A video shows nurses and corrections officers at a New York prison complaining about medical equipment and making jokes while giving CPR to an inmate who died in a cell.
The footage is from the body camera worn by Oneida County Correctional Facility officers present at the scene in February 2024. The inmate, Antwan Cater, died from a synthetic-marijuana-induced seizure at age 25, according to The New York Times.
Bodycam video revealed that 12 minutes lapsed between an officer first seeing Cater on the ground and when a nurse checked his pulse.
Video also showed that in the 40-plus minutes that medical staff administered CPR, they said the medical devices they were using “suck” and asked if anything “works around here.”
One staff member joked about the CPR being “good training,” and another said they were “too fat” and “burned a thousand calories” during the resuscitation attempt.
Cater’s father, Terry Watson, has filed a federal lawsuit over the incident that alleges staff’s “negligence and medical malpractice” caused his son’s death. Ten nurses and corrections officers, plus a medical company and the district and county where the incident took place, are named as defendants.
“Each minute they did nothing to help Antwan, the probability of his survival dropped significantly,” Watson’s lawyers wrote in the filing, per the Times. “By first ignoring Antwan’s seizure and then standing around idly for minutes, the correction officers and medical staff sealed Antwan’s fate.”