while he sat handcuffed on a medical examination table at the Marcy Correctional Facility in December 2024. Brooks died the following day. Last Thursday, a grand jury issued indictments on charges including second-degree murder, manslaughter, and tampering with evidence. Of the nine officers who appeared in court that day, all pleaded not guilty. Another officer is scheduled to appear in court next week, the county district attorney said.

Bodycam footage appears to show a prison officer placing something in Brooks’s mouth before striking him, while another officer is seen hitting him in the stomach with a shoe. At one point, an officer lifts Brooks by the neck before forcefully placing him on the examination table. A medical examiner ruled Brooks’s death a homicide. Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, described Brooks’s severe injuries on Thursday, including broken bones and cartilage, bruising of internal organs, and repeated restrictions to his airway, which caused severe brain damage. Brooks "did absolutely nothing" to provoke the assault and ultimately died by choking on his own blood, Fitzpatrick said, according to the BBC’s U.S. news partner CBS.

Shortly after the incident, New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered the firing of 13 officers and a prison nurse who were allegedly involved in the assault. “The indictments and arrests of those officers allegedly involved in Mr. Brooks’s death should be met with the same presumption of innocence that every citizen is afforded until proven guilty in a court of law,” officials said.

Several defense attorneys declined to comment on the case on Friday, and the BBC attempted to contact legal representatives for the remaining officers. The investigation into Brooks’s death remains ongoing. At the time of his death, Brooks, 43, had served nine years of a 12-year prison sentence for stabbing his son's mother. He had been transferred to Marcy Correctional Facility—about 220 miles (350 km) north of New York City—from a nearby facility just hours before the beating.