While Mentally Ill Rikers Island Detainee Lay Dying, Staff Sprayed Air Freshener, Fudged Cell Checks
Surveillance video from New York City’s Rikers Island jail captured staffers flouting policy and ignoring detainee Ardit Billa, 29, as he lay dying in a cell in August 2025, according to a report released on September 17, 2025, by the city’s Board of Correction (BOC), the oversight agency for its Department of Correction (DOC). In response, the DOC issued four-week suspensions to an unnamed guard and his supervisor, a guard captain who was also unnamed.
The cell was located in the Program to Accelerate Clinical Effectiveness (PACE) unit, which is designed to offer mental health programming to detainees most in need of it. But the guard was caught on video abandoning his post there for nearly two hours on the night of August 29, 2025, leaving the area unstaffed. His required cell checks were fraudulently recorded every 30 minutes as if he had never left. An unnamed Suicide Prevention Aid (SPA) was also on duty, supposedly to provide interim cell checks every 10 minutes. But he performed only one in the guard’s two-hour absence.
Once the guard returned, so did the supervisor, but neither entered Billa’s cell—apparently satisfied when they “noticed Mr. Billa move his arm slightly,” the report recalled. After the captain left, the guard proceeded to “spray an unknown substance around the cell.” That was likely air freshener, which jail employees carry to combat its pervasive stench. Earlier, an unnamed Correctional Health Services (CHS) employee was recorded holding her nose as she sprayed air-freshener around the cell, too. For not making a determined effort to speak to Billa, she was also given an undescribed suspension, according to the New York Times.
Almost an hour after the guard fumigated the cell, his supervising captain discovered that Billa was unresponsive. Both the supervisor and guard began CPR until CHS staff arrived and took over. But it was too late; 16 minutes later, Billa was pronounced dead. Though he died in the George R. Vierno Center, he had cycled through three other Rikers Island lockups, as well as two hospitals, since his February 2025 arrest for assault and burglary, thanks to involvement in several large fights among detainees. See: Ardit Billa Five-Day Report, NYC BOC (Sept. 2025).
Since Billa’s death, Rikers Island has recorded two more: Jimmy Avila, 44, died on August 30 and Carlos Cruz, 43, died on September 3. That made 14 deaths in less than nine months of 2025, over twice as many as the lockup recorded in all of 2024, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.
Additional sources: The City, New York Times, Vera Institute of Justice
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