"AT FIRST IT WAS JUST HEINOUS, IT WAS HORRIBLE. AFTER A WHILE, YOU GET NUMB TO IT. IT BECOMES THE NORMAL."

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EXCLUSIVE

Jan. 22, 2025

The State of New York turned a prison infirmary into a torture chamber and Sean Chung's job was to clean it up. Nurses helped cover-up the abuse. 

Teeth, skin, blood and sometimes even dreadlocks that had been ripped from mens' heads were just some of the things Chung had to mop up after a beat-up squad of prison guards finished with victims at the Marcy Correctional Facility.

"That place was like a NAZI death camp," Chung told The Free Lance. "At first it was just heinous, it was horrible. After a while, you get numb to it. It becomes the normal."

Nurse Patricia L. Matos sometimes called prisoners who had been beaten and pepper-sprayed by guards and brought to the infirmary for treatment "'whiny little babies,' telling them to 'suck it up' and 'be a man,'" Chung said.

Matos even "physically beat people up," Chung added,  "slapping people. While guys were handcuffed and Maced." 

"I saw this," he emphasized. "I saw this with my own eyes."

Chung and another former prisoner, William Alvarez, also said Matos conspired with guards to file false reports. 

"Matos was the Queen of coverups," Chung says. "I watched her tell them what to write, specifically."

Matos, 58, has been licensed by the New York State Department of Health as a registered nurse since 1987, according to public records. Her license expires in 2028.

Matos is one of two nurses Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS, to fire as a result of the killing of Robert Brooks by guards at Marcy on Dec. 9, 2024. A total of 18 DOCCS employees have been suspended pending termination hearings, including 16 guards and two nurses, Matos and Kyle Dashnaw, DOCCS says.

Dashnaw was captured smiling as guards beat and choked Brooks to death in body-worn camera video from four of the guards who unknowingly filmed themselves killing Brooks. Because the videos were recalled by investigators via a fail-safe recovery mechanism, they do not have sound. 

In the video, Matos is captured inside the room in the infirmary where guards are killing Brooks, but leaves without attempting to stop them. More video captures Matos sitting at a table at the infirmary's entrance filling out paperwork with guards.

Chung, now 29 and living in Queens, pleaded guilty to gun and murder conspiracy charges in 2018 and was sentenced to seven years in prison. He landed at Marcy in 2021 and was assigned to work as a porter in the medium-security prison's infirmary at night.  That meant sweeping and mopping the floors, cleaning the bathrooms, taking out the trash, moving supplies around and running errands, etc.

Chung kept quiet about the horrors he saw, even when asked by other guards outside the infirmary. Chung thinks it was a test that earned him the perverse trust of Marcy's staff.  

Dashnaw, the nurse captured smiling in the video while Brooks is killed, started working "a little bit" after he did, Chung says. Dashnaw approached Chung outside the infirmary during a smoke break a few weeks later, and confided in him.

"He didn't understand why they had to resort to that kind of violence to get things done," Chung said Dashnaw told him. "He found it was morally wrong."  

But Dashnaw kept coming to work, kept cashing DOCCS’ payroll checks and kept silent as the prison cop crime wave continued, culminating in the killing of Brooks.

Dashnaw, 28, has been licensed by the New York State Department of Health as a registered nurse since 2018, according to public records. He license expires in 2026.

DOCCS did not respond to a request for comment.

A telephone call to Matos’s husband was not answered and a text message inviting comment was not returned.

Dashnaw previously did not return a voicemail and text seeking comment. Neither did he open his front door when The Free Lance knocked—even though his car was covered in snow in the driveway.

Because Chung was the night-time infirmary porter, sometimes he got summoned to work after normal hours. Since he worked there for a year, he made the trip in all four seasons. 

"Rain, sleet, snow, summertime," Chung recalled.

As he walked the 10-or-so minutes from his dormitory-like, open-air housing unit to the infirmary, Chung knew it meant "someone got beat up." He explained he got through it by thinking, "I know what job I gotta do. Let me hurry up and get in and get out. That's it."

The room where Brooks was killed is called the "Emergency Room," or "ER," by Marcy staff. Prisoners were also attacked in the lobby of the infirmary, in the hallways and in the quarantine room "all in the way in the back" that was used during the Wuhan virus pandemic to isolate prisoners who tested positive for COVID-19 

The reason guards chose the infirmary to abuse prisoners in, Chung explained, was because it lacked surveillance cameras.

Guards' perverse mis-use of prison infirmaries as places to abuse prisoners was documented by The Free Lance in 2020, when we detailed the killing by guards of Samuel Harrell inside the infirmary at the Fishkill Correctional Facility in 2015.

Anderson, now 27, landed at Marcy in May 2021. He was serving two years for attempted criminal possession of a weapon. Marcy was dominated by the beat-up squad, he recalled. Various versions patrolled the walkways of the campus-like medium security prison, harassing prisoners with a super-charged jail version of stop-and-frisk.

Residents of housing units are allowed to leave to walk to the mess-hall, yard, school building, gym, at specified times of the day. Walking down the prison's main road was like running a gauntlet. The beat-up squad singled victims out and threw them up against prison vans. They did it to everyone, Anderson said, "every race. Black, Spanish, white. No matter who you are."

"They'd throw you on the van" and push your legs out so far, Anderson explained, "You're standing diagonally on the van. Like you're trying to hold the van up from falling on to you."

The slightest resistance was met with merciless violence. 

"They'll do a lot to the point where sometimes you don't even want to come outside, you don't want to go to chow," Anderson said.

Anderson asked that his first name be withheld because he was known to Marcy guards by his last name and he wanted them to know it was him revealing their crimes.

Chung said the Marcy beat-up squad was notorious for ripping dread-locks or box braids out of prisoners' heads.

"Sometimes you can walk down the walkway and see braids on the ground in front of the mess hall or in front of your dorm," Chung recalled. "That was a normal day."

Sometimes the beat-up squad made examples out of people in front of the population. One white Rastafarian prisoner was seized by the squad and smashed head-first into the ground.

"They slammed him and put their foot on the back of his head and grabbed a chunk of his dreads and ripped it out and they left it," Chung said. "They left a piece of it on the stoop and they took the rest with them."

Alvarez was serving three years for assault when he was beaten and choked by Marcy's beat-up squad in 2020. CO Anthony Farina threatened to kill him, Alvarez testified under oath in 2023 in support of the federal civil rights lawsuit he filed against Farina and other members of the squad in 2022.

When Alvarez was brought to the infirmary by Farina and the beat-up squad, Matos attempted to cover-up their crimes.

"She was on their team," Alvarez testified. "She told them clean me up real quick, they cleaned me up, they changed my outfit and then they took pictures." 

Chung, the infirmary porter, called Matos the “head nurse." She “definitely had power over all of them. They all feared her."

DOCCS' regulations require photographs of prisoners' injuries taken after guards use force against them. Photo-illustrated Use of Force reports are passed up the chain-of-command to DOCCS' Central Office in Albany, where higher-ups are supposed to monitor use of force by guards and give critical feedback.

Nurse Matos didn't want to approve sending Alvarez to a hospital for treatment. The beat-up squad smashed Alvarez's head into a corner where two concrete walls met. Both his eyebrows, he said, "were slit open" and bloody. They choked him and "shattered" his ankle.

Alvarez called Matos "the main nurse, the older nurse” and said she "wasn't suggesting me to go to the hospital." Instead, "she was just saying for them to do butterfly staples in my eyes and to leave it like that."

A doctor outside the prison screened Alvarez via video conference, overruled Matos and ordered he be taken to the hospital. Surgery was required to fix his ankle and 9 stitches, four on one side, five on the other, were needed to close his eyebrows. Today, the scars are about an inch-and-a-half long on both sides. Alvarez's lawsuit remains pending.

"You would think, 'prison, OK, I gotta watch out for the booty bandits and this or that,'" Anderson explains, "Nah, you really gotta watch out for the police. That's the crazy part."

The American Correctional Nurses Association, the New York State Nurses Association, the Medical Society of the State of New York, the New York State Public Health Association, HealthRight, and the Center for Victims of Torture all did not respond to a request for comment on the use of prison medical facilities to torture and kill Brooks.

Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, responded but would not provide a statement on Brooks' killing because, a spokesman said, "MSF only comments on contexts where we're working, which is almost exclusively outside the US."

Khadijah Shakur, a Registered Nurse, called out the nursing establishment’s silence.

“It is an embarrassment to the profession that no nursing organization has made a statement,” Shakur told The Free Lance. “After watching the Robert Brooks torture and murder, … the infirmary is the ‘beat down room’ and the nurses allow it!”

Matos, Dashnaw and another nurse who was there ”had a duty to protect their patient from injury and harm and they breached that duty by doing nothing to stop the torture and ultimate murder of Robert L. Brooks.”

After a year, Chung finally had enough cleaning up after the beat-up squad and quit. He got a job in the law library and was elected by his peers to the Inmate Liaison Committee for a six-month term. He represented their interests in monthly meetings with the prison administration.

Chung and the ILC met with Marcy's Superintendint Patrick Reardon and his deputies, including Deputy Superintendent for Security William J. Snyder and its future superintendent Danielle C. Medbury. (Medbury was later promoted and was its acting superintendent at the time Brooks was killed.) Chung and the ILC warned them residents were "getting beat up on their way to the mess hall" and "getting beat up in the infirmary." 

"They all knew," Chung said. "And they did nothing."

For tips or corrections, The Free Lance can be reached at jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me.

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