INSIDE THE 'MYSTERIOUS' START OF THE WILDCAT STRIKE BY NY'S PRISON GUARDS
POLICE ARE INVESTIGATING WHAT HAPPENED AT THE COLLINS CORRECTIONAL FACILITY ON FEB. 12, FIVE DAYS BEFORE A WILDCAT STRIKE BY GUARDS
Scene outside the Franklin Correctional Facility during a wildcat strike by prison guards on Mar. 7, 2025. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
EXCLUSIVE Apr,. 10, 2025
It was like a scene out of a Hollywood action movie: three men fighting inside a bathroom stall. But it wasn't fiction. It happened at a state prison outside Buffalo on Feb. 12.
That's how it started.
Before it was over, about 12 hours later, the New York Post called what happened next a "rebellion" and "uprising." A spokesman for the state prison system accused guards of lying about what happened. Whatever happened, ABC News' Buffalo affiliate reported state officials were "downplaying it." Two weeks later, a State Police news release said Troopers were "continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding" the "incident."
On Monday, Beau Duffy, spokesperson for the State Police, told The Free Lance their "investigation is not concluded, still pending."
Whatever happened at the Collins Correctional Facility 126 hours before guards there ignited a wildcat strike that spread like wildfire to 38 of New York's 42 prisons, lasted 22 days, crippled the system and ended with Gov. Kathy Hochul firing 2,000 alleged strikers remained largely a mystery—until now.
Now three former Collins guards who were there tell their stories for the first time. Because the State Police are investigating their actions, they asked not to be named.
What they have to say still matters because, even though the strike is over, the crisis engulfing New York's prison system is not. What happened at Collins is also key to understanding the chasm of distrust between guards and Gov. Kathy Hochul's hand-picked prison chief, Daniel F. Martuscello III.
Martuscello is the commissioner of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS. The distrust between guards and the commissioner is so great Martuscello claimed guards "made up" what happened at Collins as a pretext to launch their strike, three confidential sources told The Free Lance.
Martuscello even showed union officials selectively edited video of body-worn camera footage he claimed proved it, two of them said.
DOCCS was invited to comment on this and the other events detailed below. Spokesman Thomas Mailey declined. He wrote: "The Department does not comment on ongoing investigations."
Striking New York State Correction Officers and supporters on the strike line across from the Bare Hill Correctional Facility on the third day of the wildcat strike. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
The first Correction Officer was a "rover," the prison version of a baseball utility man, with more than a decade's experience. Rover just finished counting prisoners in D-block half-past midnight on Feb. 12 when he saw Sgt. Jay Janik chasing prisoner Virtue Oliver into dormitory D-1's communal bathroom. Rover chased them. CO Patrick Schuler, the officer assigned to guard D-1 overnight, followed.
Inside the bathroom, Oliver squared off .
"He's ready to fight instantly," Rover said. "We're just trying to hand-cuff him and see what's going on."
He didn't know it at that moment, but moments before Sgt. Janik caught Oliver in someone else's living space after lights out—a violation of prison rules. Janik ordered Oliver to put his hands on the wall and submit to a search for contraband. Instead, Oliver ran into the bathroom.
Then Oliver ran into a stall. Janik crashed into it with Rover.
"Three grown men in a bathroom stall," he said. "Kinda tight. He's fighting and screaming and yelling at us."
Then, he said, "all three of us fell out of the stall." When that happened, Oliver "dropped his cellphones."
He had two, concealed on his person. The mobile cellular telephone may be a blessing for some, but for prison administrators they're contraband.
When the phones skidded across the floor, Rover's first thought was "oh fuck." He feared he mistakenly took his own mobile phone to work.
"But then we're all looking at it," he explained, "and we're like, 'Holy shit! Those are his!'"
Prisoner art inside Spofford, the notorious prison for kids in the Bronx after it was closed. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
When they fell out of the stall, Rover saw more than a dozen prisoners between them and the exit. More were outside the bathroom door.
"We were trapped," he explained. "There were so many of them, we couldn't get out."
"Not only that, he said, "They're either mad at us, or they're mad at him"—Oliver—for being caught with the phones some were likely paying to use.
Everyone was screaming at each other. The prisoners were yelling at the guards. Some were yelling at Oliver. The guards were yelling back. Oliver was still resisting being handcuffed.
"'Get your hands off him you're killing him!,'" Rover said someone yelled.
Robert Brooks was killed by guards at the Marcy Correctional Facility on Dec. 9. The alleged murder may have motivated the prisoners at Collins to intervene.
"We weren't even doing anything to him," Rover added. "We all had our body cameras on."
Another sergeant and two more COs raced into the bathroom. Eight guards faced off against the mob.
"The midnight shift is already short-staffed," Rover revealed, "so all the back-up was already in the bathroom."
Once guards got Oliver cuffed, he stopped resisting.
Trying to push through the crowd would have been suicide, so they waited. Five minutes passed before the mob "kinda backed up, but still kept yelling at us," according to Rover.
Even Oliver tried to calm things down.
"'I'm fine! I'm fine!,'" he yelled as they emerged from the bathroom.
Rover said Oliver's declaration was "almost like, 'They didn't do nothing to me—relax!'"
Oliver was brought to the prison's infirmary; Rover went to an office to write reports.
A steam-powered electric generator in one of the prisons New York State closed in the last decade. The Mid-Orange Correctional Facility began life as the Warwick Training School for Boys. Before that it was the New York City Farm, for alcoholics and morphine addicts. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Collins' administrators appealed for emergency assistance.
"Dayshift" answered the call. The single father-of-three, also with more than a decade on the job, usually works the dayshift. He was sent to the hallway between D-1 and D-2. The hallway connects their entrances. D-3 and D-4 sit above them in a rectangle-shaped, two story tall building.
After guards removed Oliver, they did not re-enter D-1. About 10 COs and three sergeants staged in the hallway instead.
"It was a tense situation," Dayshift recalled. "They knew they had us outnumbered a lot to a little."
Still, Dayshift added, "We weren't fucking with them, they weren't fucking with us."
A sergeant who usually didn't work in general population joined Dayshift and the other COs in the hallway shortly after 4:00 AM.
"You can't really hear the tension," the Sergeant explained, "but you can feel it."
The normal time for the morning count arrived around 6:00 AM. Prisoners are required to stand for it. CO Phil Voltz volunteered to take the count in D-1. That meant entering at one end and walking down an aisle in the middle, with beds on either side, all the way to the far end, and then coming back.
"When he did that turn around and started walking back," Dayshift said, "a bunch ganged up behind him and yelled 'Come get us!'"
Moments after completing the count, the Sergeant and a CO re-entered D-1.
"As this is happening, there's an inmate walking out of the D-1 bathroom with a weapon in his hand," the Sergeant says. "He clearly had what was like an ice pick weapon in his hand."
But then other prisoners surrounded him, "forming a wall."
That's when the Sergeant ordered guards to leave D-1, which meant taking the log book and the phone and locking the door behind them. They say they did what they had to do because they feared prisoners were plotting an attack.
"When an inmate comes out of a bathroom brandishing a weapon, making threatening remarks to staff," they explained. "I'm shutting it down right there."
"All of my decisions," they added, were "to protect the staff that was working with me that morning."
Dayshift and Rover both agree the Sergeant "made the right calls."
But when the Sergeant reported what they’d done to a captain and Collins' Superintendent Leanne Latona, the Sergeant said "they didn't agree with it."
Latona, they revealed, "got on the phone and tried ordering me to put an officer back on dog one."
"I lost my mind," the Sergeant admits. "I said 'Absolutely not. There's an inmate with a weapon in his hand right now. There's no way in hell I'm opening that door.'"
Photographs of the first day of the strike at the Collins Correctional Facility on Feb. 17, 2025, published by strikers on Facebook. Photo credit: unknown, via Facebook.
The Sergeant ordered D-2 locked down as well. They said they did it because officers reported prisoners from D-2 entered D-1 during the midnight bathroom showdown. They didn't want to have to deal with additional problems when they already had D-1 to deal with.
"So I secured both of them. Then I got to thinking about it, and said 'I may as well secure upstairs, D-3 and D-4, just in case."
Because of a quirk in the way the building was constructed, there was no way to secure D-3 and D-4 without locking the two officers inside what they call the "crossover"—essentially a small room with a bathroom.
"I called the officers upstairs and told them to do that," the Sergeant said. "And just wait for me to call them. I knew they were safe in there."
The Sergeant said they didn't know it when he gave the order, but the prisoners on D-3 and D-4 "weren't aggressive. They were just confused why this was happening."
An hour or so later, everyone was evacuated from D-3, including the two guards locked in the bathroom. Guards also re-entered D-4, bringing food and medication with them for the prisoners.
The doors that locked the dorms had small plexiglass windows in them. The Sergeant said "now-and-then one of the inmates from D-1 or D-2 would come to the door and try to talk to staff."
"'Why are you doing this?,'" one asked, he recalled. Another said "we want meds, chow." The Sergeant called it "just normal stuff."
In other words, they weren't demanding a jet to Havana, a truck full of cash and a ride to the airport.
A retired CO and his daughter supporting striking COs across from the Bare Hill Correctional Facilit, Feb. 19, 2025. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Yet, the Sergeant says, someone, somewhere set something in motion no one told him about.
100s of reinforcements arrived by about 9:00 AM, including a deputy superintendent for security, captain and 75 guards from the maximum-security Wende Correctional Facility. There were also scores of officers from the Office of Special Investigations, Special Operations and the Crisis Intervention Unit.
"'I'm assuming command,'" is what DOCCS' Director of Special Operations Christian Nuñez told the Sergeant when he got there, the Sergeant said.
D-1 "refused to talk to anybody. There was a stand-off."
The Sergeant said it was caused by the "inmate that had the weapon." The same one that caused the Sergeant to order a lock-down in the first place. He "was telling guys, 'Do not go to that door. Do not talk to anybody.'"
During the standoff, the Sergeant says "They were listening to the news. Their families were calling them on their tablets saying that they had hostages."
The prisoners in D-1, he said, "were very upset about that, they're like, 'We don't have any hostages.' We're like, 'We understand that. We don't know how that got out. That's not us.’"
The Sergeant said the misinformation "created hostility. Because they didn't believe anything we were saying for a little bit there."
"Eventually guys needed medical, guys wanted to eat," he explained. "So they started not listening to this inmate and they started talking."
Nuñez promised them they wouldn't be punished if they left peacefully. The prisoners demanded that prison SWAT teams not be involved. The teams, nicknamed CERT for Correctional Emergency Response Team, typically re-take housing units by force.
"They didn't want any CERT staff there," the Sergeant said. "They were in fear of retaliation."
Nuñez agreed to their demand, but also ordered CERT deployed to keep order in the gymnasium, where evacuees from D-1 were taken.
Nuñez had prisoners in D-1 come to the front door one-by-one. He had them walk backwards out the door. They were pat frisked in the hallway by OSI officers then escorted to the gym. They were held in the gym while D-1 was searched for weapons. Many, but not all, were allowed to return to D-1.
Striking guards across from the Clinton Correctional Facility on Feb. 28, 2025. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Nunez also “handled the negotiations with dog two," the sergeant says.
After D-1 was emptied, guards entered D-2, searched everyone, confined them in the dayroom then searched the dorm and individual living quarters.
About 12 suspected leaders were immediately transferred to other prisons, where they were placed in general population, the guards say.
"You just gave them the playbook and spread them out throughout the state," is how Dayshift saw it.
Collins was locked down for three days while the entire prison was searched for contraband. More than two dozen weapons were recovered, the officers said.
The searches at Collins ended Friday evening, Feb. 14. The wildcat strike started Monday morning, Feb. 17.
"There was a collective" who decided to take action, Dayshift revealed.
"Between the exposures state-wide, the record number of assaults on staff state-wide and a severe staffing shortage," he explained, "everyone came to the realization that we were a 1000% fucked on the path we were headed down."
Rover said some of them were troubled that no prisoners were punished.
"The COs were thinking, 'What do you mean there's no discipline?' These guys just took over the dorm!,'" Rover said. "That solidified the whole, 'Enough is enough!' mentality. We needed to make a point."
The group recruited guards from the Elmira Correctional Facility to join them because, at an Executive Assembly of union leaders in Syracuse the week before, Elmira's delegation asked that members be allowed to vote to strike. Because strikes by law enforcement officers are banned by New York's Taylor law, the vote was not allowed.
About 200 guards at Collins and Elmira started the strike Monday morning.
The Sergeant, Dayshift and Rover were among the 2000-plus officers fired for allegedly taking part.
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