NEW YORK — After 24 years behind bars, mostly in state prison, Gregory Acevedo seemed like a survivor to his sister and mother — so they don’t understand what it was about being in the custody of the New York City Department of Correction that pushed him over the edge.
The city says he died trying to escape.
Acevedo, 48, climbed a fence Sept. 20 in the rooftop recreation yard of “the Barge” jailhouse moored off the Bronx in the East River formally known as the Vernon C. Bain Center.
As an officer tried to stop him with pepper spray, Acevedo made his way through the razor wire atop the fence and plunged 50 feet into the East River.
Acevedo’s family isn’t sure what to make of the circumstances of his death.
“The question we have is, ‘What caused this?’” Acevedo’s mother Mildred Roman, 65, told the Daily News.
“Something must have happened,” Roman added.
“He didn’t cover his face when he was pepper sprayed? He went under barbed wire and threw himself into the river? Come on. He must have been terrified to the point where he decided he had to get out of there.”
Acevedo was recovered by NYPD Harbor Unit officers and taken to Mount Sinai Queens, where he was taken off life support later that day.
The city Medical Examiner ruled his death an accident with complications from drowning. Acevedo was the 15th of 16 city detainees to die in 2022 following illnesses, overdoses or injuries suffered in the jails.
No one from the Correction Department notified the detainee’s family that day, nor has anyone from the agency reached out since. Acevedo’s sister Cynthia told The News the family learned of his death from Mount Sinai doctors.
“The doctor called me and said, ‘Your brother is not looking good. He had a very bad fall,’” she said. “‘He has a couple of minutes to hours to live.’ I went straight there. But DOC has never called me.”
The Department of Correction press office did not respond to an email.
Acevedo grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and attended Boys and Girls High School. His father, a Vietnam War veteran who struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, died in 1987. It fell to Roman to raise her children on her own with her salary as a sixth grade teacher in the city’s public schools.
Acevedo started getting in trouble as a teen. In 1994, when he was 19, he was arrested on charges of attempted murder, robbery and assault. Upon his conviction, he was sent to state prison.
At 5-foot-5, he had to defend himself repeatedly in prison and spent long periods in solitary confinement. “He was little in stature so he would always have to fight,” Cynthia said. “He refused to join a gang, and would end up having to fight gang members.”
In July 2016, Acevedo was paroled. At age 42, he had spent more time in prison than as a free man. His family threw a party for him, complete with a home-cooked meal of stewed chicken and rice and peas.
“Everything looked different to him,” said his sister Cynthia. “He asked what happened to subway tokens. Everything was faster — computers, cellphones,” she said. “He didn’t trust people when he came out. But he was trying to do the right thing.”
He was released to the Bellevue Men’s Shelter in Manhattan but Cynthia insisted he come and live with her.
Acevedo got a job handing out flyers, which led to a job delivering medical supplies, then to construction work on high-rise projects, his sister said.
“He loved to work. He would get up real early and go to work,” Cynthia said. “He was proud he was earning money and able to support himself.”
Acevedo settled into life on the outside and made his parole meetings. He returned to a shelter in Queens to give his sister a break and save money to get his own place, she said. He talked about writing a book about prison.
“He felt that prison was just a business that helps upstate towns,” Roman said.
But then Acevedo hurt a foot and his back and couldn’t work and then the pandemic hit and he told family he felt isolated.
In February, he was arrested for stealing tools from a van and fighting with the van’s owners.
Upon his arrest, Acevedo was sent to the Eric M. Taylor Center on Rikers Island. A few weeks later, on March 18, he was transferred to the Bronx jail barge.
On the barge, he avoided trouble. He had no infractions during the period, a report by the city Board of Correction said. He often slept all day and kept to himself.
But he was upset that he was back in jail. He often paced up and down the unit at night complaining about the case against him. “It was clear he didn’t want to go back to prison,” the Board of Correction report said.
His sister Cynthia says he didn’t contact her for the whole period he was jailed. “He told one of his friends he didn’t want me to know that he was rearrested,” she said. “He also didn’t want me to worry.”
Instead, Cynthia sent money to his commissary account as her way to communicate she cared. She last sent money on Sept. 16, four days before he died.
The day before he died, Acevedo, agitated, woke everyone in the housing area at 4 a.m., the report said.
On Sept. 20, there was some kind of incident in his unit, the Board of Correction report said. A correction captain who noticed other detainees were “picking on” Acevedo packed up his property and planned to move him to another unit.
Acevedo, another detainee said, told the captain he was fine.
He returned to the unit and went outside for recreation time. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary but just as he was supposed to get back from his recreation break, correction officers heard a shout. Acevedo was climbing the fence.
“Unfortunately, this death is yet another example of an incarcerated person dying while in Department of Correction custody,” said the family’s lawyer Yan Gilkarov of the firm Gregory Spektor and Associates. Acedevo’s family has not yet filed a legal claim or lawsuit.
“We look forward to having our day in court and bringing the truth of how Mr. Acevedo died to light,” Gilkarov said.
