Inmate Dies After Fight Breaks Out at Troubled Brooklyn Jail

A 36-year-old inmate at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn died Wednesday after he was injured in a fight at the jail, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

The inmate, Edwin Cordero, was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Justice Department and runs the jail. No other employees or inmates were injured during the brawl, which was stopped by jail employees, according to officials.

Mr. Cordero had been in custody at the detention center, or M.D.C., which has more than 1,300 inmates, since March 2024. He was initially sentenced to 18 months in the District of New Jersey for wire fraud and was later sentenced in June to 24 months in the Southern District of New York for committing assault, which was a violation of his supervised release.

Andrew Dalack, a lawyer representing Mr. Cordero, called his client’s death “senseless and completely preventable,” while adding that Mr. Cordero was “another victim of M.D.C. Brooklyn, an overcrowded, understaffed and neglected federal jail that is hell on earth.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment on the matter.

In February, Mr. Cordero was walking home from a deli in the Bronx when he was struck by a snowball thrown by a small child who was playing with a 17-year-old across the street, prosecutors said in a court document. Mr. Cordero confronted them and slashed the older child’s face, the document said.

Mr. Cordero’s death comes just months after a federal judge, Jesse M. Furman, refused to send a man convicted in a drug case to the troubled jail. The judge cited complaints of horrible conditions, frequent lockdowns and staffing shortages.

In a June letter to another federal judge, Ronnie Abrams, Mr. Dalack cited the “awful” conditions at M.D.C., as he requested that Mr. Cordero’s sentence be 18 months instead of 24, followed by 12 months of supervised release. Mr. Dalack wrote that Mr. Cordero and other detainees were “denied the most basic level of care, including access to showers, medical treatment and phone calls with their families” during lockdowns.

Ashley Cordero, Mr. Cordero’s wife, wrote to the judge in a June letter that she had spoken to her husband recently and that he was “depressed and upset.”

The couple had two children together: a baby who was 8 months old at the time of the letter and a 2-year-old daughter.

“Mr. Cordero is more than just a statistic,” Mr. Dalack said. “He is a real person with a family who genuinely loved and cared for him.”

M.D.C. has been the primary federal detention center in New York City since the Bureau of Prisons closed its sister jail in Manhattan in 2021 because of deteriorating conditions there. Visitation has been suspended until further notice, according to the center’s website.

Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.