‘All That Death in His Life’: Daniel Prude’s Tragic Journey to Rochester

CHICAGO — On the last day anyone on Chicago’s West Side saw Daniel Prude alive, he was his usual self, shooting the breeze with a loose band of neighbors outside of a local carwash.

He was the imp of the group, often playacting that he was itching for a fight, only to break into a wide grin the minute fists were raised. The only thing different that day was his repeated requests for a spare $20.

The money was for an Amtrak ticket: He was leaving his hometown that day for his brother’s home in Rochester, N.Y.

Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Prude was near death after a confrontation with the police in Rochester. He had what the police said was a psychotic episode, leading him to burst from his brother’s home, shirtless and shoeless, into the frigid Rochester streets, as his brother frantically dialed 911 for help.

By the time the police found him, he was naked, and had shouted that he had the coronavirus. Officers put a mesh hood over his face when he resisted, and pressed his head into the pavement until he lost consciousness. A week later, on March 30, Mr. Prude, 41, was dead.

It would take months for his family to know of his ordeal, when they obtained footage from the officers’ body cameras. This month they shared it publicly, accusing the police of covering up the incident.

When Mr. Prude died on March 30, few knew of his death or the circumstances surrounding it. Now his name has joined the rallying cry against police brutality and racism alongside those of other Black people who died during police encounters, like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

His death has roiled Rochester: The city’s mayor, Lovely Warren, has since fired the chief of police and suspended the seven officers involved in the encounter; the state attorney general’s office has opened its own investigation and a grand jury will now examine the case.

Mr. Prude’s life was enigmatic, dotted by pain, loss and hardship. His playful interactions with his friends hid the fractures snaking through his life: the deaths of two of his brothers, his anguish over a nephew’s recent suicide and his increasing reliance on drugs to cope with the loss — Mr. Prude had been home in their shared apartment when the teenager shot himself last fall, friends said. He also had just been kicked out of the home he shared with his sister, after a spate of paranoid outbursts had frightened her.

In an interview, his brother, Joe, insisted that Daniel had no children; hours later that same day, a news conference was held in Chicago on behalf of his five children. (Mr. Prude was not married to any of the children’s mothers, and there were varying accounts of how involved he was in their lives.)

His sister-in-law said that she did not know him to drink or use drugs. But the police said Mr. Prude had overdosed on Phencyclidine, or PCP, and an autopsy, which determined that he had suffered “complications of asphyxia,” listed acute intoxication by phencyclidine as a contributing factor toward his death.

And outside the carwash, his friends — who refer to themselves as the 12th Street group, after the original name of this stretch of squat buildings on West Roosevelt Road — said they regularly shared bottles of Hennessy, and had seen him high in the weeks before he left Chicago.

Mr. Prude held jobs in warehouses and factories on Chicago’s Southwest Side, amid a slew of arrests — at least 37 since 1998, according to Cook County records, mostly for crimes like drug possession and driving without a license. At least two of his arrests were for violent scuffles with domestic partners.

But friends said that Mr. Prude’s life had seemed to mostly stabilize, until the nephew’s suicide led him to increasingly use illicit substances that he told them helped him cope with the loss, but led to more erratic behavior.

Despite the inner turmoil, Mr. Prude was dedicated to a job he held at Gold Standard Baking, a commercial bakery near the south bank of the Chicago River, according to Jason Hunley, a former co-worker, who said that Mr. Prude was responsible for shepherding pastries down the line and into the oven.

Mr. Prude took it upon himself to help others in the neighborhood get jobs at Gold Standard, according to Antonio Hall, 42, a childhood friend who now co-owns an apparel company. “Everybody that was willing to work that knew Rell, he’d get you in there,” Mr. Hall said, using a nickname for Mr. Prude that derived from his middle name, Terrell (also sometimes spelled Terrel on official reports). “That’s the type of guy he was.”

The best part of the job, he would tell the 12th Street group, was how it enabled him to buy gifts like trendy sneakers for his grown children. “He’d say, ‘I got to be a daddy before I’m anything,’” his friend, April Jones, recalled as she hung out not far from the carwash, Nation Wide Hand Car Wash, on a recent afternoon.

Mr. Prude grew up in Lawndale Gardens, a public housing complex of two-story brick rowhouses spread across about seven acres in the Marshall Square neighborhood. He was one of five siblings, four boys and one girl. The Prude children were raised by their mother Dorothy, a bus driver whose strictness kept them out of trouble, said Olivia Jenkins, 68, who lived near the family in a unit in Lawndale Gardens.

Daniel attended Manley Career Academy High School, after graduating from John Spry Community School; he peers out shyly from page 27 of its eighth grade yearbook, where he lists his favorite TV show: “Martin.” He liked dogs, said Mr. Hall, who grew up with the Prude children, and said they used to take in stray animals and train them.

Daniel was in elementary school when the first of a series of tragedies befell the Prude family: According to Joe Prude, their brother, Timmy, was 11 when he was struck by a car on the way to school and died.

Years later, on an evening in 2008, another brother, Byron, 23, was shot and killed near where they grew up; the murder remains unsolved. Their mother died shortly after.

In the wake of the deaths, Daniel stepped up into the role of the family’s “protector,” Joe said, moving in with his sister Tameshay, who goes by Tammy, and growing close with her sons.

“If you were sad and you were going through something he would pick up on it, and give you a motivational talk — or just tell a joke and make you laugh if that’s what you needed,” said Tashyra Prude, 18, one of Mr. Prude’s daughters, whose nickname, Shyra, was tattooed on his shoulder.

“Everybody sees my father now as somebody who was helpless and who was in a bad mental state at the time of his death,” Ms. Prude said. “But I didn’t know him as that.”

An arrest on domestic battery charges in 2016 (the case was later dropped) listed Mr. Prude as a member of the Conservative Vice Lords, or CVL, a notorious Chicago gang. The affiliation was confirmed by Mr. Hunley, the former co-worker who was also a childhood friend, but he said that membership did not mean Mr. Prude engaged in any gang activities, and that the association with such groups was a rite of passage for young men from the neighborhood.

For the past several years, Mr. Prude seemed to be on a steady path forward. Then, in September 2018, one of his teenage nephews shot and killed himself in the home they shared. “He used to talk about it all the time, and I think he probably felt responsible because he was the uncle,” said Ike White, 48, a friend.

“Tim got hit by a car and died. Byron got shot and died. Their momma died. Then his nephew,” Mr. White added. “That will affect a person, all that death in his life.”

Mr. Prude quit his job at Gold Standard, and began working at a warehouse. He was smoking PCP more frequently, according to several friends, who asked not to be named because they did not want to upset his family.

When using PCP, he could become erratic. His play-fighting sometimes spiraled into actual fistfights. Shortly after his nephew’s death, the 12th Street group stopped allowing him to hang out with them at the carwash when he was high.

On the train to Rochester, Mr. Prude’s behavior remained unsteady. Amtrak workers eventually kicked him off the train in Buffalo, he told his brother. He said he was pickpocketed by a passenger, his cellphone stolen. Later that day, he started talking about the devil and was suffering from hallucinations.

His brother had him hospitalized for an evaluation, but Mr. Prude was sent home by doctorshours later, only to flee into the streets later that night, when he was confronted by the police in an encounter that would prove fatal.

But on his final day in Chicago, March 22, he was there with his neighbors on Roosevelt Road, outside of Nation Wide, chatting with the 12th Street group and asking around for a spare $20 for his ticket to Rochester.

It was his childhood friend, Mr. Hall, who reached into his pocket and gave him that $20, he said. “I asked him when he would be back,” he recalled. “And he said he wasn’t sure.”

Sarah Maslin Nir reported from New York and Troy Closson contributed reporting from Maryland.