The night Brooks was killed, Schoff told Troopers he was chilling in Marcy’s break room with Sgt. Glenn J. Trombly and guard Anthony R. Farina when another guard, Nicholas J. Kieffer, broadcast over the handheld radios they all carried, “Wait til you get a look at this guy.”
Brooks had just been transferred to Marcy from the nearby Mohawk Correctional Facility for his own protection because he’d been beaten twice in three days there. He would be brain dead 31 minutes after his arrival at Marcy.
Schoff said Sgt. Trombly and Farina responded to Kieffer’s broadcast by leaving the break room, getting in a van and driving to the front of the prison where new prisoners are received.
Moments later, a “Red Dot” alarm was triggered and he along with another guard who pleaded guilty to killing Brooks, Michael D. Fisher, rushed to the front of the facility. The alarm was called off, but Schoff and Fisher went to the infirmary anyway when they learned that’s where Brooks had been taken.
AfTer he washed the handcuffs that had been restraining Brooks, he asked who they belonged to. Guard Nicholas J. Anzalone said they were his and Schoff gave him the handcuffs. He heard Kingsley say “he’s dead” while they were taking the handcuffs off Brooks.
Farina and Anzalone pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to 22 years for killing Brooks. Fisher pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment and will have to serve six months in the Oneida County jail if a state appeals court affirms his guilty plea.
After giving Anzalone his handcuffs back, he left the room and walked to the lobby of the infirmary where he ran into guard Nicholas Gentile.
Schoff said Gentile had just come from the entrance to the prison where Brooks was first attacked and cleaned up a puddle of his blood.
“The sally port is clean,” Gentile said, Schoff told Troopers.
“The paperwork is key. Let’s hope Mohawk doesn’t talk,” Schoff reported Gentile said, referring to the guards from Mohawk who had transported Brooks to Marcy and witnessed the first beating Marcy’s guards gave Brooks that night.
According to the investigation report they filed, Schoff explained to the Troopers questioning him that whenever guards beat prisoners, “the paperwork will always be ‘curved’ to favor staff.”
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