His Murderers, Treated With Kid Gloves

On 11 August 2026, New York State put Anthony Farina on a transport out of the state — for his own protection.

Farina is the former Marcy Correctional Facility guard now serving 22 years for the first-degree manslaughter of Robert Brooks. According to The Free Lance News, which has followed this case more closely than anyone, the body-camera footage shows Farina stuffing a rag down Brooks’ throat and stomping on the genitals of a handcuffed, helpless man while other officers beat and choked him to death.

The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision moved him from Clinton Correctional Facility into the custody of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction under the Interstate Corrections Compact. DOCCS spokesperson Nicole A. Whitaker explained that his continued placement in a New York State facility “posed significant safety and security concerns.”

New York State has now taken more care to protect Anthony Farina’s safety in custody than it ever took to protect Robert Brooks’.

That is not rhetoric. It is the plain arithmetic of this case, and it is worth setting the two side by side.

What was done to Robert Brooks

Robert L. Brooks was 43 years old. He was serving a twelve-year sentence handed down in 2017 for first-degree assault. He earned his GED inside. He was a musician. His release date was set for 2026 — he was supposed to walk out.

On 9 December 2024 he was transferred from Mohawk Correctional Facility to Marcy, both in Oneida County. Handcuffed with his hands behind his back, he was taken into a medical examination room. There, officers forced an object into his mouth, held him by the throat, and struck him repeatedly in the face, torso, groin and buttocks. Other officers stood and watched. At one point they lifted his restrained, unresponsive body toward a window.

He died the next morning, 10 December 2024, at Wynn Hospital in Utica. The autopsy, released 5 February 2025, ruled it a homicide: asphyxia due to neck compression, together with multiple blunt force injuries.

Four of the officers present were wearing body cameras. All four had them powered on but not activated — so the cameras recorded in standby mode. Video, but no sound. That is the only reason any of this is known.

The footage

Attorney General Letitia James released the body-worn camera footage on 27 December 2024 through the Office of Special Investigation. It remains posted on the State’s own servers — eight videos in all, an excerpt and a full-length recording from each of four officers’ cameras: Sergeant Glenn Trombly, and Correction Officers Michael Along, Michael Fisher and Matthew Galliher.

• Official body-camera footage — NY Attorney General, Office of Special Investigation (all eight videos, excerpts and full length)
• Attorney General’s press release accompanying the release (27 December 2024)
• News coverage of the footage release (YouTube)

We link to the State’s own copies rather than rehosting them here. They are a public record, they are the evidence, and they should be read from the source.

The convicts

Ten men have been convicted in connection with Robert Brooks’ death. The Free Lance News counts eleven DOCCS employees convicted in all. These are the ten whose convictions and sentences are a matter of public record — not as officers, which is what they were, but as convicts, which is what they are.

There are no photographs of their faces here, and that is not an oversight. A provision written into New York’s 2019 state budget bars law enforcement agencies — the State Police and the Attorney General’s office included — from releasing booking photographs to the public. The State that published eight videos of Robert Brooks being beaten has released not one booking photograph of the men who beat him.

A man helped clean the blood of a beaten prisoner off the floor of a state facility and it cost him two hundred and fifty dollars and a job he was going to lose anyway.

Where they are now

Farina’s transfer is not the first. It is the third.

Three men convicted of killing Robert Brooks have each been quietly moved out of New York, at the State’s expense and on the State’s initiative, because New York concluded it could not keep them safe inside its own prisons.

New York reached that conclusion about its own prisons. It reached it quickly, and it acted on it three times.

It is worth asking why the same institutional urgency was unavailable to a handcuffed man in a medical room in Marcy on 9 December 2024, and to every man still inside who is watching how this ends.

Farina had a file

This is the part that should end anyone’s patience with the idea that Marcy was a matter of a few bad nights.

Before Robert Brooks was ever brought into that room, Anthony Farina had 24 documented misconduct charges against him. He had a drunk-driving conviction from 2020. He had been named in a 2020 assault on another incarcerated man, William Alvarez. He was still on the payroll, still in uniform, still permitted to be alone in a room with a handcuffed prisoner.

Marcy’s record was documented well before December 2024: racialised verbal and physical abuse of Black prisoners, widespread staff violence, an unresponsive grievance process, healthcare gutted by vacancies. None of it was secret. All of it was survivable, institutionally, right up until the cameras happened to be in standby mode and recorded it anyway.

What has not changed

Governor Hochul ordered firings on 21 December 2024 and installed a new superintendent at Marcy. The Attorney General recused herself on 2 January 2025 and Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick was appointed special counsel. Indictments came on 20 February 2025. Convictions followed. All of that happened, and it matters.

But Marcy Correctional Facility is still open. Despite calls for its closure, including from within the State Senate, the consolidation that followed fell on Collins Correctional Facility instead — a prison some thirty miles south of Buffalo where nobody was beaten to death on camera.

The building where Robert Brooks was killed is still receiving prisoners.

The point

Robert Brooks was handcuffed. He was in a medical room, in the custody of the State of New York, having committed no offence that day. His release date was already set for 2026. Every protection the State owed him — the cameras, the grievance process, the personnel file that should have removed Farina years earlier, the simple obligation not to kill him — failed at once, and there is no evidence any of them were ever really switched on.

The men who killed him were convicted. Then the State reviewed their safety, judged the risk to them unacceptable, and moved them across state lines. Three times. Because their continued placement posed significant safety and security concerns.

And the sergeant named under oath as the man in charge of Marcy’s beat-up squad — the squad that killed Robert Brooks — is serving his two years in county jail.

Robert Brooks’ continued placement posed a significant safety and security concern too. Nobody moved him.

A note on the word “murderers.” One man, David Kingsley, was convicted of murder. The rest pleaded to manslaughter, reckless endangerment or evidence tampering. Two men, Matthew Galliher and Nicholas Kieffer, stood trial and were acquitted of all charges — nothing in this piece is said against them. The headline is a judgement about what happened to a handcuffed man who was supposed to go home in 2026, and we stand behind it.

On the photograph. The portrait of Robert Brooks at the top of this piece was provided by his family and has been published widely in reporting on his death; it is reproduced here with credit, for news reporting and commentary on a matter of public concern. We have written to the family’s attorneys to ask their permission properly. If the Brooks family would rather it were removed or replaced, they need only say so and it will be done the same day.

Sources

• The Free Lance News — “Another One Of The Former Prison Guards Who Killed Inmate Robert Brooks Needs Special Protection”
• NY Attorney General, Office of Special Investigation — released body-worn camera footage
• NY Attorney General — press release on the footage release, 27 December 2024
• CNN — former New York prison guards sentenced, 21 November 2025
• CBS New York — David Kingsley receives maximum sentence
• Rome Sentinel — Gentile admits cleaning up blood
• NY State Senate — on the urgent necessity of closing Marcy Correctional Facility
• Murder of Robert Brooks — case timeline and charge roster