OFFICER SEXUALLY HARASSED TO DEATH BY GUARDS AT MARCY C.F. SPARKS HUSBAND’S QUEST FOR JUSTICE
‘MY SON ASKS ME ALL THE TIME, 'WHAT HAPPENED TO MOMMY? WHY DID MOMMY DIE?' WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO SAY TO HIM?'
Jesse Ossont-Hoffert, 37, was sexually harassed by Correction Officers while working as a Correction Officer at the Marcy Correctional Facility in upstate New York where prisoner Robert Brooks was beaten and choked to death by guards on Dec. 9, 2024. Weeks after being raped by a lieutenant inside the prison in 2021, Ossont-Hoffert committed suicide. Shown here with her now 16-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son. Photo credit: unknown, via Facebook
EXCLUSIVE
Jan. 23, 2025
WOODGATE, NY-Lance Hoffert wants justice for his dead wife and their two children.
Starting with discovering the name of the lieutenant at New York's Marcy Correctional Facility who raped her inside the prison.
Jesse Ossont-Hoffert wasn't beaten and choked to death by guards at Marcy like Robert Brooks was, but she just as well might have been. While working there as a Correction Officer in 2021, she was sexually harassed every single day.
The then-37 year-old mother-of-two killed herself about two months after being raped by the lieutenant, two weeks before Christmas and her 38th birthday. Before she did, she explained why.
"She said she had enough of it, she couldn't take it anymore," Lance Hoffert now 42, told The Free Lance. "My son asks me all the time, 'What happened to mommy? Why did mommy die?' What are you supposed to say to him?"
Ossont-Hoffert revealed to her husband it was a lieutenant at Marcy who supervised her, directed a campaign of sexual harassment against her and committed the worst of the abuse.
But "she wouldn't tell me who it was. I begged her," Hoffert says. "The lieutenant, lieutenant, lieutenant, that's what coming out of her mouth."
Brooks' killing by guards at Marcy on Dec. 9, 2024 made Hoffert feel the pain of his wife's slow-motion killing all over again. This time, he said, he wants the lieutenant and the Correction Officers who sexually harassed her, literally to death, held accountable.
"I would like some justice seen," Hoffert says. "That's for sure."
Jesse Ossont-Hoffert, front row, sixth from left, graduated from DOCCS training academy in Sept. 2019. Photo credit: DOCCS via Facebook.
What made the horrible ordeal even worse was that no one from his wife's union, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Union, NYSCOPBA, even visited Hoffert, much less helped the grieving family out with funeral arrangements and bills.
"They hung us out to dry," Hoffert says.
The state agency that runs New York's prisons, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS, also failed to help.
"Never heard from anybody," Hoffert says, "never a letter, nothing to say sorry or anything."
Now the single father is about to be evicted from the house Hoffert and Jesse bought in 2009. Hoffert couldn't find enough work to pay the mortgage and raise two children by himself. The bank foreclosed on him in 2024, according to court records.
"One person, trying to raise my kids and everything I can't do it," he explained, breaking down in tears. "It's too hard."
Jesse Ossont met Lance Hoffert when they were teenagers working at the Parquet Hotel in the town of Inlet in upstate New York’s Adirondack mountains. The Parquet Hotel and restaurant, circa 1934. Photo credit: unknown, courtesy of the Hamilton County Historian’s Office.
Jesse grew up in Big Moose, in the middle of New York's Adirondack Mountain Forest Preserve. Lance grew up in Lyon Falls, 45 miles away. They met in 2000, as teenagers working together at the Parquet Hotel and Northern Lights ice cream stand in the picturesque town of Inlet.
"We were kind of running it," Hoffert says of the hotel, "and working at the ice cream stand. We didn't start dating 'til two years after that."
They married in 2007 and bought the house in Woodgate, about 35 miles north of Utica, in 2008. Their daughter, Adrienne, was born a year later, in 2009. They had a son, Triton, in 2016.
Jesse worked as a cosmetologist. Lance, like many Adirondack men, worked seasonal jobs. He drove trucks when it was warm out and spent winters fixing up cars. After Triton was born, Jesse put herself through night school and became a licensed nurse. First she worked at a rehabilitation and nursing home in Rome, then for New York's Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, or DDSO.
Jesse made $38,000 a year working as a nurse for DDSO. She saw becoming a Correction Officer as a step-up.
"She became a CO because she wanted to better herself, better her future, " Lance says, "and then everything went downhill."
"She wouldn't have took that job she would've never, I know she would've never did it," Hoffert, referring to her suicide.
Jesse graduated from DOCCS' 8-week basic academy in 2019, public payroll records confirm. Her starting salary, as a Correction Officer trainee, was $43,937. Her first job was at Comstock, a maximum-security mens' prison officially known as the Great Meadow Correctional Facility.
"She was only at Marcy for a few months," Hoffert says.
Jesse never complained about being sexually harassed by anyone before Marcy.
"Only Marcy," Hoffert said. "That was the biggest thing. The biggest of where she had issues."
Male Correction Officers sexually harassed Jesse every day.
"Everyday someone was saying something to her," Hoffert said Jesse told him, bravely trying to explain difficult things to a stranger. "She said she got a lot of, you know, people said things to her for being a female and, you know, sexual things."
"I'm gonna make you suck my dick and things like that," was what male COs at Marcy threatened, Hoffert said Jesse told him.
It was always her fellow COs who sexually harassed her, never the prisoners. (A prisoner there at the time told The Free Lance they called her "Mrs. H.")
"It wasn't from the inmates, either," Hoffert added. "She never complained about the inmates, ever. It was all the other COs."
COs even sent lewd text messages to her mobile phone. One explicitly threatened to rape her inside the prison.
"'Next time I see you, I'm gonna bend you over the table' or something," Hoffert recalled the violent text message said.
When Jesse showed it to Lance, he telephoned the sender and "told the guy. I said, 'Listen, I'm her husband.'"
What the CO revealed was, and remains, shocking. He claimed he'd been "told to harass her."
Marcy Correctional Facility, Jan. 7, 2025. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
A lieutenant raped Jesse and directed other COs to sexually harass her, Hoffert said Jesse revealed to him before she died.
"I'm positive," he says. "100% positive."
Prison guards are organized in a quasi-military hierarchy with a rigid chain-of-command. COs are at the button. Sergeants are above COs. Lieutenants are above sergeants. Captains are above lieutenants, Deputy Superintendents are above captains, etc.
At night, lieutenants hold enormous power inside prisons because they're frequently the highest-ranking officer left there. Hoffert doesn't know the name of the lieutenant who assaulted his wife, but he knows he worked at night.
"He was the majority of the persons, she complained about was the lieutenant," Hoffert recalled. "It almost seemed like he was like the head of it all."
The lieutenant raped Jesse about two months before she killed herself, sometime in Sept. or Oct. 2021.
"It made me furious," Hoffert confessed. "You want to, you really want to hurt someone. You do."
People in Hoffert's neck-of-the-woods grow up shooting guns.
The three male "buck" deer heads mounted on a wall in his living room—each bristling with about a dozen spike-like antlers—testify to his skill with firearms. His daughter's BB rifle, with a pink stock and handgrip, rested on the counter between us as we talked.
Still, crime and violence are, generally speaking, low. No one even locks their front doors.
Jesse wouldn't tell her husband who did raped her. She was also too afraid of retaliation to file a complaint.
She was terrified "the lieutenant will find out," Hoffert said.
He suggested asking her "union rep" for help.
"Well, she can't go to them, because he'll find out," Hoffert explained, referring to the lieutenant.
Jesse also feared something "worse ... from a different person," Hoffert said, "because it's all a bunch of guys, and they have their own cliques." It was also possible the lieutenant or other COs would "have the inmates beat her up because she told."
Jesse feared they'd label her a "rat" or start a false rumor that she "spread her legs to everybody."
Jesse went back to work and, Hoffert said, tried to "steel it out."
Before working at Marcy, Hoffert said his wife was "the strongest person you ever met." She "was always calm, cool and collected." She "was the person who always knew everything" right to do in tough situations. She rarely drank alcohol.
After the abuse, "she started drinking really heavy every night, and she'd start hitting me in front of the kids and start getting abusive." They tried talking it out, but Jesse' drunken rages got worse—a typical sign of post-traumatic stress disorder.
"The kids saw it too," he said. "It wasn't Jesse anymore."
They mutually agreed it was best if Jesse temporarily moved back in with her mother in the Town of Webb.
"It's kind of unbelievable seeing somebody who's so strong flip right around. It's just unbelievable to me, just a light switch flipped, and that was it."
On Dec. 9, Jesse started sending suicidal text messages to Lance "that she said she's going to do it."
"Never, ever of our whole relationship or any time I know her, ever said anything about killing herself," Hoffert explained. "That's how I knew she was serious. I tried stopping it."
He called the Town of Webb police and told them where his wife was and that she was threatening to kill herself.
"They didn't care," Hoffert said. "They went up there. Said, 'Oh, she's fine. Don't bother us again with this.'"
Hours later Jesse was dead.
"'Don't bother us again with this' they said to me the night she killed herself," Hoffert repeated, still stunned years later.
A week or so after his wife killed herself, Hoffert visited the Town of Webb police headquarters and shared his pain with police officers there.
"Kind of hollered at him a little bit," he said, "I just want to tell them, you know, now my kids don't have a mother, because you guys can't do your job."
When reached for comment, a Town of Webb spokesperson said the police chief and sergeant who worked for the town in Dec. 2021 no longer worked for the department.
Jesse Ossont-Hoffert in a Facebook post from 2020. Photo credit: Jesse Ossont-Hoffert, via Facebook.
Instead of being protected by law enforcement, Jesse was victimized, failed at every turn and abandoned by them—even though she was one of them.
"Yeah, their 'brothers in blue'," Hoffert reflected, twisting a blade sharped with sarcasm. "That's bullshit. Should be a different name for them."
Hoffert held off eviction for years, finally losing the house in Nov., according to court records.
"People don't understand what it's like," Hoffert said, hot tears burning down his face, "to have to tell their kids or explain why their mother isn't here, or why I can't pay for the house, or why I can't do this, or why the mother will never, ever be there ever again."
Hoffert placed the blame for his wife's death on DOCCS and the State of New York.
"It's because that place," he said. "How come there's not somebody there saying, 'Listen, no, you're fired?'"
The widow called on Gov. Kathy Hochul to close Marcy in Jesse's name and the name of all the female Correction Officers who have worked there or might have to work there in the future.
"100% they should close that place," Hoffert said. "How many other female officers work there are getting the same grief or same stuff happened to her?"
"How many? All of them?," Hoffert asked rhetorically, pain welling in his heart and anger rising in his voice, "All the female COs. I'm sure of it."
The Oneida County District Attorney, the State Police and DOCCS all denied ever receiving any complaints from Jesse.
Thomas Mailey, spokesman for DOCCS, said "We have no record in our Office of Special Investigations of a complaint by Ms. Ossont-Hoffert." He referred questions about death benefits for Correction Officers to the State Comptroller’s Office.
A spokesman for the Comptroller’s office provided a link to a state website indicating potential beneficiaries have to apply. The office refused to disclose whether benefits were paid to any of Ossont-Hoffert’s survivors because "information identifying beneficiaries and amounts payable to them are considered to be private and would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” the spokesman said.
NYSCOPBA’s spokesman did not respond to a voicemail seeking comment.
The Free Lance investigation into Jesse Ossont-Hoffert's death remains ongoing. We will update readers with additional results in future reports. If you're a CO who worked at Marcy or were a prisoner there and knew "Mrs. H" The Free Lance wants to hear from you today.
Send tips or corrections to jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me.