Monday, October 24, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt twelve)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

One of the ugliest prisoner deaths was that of Kenny Malloy, who had been viciously shot at close range. His skull had been riddled with so many bullets that his eye sockets were shredded by the shards of his own bones. Indeed so gruesome was this shooting that one of the two troopers whom investigators knew to be responsible for shooting at this prisoner later spoke of “having nightmares about seeing brains.” This trooper, according to an internal investigative report, was a man named Aldo Barbolini. He had shot Malloy with his .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson. The Attica investigation was persuaded that Barbolini also had killed Ramon Rivera, shooting “directly into this tunnel where Rivera fearfully lay.”

From the earliest days of the investigation, Simonetti’s office had looked closely at Barbolini but all NYSP brass had been making sure that the investigators were told nothing. Significantly, the highest-ranking officials in the NYSP, including Lieutenant Colonel Infante, knew of Barbolini’s actions that day and, as Bell saw it, they conspired to cover them up. According to an internal NYSP memo, trooper Barbolini had been asked to resign on September 17, 1971, and, according to a New York state senator who later contacted the Attica investigation about the matter, Barbolini had specifically been told by his superiors “that if he resigned he would not be prosecuted.”



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