Man held on Rikers for 19 months becomes first to die in jails in 2025

Author: Jacob Kaye with Queens Daily Eagle
2/20/25
A 38-year-old man died on Rikers Island on Wednesday morning.
Ramel Powell, who had been held in the city’s jails for nearly two years as he awaited trial, was
found dead inside the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers around 2:14 a.m., according to
the Department of Correction.
The DOC, which announced Powell’s death Wednesday morning, gave no details about the
circumstances surrounding the detainee’s death.
Powell is the first person to have died on Rikers in 2025.
The 38-year-old’s death has allegedly been reported to the Board of Correction, the state
attorney general’s office, the State Commission of Correction, the city’s Department of
Investigation and the federal monitor tasked with tracking violence in the jails as part of the
ongoing detainee civil rights case, Nunez v. the City of New York.
“I, and the entire NYC Department of Correction, express our deepest sympathy to the loved
ones of Mr. Powell,” DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginely-Liddie said in a statement. “We are
conducting a full investigation into this tragic event.”
Powell was first brought to Rikers Island in July 2023 after violating his parole, according to
court records. He was arrested on assault charges in Manhattan and sent to the jail on $50,000
cash bail.
Powell was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in order to determine whether or not he
was fit to stand trial. He eventually was found mentally fit to stand trial and had seen his case
slowly move in Manhattan Criminal Court over the last 19 months.
He was next scheduled to appear in court in early March.
Around 100 people have died on Rikers Island in the past decade, including 34 who have died
while Mayor Eric Adams has been in office.
Five people died in DOC custody last year, nine in 2023 and 19 in 2022. Sixteen people died the
year before Adams took office as a number of compounding crises on Rikers Island made worse
by the pandemic came to a head.
Advocates largely blamed the mayor for Powell’s death, accusing Adams – who was in federal
court on Wednesday seeking to have the bribery and corruption charges brought against him
last year dismissed – of fueling the violent and dangerous conditions in the jail complex.
“It is unconscionable that the mayor continues to avoid putting in the work necessary to close
the pipelines that feed incarceration and expedite the closure of Torture Island,” Daren Mack,
the co-director of advocacy group Freedom Agenda, said in a statement. “Mayor Adams only
believes in due process for himself and his cronies. He could care less what happens to the rest
of us, and now another family has to see that firsthand.”
Lah Franklin, a member of the Katal Center, said the death toll mounting under the mayor’s
watch was “so sad and outrageous.”
“This is unacceptable,” Franklin said in a statement. “The death of a person detained shows why
Adams should be removed, and the city must shut down Rikers.”
The city is legally required to shut down Rikers Island as a jail complex by August 2027 and
replace it with four new borough-based jails. However, the city is wildly off track of its plan to
close Rikers after steps to shutter the jails have largely come to a halt under Adams.
The earliest of the four new jails is not expected to be completed by 2029 and at least one won’t
be completed until 2032, five years after Rikers is supposed to be shuttered.
Complicating the closure of Rikers is the potential takeover of the jails by a court-appointed
authority known as a receiver.
Federal Judge Laura Swain, who found the city in contempt of court for failing to tamp down
violence in the jails over the past decade in November, is currently considering whether or not
the city should remain in control of Rikers.
Last month, the city told Swain that should she appoint a receiver, she should tap
Maginley-Liddie to serve in the role. The unusual proposal was blasted by the Legal Aid Society
– which represents all detainees on Rikers Island in the case – and federal prosecutors who
instead called for Swain to appoint an independent authority who currently does not work with
the DOC.