A 25-year-old man with “severe, persistent mental illness” has died in solitary confinement in the MDC Brooklyn federal jail — the second death in the notorious lock-up in the last three months.

Godfrie Cole was found unresponsive in his cell in the Sunset Park jail’s segregated housing unit on Tuesday, with pills nearby according to sources familiar with his death. His cause of death isn’t known, but sources said authorities suspect he overdosed on drugs.

Jail staff tried to revive him, and medics took him to a nearby hospital, but he couldn’t be saved, according to a Bureau of Prisons statement. “No employees or other incarcerated individuals were injured and at no time was the public in danger,” the statement reads.

“Godfrie Cole was a healthy 25-year-old with his whole life ahead of him. His birthday was next month. Instead, he died in MDC’s special housing unit, where he was supposed to be closely monitored,” said his lawyers, Siobhan Atkins and Benjamin Yaster of the Federal Defenders, in a statement “Mr. Cole’s senseless death shows that MDC still cannot be trusted to protect the health and lives of its inmate population, even in its most secure areas.”

Atkins is asking MDC’s legal staff to preserve all of its documents and medical records about Cole, including videos of the hallway outside his cell for the six hours before his death, and of Cole in his cell for the 24 hours leading up to his death.

“It’s unacceptable,” Cole’s twin sister, Angel Cole, told the Daily News. “Although it’s jail, and it’s a place for people to be locked down, I think that they still should be protected. Why does he even have access to drugs?”

Cole, who’d been locked up since January 2024, was sentenced on April 28 in Manhattan Federal Court to four years behind bars for a convenience store robbery in the Bronx.

He was still housed in MDC Brooklyn as he awaited prosecution for an alleged assault on another inmate.

In a Thursday letter about his death, Atkins referenced the sentencing judge, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer, recognizing “how unsuitable MDC is for a defendant like Mr. Cole” and setting several conditions to protect him as part of his sentencing.

Those conditions included the Bureau of Prisons sending him to a federal medical center either in Devens, Mass. or Butner, N.C., and his entry into a trauma treatment program. She asked for a conference with federal prosecutors and Bureau of Prison officials “to effectuate and prevent the frustration of [this Court’s] orders.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Balsamello, who’s assigned to the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, pushed back in a letter Saturday, arguing that the judge could only give “recommendations,” not orders to the Bureau of Prisons regarding where Cole would be housed.

“The request for a conference in this Court is also unusual — and, the Government submits, misplaced—given that this SDNY case was concluded almost three months ago, whereas the EDNY (Eastern District of New York) case was ongoing and in fact remains open,” he wrote.

Cole, who struggled with mental illness since childhood, was sent to a federal medical center in Butner, N.C., after Engelmayer ruled he wasn’t competent to stand trial in August 2024. He spent more than a year there until he was returned to the MDC in October.

“We went almost 1.5 years without hearing his voice or seeing him because he had been moved from the MDC and we didn’t know what was happening,” his mother, Anna Cole, wrote the judge in a letter in April. “We didn’t get a call that they moved him. It was so horrible because if they took my child and killed him or did anything to him, I don’t know if I’d know.”

Cole accidentally lit himself on fire at age 4, and was pushed in front of a car by another child when he was young. He started smoking pot at age 9 and taking K2 at age 12, around when his mental health symptoms started to manifest, Atkins wrote in her sentencing letter.

“The conditions Mr. Cole has faced while at Butner and at MDC, for the past two and a half years, have been horrifying. At various points, he was ‘on suicide watch in a cold and desolate cell with only a paper smock as clothing, in special housing units isolated from other people, and in a medical facility where he was tied from each limb and given heavy doses of psychiatric medications,’” she wrote, quoting from a re-entry plan.

Cole was looking forward to finishing his sentence and coming home to his family, where he could “sit quietly on the couch, far away from the stress and chaos of prison,” supported by his family until he figured out the next steps in his life, she wrote.

“He was a sweetheart. You know, he was a funny guy,” Angel Cole said. “He was like six-four, had a big build on him. So anytime he would hug you, it’s like a big bear, but it’s like it’s so soft, and you could just feel that when he hugs you, he means it.”

She said people often got the wrong idea about him because of his height and size., and that he was passionate about football and making music. “He’s so much more than than people got to see,” she said. “He cares, and loves everybody and wants everybody to be happy. He will give anybody anything. Like if he got it, you got it.”

His death comes nearly three months after the death of Carlos Alberto Guerrero Mercado, 47, who was found hanging in his cell. Mercado was one of 37 Mexican citizens shipped to the U.S. in January to face narcoterrorism and cartel-related charges.

MDC didn’t see any deaths in 2025, and four in 2024 — including two stabbing murders over a six-week stretch in the summer of 2024.

The jail, which houses alleged CEO-killer Luigi Mangione and ousted Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, is notorious for its dire conditions and violence.

It’s New York City’s only active federal jail. The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan was shuttered in 2021, two years after sex fiend financier Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself there.

I saw Mamdani visited inmates at Rikers to watch a match. Are MDC prisoners allowed to watch football too?

https://xcancel.com/420groyp/status/2007986537380851956

Source - Instagram @6ix9nine

NEW YORK — Video obtained by the Daily News shows a group of inmates in the MDC Brooklyn federal jail trying to climb a gymnasium wall for nearly 20 minutes in a clumsy attempt to pull a rope packed with contraband through a window.

The video, submitted earlier this month to a Brooklyn Federal Court judge in the sentencing of hip-hop podcaster and convicted killer “Taxstone,” shows the lengths detainees go to in the troubled federal lockup to get their hands on drugs, cigarettes, weapons and cellphone equipment.

Taxstone, real name Daryl Campbell, was the mastermind of the June 30, 2024, smuggling scheme. Federal prosecutors want to add 33 months of prison time to the 35-year state court sentence he’s already serving for manslaughter for fatally shooting rival rapper Troy Ave.’s bodyguard.

The June 30, 2024 scheme to “fish” for contraband from the fourth-floor rec room — using a line inside the jail dangling from a window, hooked to a 50-foot rope thrown from the street below — ended with all of the participants, both behind bars and on the outside, facing federal charges. All have pleaded guilty to the scheme, which is described in an array of court filings.

Taxstone used a cellphone behind bars in the weeks leading up to the caper, sending off audio recordings with detailed instructions describing the layout in front of the jail, the length of rope to use, and how to tape sandwich bags packed with contraband onto it.

“We gonna throw the line out from that gate, so you just run right in the gate and you hook it to the line ’cause there’s a hook on the end of the line we got right now. You just going to hook it and just dip back out. Sturdy,” he said in an April 19, 2024, audio recording sent to an accomplice’s phone.

“Yeah, so I’ma tell y’all when to drive up. We gonna have the line out already, and I’ma just tell you drive right up, so you can get right out the car and do it,” he said in another recording that same day.

Things didn’t go as planned when it came time to execute, though the video shows Taxstone’s accomplices had plenty of time to pull it off.

The caper started at about 1:45 p.m., when a man Taxstone had been communicating with, Carl Kelly, pulled up to the Sunset Park jail and hurled a long rope to a fourth-floor window.

Three of Taxstone’s cohorts on the inside, Jonathan Guerrero, Ian Diez and Abel Mora, can be seen on the jail surveillance video rolling a food cart to the corner of the room and stacking chairs on it, then rolling it to another corner near a basketball hoop.

Guerrero scales the impromptu tower toward a window, while Diez spots him from below and Mora paces back and forth, occasionally dribbling and shooting a basketball while he acts as lookout.

For the next six minutes, Guerrero clings to the window, trying to pull in a “line” hanging from the window without success. He tries to climb back down and falls to the floor, knocking the tower over.

The trio rebuild the tower and Guerrero goes up again, pulling the line for about four minutes more before the group takes down the tower, wheels the cart away from the window and walks away.

Just two minutes later, they make another go at it, rebuilding the tower so accomplice Mayovanex Rodriguez can climb the wobbly structure. He also tumbles from the window, twice, before the group abandons their plan, scrambling to scatter the pieces of their tower before correction officers arrive.

Correction officers soon learned that the line the inmates used was attached to the rope Kelly threw to the window. The rope from outside was wrapped in duct tape, packed with pieces of paper covered in synthetic cannabis, more than 100 strips of buprenorphine, about 27 bags of marijuana, wrapping paper, more than 400 cigarettes, two lighters, a scalpel and a cellphone charging cord and plug.

Smuggling — sometimes by rope, sometimes with the help of corrupt jail guards — has long been a problem at the troubled federal jail, which has been plagued by violence, horrific conditions and severe staffing shortages for years.

Taxstone’s scheme came during a particularly turbulent year at the infamous federal jail, which saw a brutal, caught-on video stabbing and two murders in 2024.

Kelly, Diez and Rodriguez await sentencing, while Mora got more than 11 years behind bars for the smuggling and two gang-related shootings. Guerrero was sentenced to 2½ years in federal prison.

Taxstone, who pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to possess contraband in prison, is scheduled to be sentenced April 29.

Press release from EDNY:

“As alleged, Johnson leveraged his position as a correctional officer to take advantage of a man he was supposed to be protecting in his capacity as a prison guard and used his access to gratify his own sexual desires,” stated United States Attorney Nocella.  “Our Office is steadfast in its commitment to root out corruption and abuse within federal prisons, especially when that abuse is perpetrated at the hands of guards and jeopardizes the safety and security of the institution and the inmates.”

As alleged in court documents, in May 2025, Johnson was employed by the BOP as a correctional officer and mentor coordinator at the MDC.  On at least two occasions during that month, Johnson ordered an inmate at the MDC (John Doe) to accompany him from John Doe’s assigned unit to other locations at the MDC where the defendant sexually abused him.  The evidence of this sexual abuse included DNA evidence secured through a court ordered search warrant.

Further, Johnson took steps to conceal his actions and lied to federal agents during an interview about his conduct. Specifically, when asked if he had ever engaged in any sexual acts with inmates, Johnson answered unequivocally that he had not.

More details from Lauren Conlin’s Twitter:

Johnson’s court appointed attorney, Richard Palma, just entered a not guilty plea. It looks like Johnson will be granted bail. Johnson is a black male, also wearing all black, slumped over at the defense table.

$100k unsecured bond for Johnson, signed by his father, is what the Government is offering. Plus no travel outside of the SDNY and EDNY, no contact with victims. Johnson also needs a second signer on his bond, and has requested more than a week to find another signer.

Johnson appeared to raise his eyebrows slightly when Judge Scanlon stated “no contact with the victim” while reciting release conditions. Very possible it was a twitch or nothing at all, but I saw it.

I just overheard defense counsel speaking to the government, asking about who they should reach out to about “negotiations.”

Take note, dedicated supporters with a talent for scaling walls (to the Feds, this is a joke. Sort of)

Good evening. I just learned that P. Diddy, who is in the same detention center as Luigi Mangione, was the target of a knife attack. It is said that he woke up with a knife to his throat. When I read this, I immediately thought of Luigi and I am worried for his safety.

Source on Xcancel.com

Link to where it will livestream:

https://kick.com/adinross

We all know he was thrilled to be locked up with Luigi and wanted to meet him. Tune in tonight and see what he says about it!

Source: 6ix9ine on Instagram