MIRACLE AT MARCY: WILLIAM ALVAREZ SURVIVED WHITE PRISON GUARD GANG THAT KILLED ROBERT BROOKS
WILLIAM ALVAREZ IS A VERY LUCKY MAN. HE SURVIVED THE BEAT-UP SQUAD AT THE MARCY CORRECTIONAL FACILITY THAT KILLED ROBERT BROOKS
Dec. 28, 2024
Four years before Robert Brooks was beaten, kicked and choked to death by a "murder squad" of state prison guards at Marcy, a medium-security state prison near Utica in upstate New York, the same squad attacked William Alvarez with strikingly similar savagery.
The only difference: Alvarez miraculously survived. This is his story.
"I was told that they were going to kill me and they were choking me, telling me to shut up," Alvarez testified under oath in 2023, detailing an attack that happened in 2020 yet featuring many of the same elements of the attack that killed Brooks Dec. 10.
Alvarez called the guards the "beat-up squad." He testified Sgt. Glenn Trombley was "the sergeant in charge of the beat-up squad." C.O. Anthony Farina and others were members of the beat-up squad. Both attacked him in 2020, Alvarez testified
Trombley and Farina were "involved in the fatal attack" on Brooks Dec. 9, Gov. Kathy Hochul and police allege. Police say preliminary findings by the Onondaga County Medical Examiner show Brooks was killed by "asphyxia due to compression of the neck."
Alvarez filed his lawsuit against Trombley, Farina and three other Marcy guards in 2022. The primary job of all attorneys general is to defend state officials and employees from lawsuits, so the guards are being represented by New York's Attorney General Letitia James.
Whenever you sue or are sued in federal court you get to gather evidence before a trial from the opposing party by conducting "discovery." During discovery, plaintiffs and defendants are allowed to question each other under oath in a "deposition." Lying is perjury punishable by prison.
In his sworn deposition, Alvarez was interrogated by Matthew J. Gallagher, one of three Assistant Attorneys General from James's office defending Trombley, Farina and the other Marcy guards.
The lawsuit remains pending in Federal District Court in Albany. No trial has been held or is even scheduled.
Alvarez testified the attack was started by the Correction Officer assigned to the dormitory he lived in. C.O. Caleb Bause was being forced "to work a double shift" and didn't want to, Alvarez alleged. A verbal dispute resulted in Bause ordering Alvarez to clean the shower. While Alvarez was doing that, Bause allegedly walked up behind him and "emptied the can" of pepper spray guards carry point-blank in his face in "one long spray."
Bause "pulled the pin" activating his personal alarm, bringing out the beat-up squad. Its members each ran toward the dormitory from all across the facility. Bause ordered Alvarez to go to the entrance to the dorm, put his hands on the wall and wait for them to arrive. Alvarez says he complied.
The squad showed up seconds later. They slammed Alvarez's head twice into a nearby corner where two cinder block walls met and laughed. The blows split both of Alvarez's eyebrows open, on each side of his head. Blood flowed out of the cuts and mixed with the pepper spray on his face.
Alvarez fell to the floor. The beat-up squad handcuffed him and kicked him repeatedly. The blood and pepper spray in his eyes made it hard to see but he could still feel their blows.
"I was kicked a bunch of times," Alvarez testified. "My face, my back, my arm, my chest, my ribs."
The beat-up squad dragged the handcuffed Alvarez to a van and drove to the infirmary building. The back of the van had a single bench seat on one side of it. Sgt. Trombley got in the front passenger seat while C.O. Farina and C.O. Skylar Tuttle got in the back with Alvarez, who was handcuffed on the floor.
In the back of the van, Farina and Tuttle punched, choked and repeatedly told Alvaraez they were going to kill him.
"Being told that they were going to kill me," Alvarez testified. "And there was nothing anybody can do about it."
They even seemed to play a sadistic game with Alvarez. They choked him he said "to see if they can stop my breathing."
Alvarez said that instead of choking him with their hands directly, Farina and Tuttle positioned his neck on the edge of the bench seat in the back of the van and pressed on the back of it.
"My neck was being pushed like this, got a knee on the back of it. So I couldn’t breathe," Alvarez explained. "I'm being punched in my rib in the back. I'm getting punched and like being pushed into that so I can't breathe."
Alvarez pleaded for Sgt. Trombley to order them to stop, but was ignored.
"I couldn't breathe," Alvarez said. Referring to Sgt. Trombley, "I kept telling him, 'I can't breathe, I can't breathe.' And he just looked at me and pay me no mind."
It wasn't until the van arrived at the infirmary, Alvarez said, that Sgt. Trombley "looked back and he told them, 'Enough.' And they stopped."
Inside the infirmary, nurses cleaned his wounds then took photographs of his injuries.
“After they cleaned me up, they cleaned me up to take pictures,” Alvarez testified.
“The main nurse, the older a nurse,” he added, wanted to help cover-up the beat-up squad’s crimes by treating Alvarez in the infirmary and not sending him to a hospital in the free world.
“She wasn't suggesting me to go to the hospital,” Alvarez testified. She was just saying for them to do butterfly staples”—to close the 1 1/2-inch-long gashes on his head—”and to leave it like that. “
In the end, a doctor screened him by video and ordered Alvarez transported to a hospital for treatment.
"Let's see if you learned your lesson now," C.O. Tuttle allegedly told Alvarez, before he was taken by other guards to the hospital.
Alvarez needed about a dozen stitches to close the gashes on his face and emergency surgery to repair a broken foot. His ankle bone, Alvarez said, "was broken. It was shattered." His jaw was broken too, he said.
Alvarez was accused of assaulting Corrections Officers, so when he was released from the hospital and returned to the prison he went straight to solitary confinement for 94 days. Three of his teeth feel out while he was there. All or most of the mail, including official complaints and written appeals to high-ranking prison officials for help, were thrown out by guards.
He knows this because the inmate responsible for taking out their trash always fished Alvarez’s mail out of it and gave it back to him.
Instead of being released back into general population at Marcy, Alvarez was transferred to the maximum-security Comstock Correctional Facility.
He finished his sentence in January 2021. He lives in the Bronx today. He has PTSD and sometimes blurry vision and pain, especially when it's damp or cold.
At the end of his interrogation of Alvarez, Gallagher, the Assistant Attorney General from James's office defending the beat-up squad, asked Alvarez if he'd seen the Marcy squad beat up anyone else.
Alvarez identified three prisoners by name, including a cousin, and said he'd seen "a few other guys" get abused too but didn't know their names. One was beaten so badly "the guy defecated on himself from the beating he got," Alvarez said. "Excuse my French. But literally beat the shit out of him."
"I told you they were known as the beat-up squad," Alvarez concluded. "That's what they would do."
What Alvarez said should have sent alarm bells ringing in the headquarters of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in Albany, the state agency that operates New York's prisons. Legal experts told The Free Lance Alvarez’s allegations likely made their way up the chain-of-command to Attorney General James herself.
Despite being given an open-ended invitation by The Free Lance to dispute this allegation, James has not.
If either happened, given Brooks’ killing nothing appears to have been done to rein in the out-of-control squad.
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