’t going to “get priority” when it came to dispensing medical care.12 This state official deemed trooper injuries—a “fractured finger, bruised knee,” a “fractured toe,” and “gas in eyes and inhalation”—a higher priority than the scores of prisoners who had been shot, many multiple times.13
Indeed, not taking prisoner injuries seriously meant that when Superintendent Mancusi finally contacted Meyer Memorial Hospital to ask for more doctors, he failed to convey the scope of the tragedy at his prison and thus the size of the medical team that would be needed. Meyer Memorial’s Dr. Worthington Schenk cobbled together a tiny team consisting of himself and two medical residents to head to Attica a full hour later. As soon as Schenk saw the extent of the disaster awaiting him, he went to the prison administration building and spent another half an hour making calls to assemble a much larger team consisting of four mobile medical units as well as surgical supplies, blood, plasma, and other needed items. It took another three hours before this still insufficient medical team was in place. By the time the additional medical help arrived, numerous severely wounded men had lain for hours without treatment.14
The state of the suffering was hard even for these medical professionals to witness. One physician looked in dismay at the bodies lined up by Attica’s fence and couldn’t help but liken it to “a Civil War painting.”15 Another, a doctor who had seen combat care in World War II, stared in disbelief because “he had never seen people who were so badly neglected.”16 Members of the National Guard were equally appalled when they came in, reporting that “people had to be put everywhere, on the floors and in the corridors and in “every spare area,” and that trying to treat “the most severely wounded first” simply “was not possible in all of the confusion.”17
Dr. Robert S. Jenks of the hospital in Genesee County wasn’t just appalled at the scene he came upon, finding it unconscionable, but he was also furious that no one from the prison had called doctors in until long after the injuries had occurred. Another doctor from a nearby hospital was equally appalled at this delay, and later reported that he had been “waiting in his fully equipped almost empty hospital for all the wounded he had heard there were…and wondering ‘where are the prisoners?’…[And, finally], on his own initiative, he gathered up four other surgeons and set off for Attica.”18 When they arrived, there was nothing to work with. As Jenks described it, not only were “there inmates lying out there for hours without any kind of care,” but in the area where he was trying to work, “there wasn’t a pint of blood anywhere.”19 This, he felt, was completely “inexcusable; they just didn’t ask for it, because I know plenty was available. There are several blood banks around here and they could have gotten all they needed beforehand.”20 Another doctor also reported that “it was chaos when he arrived.”21 “Nobody was directing anybody what to do,” he went on, and the prison had none of the medical supplies he needed including vital things such as plasma.22
Because of this lack of planning and neglect prisoners with compound fractures received either no care or “nothing beyond primitive bandaging,” and even the most severely wounded prisoners had no sedation and “were expected to suffer through the pain.”23 Worse, even after the reinforcements arrived, every doctor on the scene could see that it was going to be impossible to treat all of the men in serious need of care given the state of the tiny prison hospital. Treatment was also hindered by the tear gas still hanging in the air making medical personnel ill. Dr. David Breen, a third-year medical resident, recalled that at first he could only stay inside the facility for “about 60 seconds…because the tear gas bothered my eyes.”24
Clearly the only way to deal with the large number of seriously injured inmates at Attica was to get them transferred out of Attica to local hospitals, but prison officials made that process almost impossible. As later testimony made clear, “Even when finally permitted entry, medical and legal personnel were severely hampered in discharging their professional responsibilities by the obstructionist correction officials…the refusal by correction officials, Warden Mancusi in particular, to permit certain injured inmates to be removed to a nearby Buffalo hospital for s
urgery and emergency medical care [that] doctors maintained they so urgently needed.”25
By late in the afternoon on the day of the retaking, only two prisoners had been moved to a hospital; by day’s end only six.26 Among those men was Edward Kowalczyk, who’d been shot multiple times. He was transported to Meyer Memorial only because a National Guardsman kept insisting that he needed immediate emergency surgery. And still, as he lay in unimaginable pain in an ambulance, the wounded man noticed that the prison guard who was driving “took his time, no lights, no siren and stopped at stop signs.”27 A National Guardsman who was in the ambulance with them “got into it with him,” saying to the guard that the guys “were no longer moving in back,” but the guard refused to hit the accelerator any harder.28
For the lucky few who made it to a hospital for treatment, their care was compromised because even some of the most grievously wounded of the men were “shackled by one foot to the bed frame” by the correction officer in charge.29 He maintained that, while he had “received no orders to shackle the prisoners,” he “deemed it necessary because some of them were large and strong, and presented an assault and escape risk.”30 One of these alleged flight risks was Jomo, who’d been shot seven times and was barely alive.
Back at Attica, National Guard physician Dr. John W. Cudmore was overwhelmed as he tried to deal with the tremendous numbers of men in critical condition in the prison’s tiny and archaic hospital. Because Mancusi was making the transfer of wounded prisoners to outside hospitals so difficult, Dr. Cudmore was forced to do serious trauma surgery under conditions that, at best, resembled a battlefield medic station. On September 13 alone his small crew of doctors on hand at Attica “were forced…to perform twenty-five operations, including three abdominal laparotomies,” and at times were operating on multiple men simultaneously.31
What Cudmore was most upset by, however, was the way in which troopers and correction officers interfered with his attempts to help the injured men who lay in heaps across D and A Yards. The surgeon saw one man staggering around, blinded by the river of blood running down his face, and as he approached him to try to treat his gushing wound, he “heard a voice from behind me telling me to stop, that he was a ring leader and I was not to treat him.”32
Troopers and guards were so often getting in the way of medical caregiving that outside doctors found themselves more than once in open conflict with members of law enforcement in the midst of the chaos. In one case a Guardsman was told quite literally “to rub salt in the prisoners’ wounds,” and in another case a Guardsman who was trying to reassure prisoners that they were going to be all right was contradicted by an officer “shouting out how bad the wounds looked and how it looked as though the prisoners were going to die.”33 When one Guardsman “started to make a list of the wounded so that he could get in touch with their families a CO came over and told him he couldn’t do that and then ripped a couple of names off the list because, the CO said, those two weren’t wounded.”34
A medic leaves the prison surrounded by press. (Courtesy of the Associated Press)
Other members of law enforcement still in the prison after the retaking went beyond preventing prisoners from receiving care and were actively meting out additional pain to scores of already wounded men. Dr. Cudmore watched in horror while one young man with severe shotgun wounds was tortured by troopers “poking or kicking at him when he was on the ground.”35 One young doctor who was on the scene with Dr. Cudmore, David Breen, saw one Spanish-speaking prisoner trying to sit up so that he could ask someone to please contact his family and let them know that he was alive. After he tried repeatedly to get someone’s attention, the prisoner “was struck on the head with a blunt object by a security guard…a very severe blow to the head.”36 Another hurt man “asked for some kind of…hospital assistance such as medication. He said I’m shot. You know, help me, please. He was pleading for his life. And the trooper turned around and put his foot on his neck.”37
Some of the torture was so hideous that it literally nauseated those who happened upon it. One doctor “described a prisoner whom he saw on Monday between 2 and 2:30 pm” who was “cut up badly and raggedly around the rectum and genitals and it was not a gunshot wound but looked like it had been done with glass or a broken bottle.”38
One equally barbaric incident witnessed by a National Guardsman occurred mid-afternoon on Monday the 13th. James O’Day, a young Guardsman, was on duty when he noticed a group of eight fellow Guardsmen carrying an injured man on a stretcher. The man looked badly hurt so O’Day asked what had happened to him and was told that he had gunshot wounds in his legs and buttocks. Suddenly, as O’Day looked on, a white CO standing nearby said that he didn’t believe this man had really been hurt and reached over to tip the stretcher, “dump[ing] the prisoner onto the ground which was slimy and dirty….He told the prisoner to go to his cell or he would stab him with a screwdriver, and before the prisoner had a chance to do anything he stabbed him five or six times in the anal area. The prisoner never stood up but just pushed back with his feet…and all this time he was on his back the man was walking between the prisoner’s legs threatening him.” O’Day desperately wanted to stop what he saw happening but he was terrified of the COs who were standing around nearby. He had the feeling “that if he had done anything his life would have been in danger.”39 O’Day was so disturbed by the incident that he tried to report it to the New York State Police several days after it occurred and, when no one believed him, eventually went to the FBI office in Buffalo. There agents took down his report and noted in writing that he appeared to be “a very level-headed individual and is not a long-haired hippie,” which suggested that they saw his account as credible.40
And then there was the abuse inmates were suffering at the hands of Attica’s own physicians, Selden Williams and Paul Sternberg. According to reports from other medical personnel, one injured man had a large lump in his throat, and when Dr. Sternberg saw the protrusion he “laughed and said, ‘ha, ha, you swallowed your teeth,’ and this was in fact what had happened.”41 Eyewitnesses on the scene reported hearing one of the prison doctors (either Sternberg or Williams) say about an injured inmate, “That nigger is a fucker and he should have died in the yard so we won’t treat him.”42 Another prisoner was in the prison hospital with two gunshot wounds in his back when “two men in white coats, presumably doctors,” approached him “and one of them stuck his finger into one of the holes and started wriggling it around. The prisoner was screaming with pain.”43 A National Guardsman reported seeing one prisoner who “had a deep hole in his head that looked like a gunshot wound. As he was being taken to the hospital his head was hanging down so the Guardsman picked it up and found it was in two pieces.”44 Later the same Guardsman checked on this person and found one of the prison doctors “playing with the head, joggling it up and down.”45 Another prisoner begged Dr. Williams for medication for his injuries, and allegedly Williams retorted, “I’m never going to give you no medication. I hope you all die.”46
That troopers, COs, and Attica’s staff physicians were largely unbothered by the barbaric treatment given these seriously wounded prisoners had everything to do with the vicious rumors about prisoner “atrocities” that they had been inundated with for days outside of Attica and now actively spread within its walls.47 National Guardsman Dan Callahan, for example, saw terrible abuses of prisoners take place when he was sent into Attica right after the retaking, but he had also been told stories that made him cold to their plight—for example, “that [William] Quinn had been sodomized before he was deliberately killed.”48 Trooper Gerard Smith had heard the same sorts of tales of prisoner barbarism, which he could see “got the emotions really rolling….[The COs were] real excited and they were doing some damage to the people.”49 This was also how the prisoner abuses that state legislators witnessed when they toured the facilities were justified. Arthur Eve, Herman Badillo, John Dunne, James Emery, Frank Walkley, Clark Wemple, and others had watched from catwal
ks as men lying on the ground in the yard were beaten with sticks and could see that certain inmates were being singled out for particularly harsh treatment from the troopers.50 They had even seen the particular horror of Big Black Smith, totally naked, being tortured on a table below them.51 None of them rushed to intervene.52 Like National Guardsman Dan Callahan, who witnessed the torture, they later felt enormous regret that they did not try to help. At the time, however, each of them had “bought the whole argument.”53
Even at the time, however, National Guardsman Callahan could see that the abuses happening to prisoners following the retaking were fueled by outright racism. Callahan overheard one trooper bragging of shooting a black inmate with a .357 and watched him then give a “White Power salute.”54 He also saw “a prison guard sergeant telling this very tall, yellow-skinned black to strip” and when the man refused, the sergeant “told others to hold him down and then kicked him in the head like a football—he went limp.”55 Another Guardsman overheard one trooper saying to another over by a food stand outside Attica’s walls that it was “hot work killing niggers.”56 Racial hostility was in fact so intense that during the legislators’ tour that morning, even Assemblyman Arthur Eve was showered with invective. “Guards [were] yelling at Eve—get your nigger ass out of here.”57