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A 36-year-old man awaiting trial on an attempted murder charge was found dead in his bed at Rikers Island Tuesday morning, the ninth death of a person in New York City jail custody so far this year.
Cesar Mederocuret was discovered by a correction officer at the Robert N. Davoren Center on Nov. 10, where he was having a medical emergency, but subsequently pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., according to the Department of Correction. DOC hasn't released a cause of death yet.
Mederocuret had been detained since his arrest on March 7. Police alleged that he punched a stranger in the face at a subway station before attempting to throw the man onto the tracks in front of an approaching train. He was awaiting trial on an attempted murder charge.
Correction Commissioner Stanley Richards expressed condolences to Mederocuret's family and said the department would investigate the potential cause and circumstance behind his death.
“The safety and well-being of everyone who lives and works with us will always be our highest priority,” Richards said in a statement. “This profound loss weighs heavily on us all.”
The Legal Aid Society, which represented Mederocuret, called for an independent investigation and urged the city to provide his family and attorneys with information about his death with promptness and transparency.
His death, the organization said, illustrates the dysfunction of the jail system as Legal Aid continues to push for the closing of Rikers Island.
“This is yet another devastating reminder of the human cost of the City’s dysfunctional jail system,” the organization said in a statement.
The latest death comes during ongoing scrutiny of the conditions for both correction officers and detainees – and the medical care they receive – inside NYC jails by their various oversight parties.
In an October report, federal monitor Steve Martin said operational breakdowns had contributed to several of the eight detainee deaths recorded in city custody at the time, describing situations where officers failed to conduct meaningful security checks in housing areas, as well as falsifying or inaccurately completing handwritten logbooks and abandoning their posts. The report also pointed to broken cell doors that allowed detainees to congregate in areas where they were not supposed to be.
In one of the cases, John Price spent approximately three and a half hours in a clinic holding area in March without receiving medical attention. Correction officers had failed to alert medical staff that he was experiencing an emergency, according to the board's report, before he died at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens.
Nicholas Deml, who was appointed remediation manager by a federal judge in February to oversee reforms, has directed DOC to complete a staffing assessment and develop a new deployment strategy in an effort to reduce the amount of detainee deaths.
Nine people have now died in city jail custody this year, following 15 deaths in 2025, five in 2024, nine in 2023 and 19 in 2022, according to department records.
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