Brooklyn Prison's Holiday Carrot Cake Was Laced With Rat Poison, Inmates Say

BOERUM HILL, BROOKLYN — A team of crafty jail guards at the Brooklyn House of Detention on Atlantic Avenue allegedly laced a holiday carrot cake with rat poison; served it to inmates; then tried to destroy the rest of the cake (aka, the evidence), according a civil-rights lawsuit filed last Thursday in Brooklyn federal court.

Sixteen prisoners claim they became severely ill after eating pieces of the cake on Thanksgiving Day 2015.

When inmates began calling 911 and 311 for help, the lawsuit says, guilty prison staffers scrambled to "collect and destroy the carrot cake" — while other officers allegedly "refused to administer adequate and proper medical care in a timely fashion."

The Brooklyn prisoners are now demanding the city pay them $1 million each.

They say the alleged cake-poisoning incident of Nov. 26, 2015, amounted to "assault and battery, emotional trauma, harm and distress, mental anguish, fear, embarrassment, humiliation, loss of liberty, loss of property, psychological injury [and] suffering."

Local attorney and martial-arts teacher Gregory Zenon is representing the prisoners in court.

Zenon said Monday that he would rather not delve into the suit's allegations until the city had issued its response.

He claims within the suit, though, that the NYC Corrections Department, which runs the prison at 275 Atlantic Ave. — as well as the NYC Department of Investigation, which acts as the city's internal "inspector general" — is sitting on evidence collected at the prison that day. Zenon is demanding the city hand over this evidence immediately.

Evidence includes "photos of plaintiffs’ identification cards alongside said carrot cakes"; "photos of said cakes"; "recorded interviews with plaintiffs"; and actual pieces of the carrot cake, which was "seized... for preservation and testing," according to the lawsuit.

NYC's Law Department, in charge of defending the city against legal action, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Brooklyn House of Detention, otherwise known as the Brooklyn Detention Complex, houses hundreds of inmates, most of them in the pre-trial phase. The facility was shut down for nearly a decade in the early 2000s — then reopened in February 2012 amid much fuss and ado from the neighbors, who had grown accustomed to a fancier iteration of Boerum Hill.

Just before Re-Opening Day, prison officials went so far as to host a tour of the Atlantic Avenue institution for neighbors and journalists. ("An attempt to placate the handwringers as part of a coordinated charm offensive," one local reporter called it.)

Tour attendees were served carrot cake.

That cake, however, had been "made at Rikers," prison guards at the Brooklyn House of Detention reportedly claimed at the time.

And so the plot thickens.

Lead image via Google Maps