There’s a New Sheriff in Town. But Buffalo Area Jails Remain as Dangerous as Ever.

Editor’s note: The reporter’s aunt, Nan Haynes, and father, John Lipsitz, represented plaintiffs against Sheriff Timothy Howard in 2010 and 2006. Haynes was also a plaintiff in a 2017 lawsuit that sought to compel Howard to properly document and report prisoner suicide attempts. John Lipsitz was cooperating counsel on the New York Civil Liberties Union’s 2014 lawsuit against the Erie County sheriff’s department for Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, violations. He also served as counsel for three Erie County pastors seeking to vindicate their right to visit Erie County jails under New York State law.

When John Garcia was elected sheriff of Erie County, New York in 2021, he was eager to distinguish himself from his combative predecessor, Tim Howard. Howard, who had been sheriff since 2005, faced criticism for, among other things, appearing in uniform with pro-Trump demonstrators holding flags and signs with Confederate and Nazi imagery, and attending the trial of a deputy convicted of assaulting a young man outside of a Bills game. Under Howard, the sheriff’s office also faced lawsuits by federal and state officials over degrading treatment of people inside the county’s deadly jails and his handling of allegations of sexual misconduct by corrections officers. 

Garcia vowed while campaigning to run a more transparent, modern, and professional sheriff’s office, to help inmates experiencing mental health crises, and implement better programming.

Yet four years later, Erie County jails remain notorious for their high death rate. People have died on mattresses on the floor, in their cells, and shortly after being transferred to hospitals, often with signs of medical neglect. Some visibly suffered in the days leading up to their deaths.

Sean Riordan was one of the first to die under Erie County’s new sheriff. According to a lawsuit filed by his family, Riordan started vomiting blood in a detox cell within hours of being detained on June 2, 2022 for an outstanding warrant for driving without a license and criminal impersonation. The lawsuit claims that a nurse who eventually examined Riordan mocked him (“This is what you get for drinking a pint of vodka a day”) and, rather than providing appropriate medical care, merely gave him a garbage can to vomit in. After four days in jail, Riordan went into cardiac arrest and was taken to a hospital, where he was declared brain dead; his mother Christine Riordan made the agonizing decision to remove him from life support several days later, on his 30th birthday.

A report on Riordan’s death issued by the New York State Commission of Correction last year said that the state’s Medical Review Board, which is tasked with investigating the deaths of incarcerated people in New York, found “serious deficiencies and absences in Riordan’s medical care during his incarceration that may have contributed to his death.” According to the commission’s report, “had established medical policy and procedures been properly followed and had Riordan been promptly sent to a hospital for treatment, his death may have been preventable.” 

Garcia and his representatives refused multiple requests for comment on this story.

The Buffalo-based Investigative Post revealed last year that jail deaths like Riordan’s have long been underreported in Western New York, and that the rate of jail deaths has largely remained the same in the last 20 years, with approximately one Erie County inmate dying every four to five months—even under Garcia, who has overseen a smaller jail population than his predecessor did throughout much of his tenure.

Garcia, a Republican, is currently courting voters—and donors—as he seeks reelection. But he is already virtually guaranteed a second term: He is running unopposed, with no challenger filing to challenge him in the June primary or in November’s general election. He won’t face voters again until 2029, the security of his position a reminder of how rarely the democratic process keeps sheriffs accountable.

His campaign website lists a single event: A July 7 dinner fundraiser at a Cheektowaga restaurant that cost a minimum of $99 per person and offered sponsor levels ranging from “Silver” ($500) to “Diamond” ($5,000). Even with no challenger, his political committee has raised roughly $900,000 since he took office. 

Erie County Democratic Committee Chair Jeremy Zellner, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, told local reporters in March that he couldn’t find a challenger qualified to take on Garcia, whom he described as “very successful” and “very well liked in the legal community.” 

People who have lost loved ones in the county’s deadly jails have a different perspective. Monica Lynch, whose brother died in 2019 after a short stint in jail, still fears for other family members who end up there, even if the sheriff and his rhetoric have changed. She says her youngest children, 28-year-old twins with intellectual disabilities and mental health problems, have cycled in and out of the county’s jails in recent years, where she says Garcia’s staff have insulted, intimidated, and threatened her sons rather than trying to get them the help they need.

“To know that your child with a disability is [in a place where] they’re killing people without a disability is the scariest thing in the world,” Lynch told Bolts. “How could they think a parent could sleep knowing any second they could get a call?” 

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In about half of the jail deaths that occurred under Erie County’s previous sheriff, an inquiry by the state commission of correction found fault with jail medical staff, guards, or both and recommended policy changes to help prevent future deaths. 

It’s unclear which, if any, such changes Garcia has implemented, but the New York State Sheriffs’ Association reaccredited the jails after he took over in 2022, and in 2023 the sheriff’s office announced that its jail management division was no longer under the federal oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice, as it had been for the previous 15 years. The sheriff’s office credited Project Blue, a reintegration program run by the county, and Peaceprints of WNY, a nonprofit contracted by the county to provide services to inmates, with some of the improvement and noted a decrease in suicide attempts. In 2024 the National Commission on Correctional Health Care accredited the jails in health services.

Still, the state correction commission also noted serious problems in the two reports it has so far released for deaths under the new sheriff, including deficiencies in Riordan’s treatment and questions around staff monitoring of William Henley, who also died at Erie County Holding Center the day after he arrived there in November 2022. 

The commission noted that Henley had been badly beaten before his arrest and detention, and later it was determined that he died from blunt force injuries to his head and neck—injuries that the nurse who examined him upon entering the jail didn’t identify or address. The commission also reported that Henley was dead at least four hours before jailers discovered him and questioned whether the jailers responsible for his supervision, who noted in logbooks that Henley was checked every 15 minutes, were accurately documenting their cell checks. The Erie County Attorney responded that jail management and correctional health services found no policy violations in their own review of Henley’s death.

Howard and Garcia, political allies who ran for sheriff as Republicans, differ in temperament and leadership style. Howard was more antagonistic and blunt in rejecting criticism over the high death rate: “Bad things happen in jails because of the people who are sent to jail,” was a characteristic response after an inmate died by suicide in 2018.

Garcia, by contrast, has expressed more compassion for the families of those who have died in the jails and pointed to many of the same problems raised by his critics. “We don’t have the means to give individuals that come through the doors adequate medical help,” he said in 2023, referring to the significant portion of people in county jails who suffer from addiction, mental illness, and poor health. “There’s people that are just in need of a place to be under observation and counseling and therapy and medication, whatever, but not in a jail.” 

But even as he said he sympathized with Riordan’s family, Garcia suggested they were lying or in denial, while also harshly questioning the county medical examiner’s autopsy report on Riordan’s death.

Garcia has also been more willing than Howard to support programs for the people in his custody: Howard, for instance, vocally opposed medication-assisted treatment (MAT) programs for inmates battling drug addiction, while Garcia has voiced support for MAT. (A state law passed in 2021 about a month before Garcia’s election requires him to provide MAT in his jails, regardless of his personal views).

Some of the previous sheriff’s fiercest local critics have described Garcia as a refreshing change from his predecessor, and others who interact regularly with the sheriff’s office say he’s easier to work with. Cindi McEachon, the CEO of Peaceprints of WNY and a former member of the county’s beleaguered jail advisory board, says Howard “never actually spoke directly” with her and communicated through an undersheriff or other jail staff. That dynamic, she said, has completely flipped with Garcia, who “answers all of my phone calls and questions,” helping her “get to the root of things a lot faster than trying to go throughout the hierarchical chain of command.”

Yet many advocates who have fought for years to improve conditions in the county jails see Garcia, whom Howard endorsed, as a dressed-up version of the previous sheriff. 

“Tim Howard with a smile,” is how community activist BaBa Eng, program director of the Buffalo-based nonprofit Prisoners Are People Too, described Garcia. “He wears suits. He’s a lot slicker, a lot more polished than Tim Howard was. But [he has] the same orientation, the same ultra-right, brutal, racist ideology.”

Jerome Wright, a prisoners’ rights advocate and co-director of New York’s #HALTsolitary campaign, said changes under Garcia have been “minimal at best,” adding, “Right now, I’m leaning towards Garcia being worse than Howard. He’s just a better PR person.” Garcia has kept many of Howard’s top aides in key positions in jail management.

Data analyst and human rights activist Steve Hart, who is also part of the #HALTsolitary campaign, called Garcia “a much better communicator” than Howard—“somebody that people can sometimes talk to and have dialogue with rather than just being shouted at”—but noted that under his leadership, “a lot of things have really not changed at all.” Jail policies and practices essentially remain the same as before, while jail deaths continue at about the same pace. Hart also noted the “malign indifference” of jail staff that has continued under Garcia, citing as an example the tendency to change jail visiting days or hours without notice, leading visitors to undertake what are sometimes hours-long journeys only to be sent home.

Brutality from deputies, which was common under Howard, has continued under Garcia. A local TV news investigation last year showed deputies using a metal flashlight to force a handcuffed inmate’s mouth open, splattering his blood and allegedly cracking his molar in the process. They suspected that his girlfriend had passed him drugs via a kiss goodbye. Garcia defended his staff and disputed the extent of the man’s injuries, and officials pursued contraband charges against the man and his girlfriend, which were later dropped. A lawsuit the man filed against the county and 19 corrections officers in April accuses them of using “sadistic and malicious force” to pry open his mouth and states that jail officials never found drugs. In bodycam footage, one officer can be heard saying, “Open your mouth or I’m going to break them teeth.”

While Garcia campaigned on transparency, he has nonetheless repeatedly refused to answer questions about his deputies’ behavior or fulfill valid public records requests from legislators, journalists and other members of the public.

During his first year in office, the Buffalo News had to sue Garcia to compel the release of body camera footage showing an officer kicking a handcuffed inmate (a judge ultimately ordered him to release the tape). Garcia’s office has also withheld from local reporters the disciplinary records of deputies found to have committed misconduct, despite the fact that Howard had turned over such files to journalists after the state passed legislation opening most law enforcement disciplinary records to public view. In May, The New York Times sued Garcia over his refusal to release disciplinary records the paper had sought under a public information request, which the office denied after dragging its feet for months; a judge is now considering the matter.

Garcia’s critics say that his actions in office—stonewalling reporters, refusing to answer questions about his deputies’ behavior, and denying valid requests for public records—are anti-democratic. As attorney and Erie County Legislator Jeanne Vinal, whose own efforts to obtain information from the sheriff’s office and the Buffalo police department have been stymied, told Bolts, “If you live in a society where you can’t question or criticize law enforcement, you don’t have a democracy anymore.”

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Even as no other candidate surfaced to challenge Garcia this year, negative local press coverage has dogged him since March for the apparent cover-up of an incident involving the chief of his narcotics division, D.J. Granville, who plowed his take-home county vehicle into seven parked cars on Buffalo’s West Side one night in April 2024.

Granville’s sister-in-law, a Buffalo police lieutenant, was the supervising officer on the scene, and Granville does not appear to have been tested for sobriety. Investigative Post revealed that Granville and his wife have given nearly $30,000 to political campaigns in the last decade—and that Garcia, Granville’s boss, is the top beneficiary of his political contributions. (Granville’s wife, a Democrat, has also hosted political fundraisers for Zellner, the Democratic committee chair.)

It was not the first time a sheriff’s office employee, or even one named Granville, had crashed a county vehicle. William “Billy” Granville, D.J.’s younger brother and an undercover narcotics detective in the sheriff’s office, smashed his sedan into a parked SUV in 2016—another incident that raised questions about how local law enforcement handled a crash involving one of their own. According to reporting by the Buffalo News, officers who responded to the younger Granville’s crash in 2016 didn’t test him for sobriety, either. Another sheriff’s employee, Aaron Naegely, who oversees the department’s vehicle fleet and was involved in the sheriff’s alcohol compliance and substance abuse prevention programs, crashed a department-issued vehicle in 2020 while drunk.

D.J. Granville’s seven-car crash last year also created a conflict of interest with the Erie County District Attorney’s Office, where another sister-in-law, Billy Granville’s wife, works. While the county paid out around $60,000 to the people whose cars he damaged that night, initially, D.J. initially only faced a ticket for a moving violation, which was reduced to a jaywalking charge and a $150 fine. After local journalists reported on the crash earlier this year, Erie County DA Michael Keane asked a court to appoint Brian Seaman, the DA in neighboring Niagara County, to investigate the incident because of “the potential appearance of impropriety with this office advising the Buffalo Police Department on this matter.” 

In April, Seaman recommended D.J. be charged with three counts of leaving the scene of an accident, which Buffalo police subsequently did. Dissatisfied with Seaman’s investigation and with those the sheriff’s office and police department still claim are underway, a Buffalo city councilman has since asked New York State Attorney General Letitia James to launch a “neutral, third-party” inquiry into the incident.

Garcia initially dismissed the whole episode as a “car accident,” refusing to comment further. In early May, after the Buffalo News released footage of D.J. crashing into cars and leaving the scene, Garcia’s office placed him on paid administrative leave. If no further action is taken and D.J. Granville is still employed with the office in August, he’ll be eligible to retire with his full pension of more than $104,000 per year.

Buffalo developer Carl Paladino is an enthusiastic Garcia supporter and a donor to his campaign. Asked about the Granville incident, Paladino said that Granville, an acquaintance, appears to have been intoxicated when he hit the cars but is a “good father to his children” and “the kind of guy you can depend upon for fair treatment.”

The crash served as a reminder that Erie County law enforcement officers are as close-knit as they are tight-lipped. Both the sheriff’s office and the Buffalo police department have denied most requests for public information in the case. The sheriff’s office employee who handles records requests, Neil Held, also heads the office’s Professional Standards Division, which is responsible for investigating internal complaints against and potential discipline of deputies. That means he can decide whether to comply with requests for information from the public about officers’ alleged misconduct while also deciding whether or not they have engaged in misconduct or should be punished if they have.

After WGRZ journalist Charlie Specht reported in April that witnesses to the crash believed D.J. Granville was drunk, with some not wanting to be identified “because they feared retaliation from police officers,” Specht said he started experiencing “harassment” and “intimidation” at the hands of Buffalo police officers, sheriff’s office employees, and their lawyers—including being followed by police officers, investigated by their lawyers, and “scream[ed]” at by Garcia’s undersheriff at a local music festival.

Garcia, meanwhile, has bristled at oversight attempts from other local elected officials like Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick, who said he’s been trying to complete an audit of the county’s take-home vehicle fleet since last summer. Hardwick told Bolts his office has received information from every county office except the sheriff’s, saying Garcia remains unwilling to hand over information even after multiple attempts and local coverage of the standoff.

Garcia told the News he did not respond to Hardwick’s initial requests because he believes they’re politically motivated (Hardwick is a Democrat), even as Hardwick maintains that the information he has been seeking is unrelated to politics; the audit by Hardwick’s office began last summer, whereas details of D.J. Granville’s crash didn’t publicly surface until the following March. Eventually, Hardwick had his office prepare a subpoena to obtain the information, which seems to have prompted Garcia’s office to turn over some of the requested information.

“I have yet to use [my] subpoena power,” Hardwick told Bolts. “I’m reluctant to do that because I think it’s a bad look for one county official to be issuing a subpoena to another…but [now] he’s reached out to us, so we’ll see where this goes.”

Garcia says he has no problem holding deputies accountable and even charging them if their conduct is criminal. He claimed to have fired multiple deputies for misconduct in his first year on the job, but it appears that only two were actually fired; one resigned and another was no longer employed by the sheriff’s office when Garcia took over. And early in Garcia’s tenure in 2022, Buffalo’s WKBW Channel 7 news team reported that the sheriff’s office had failed to decertify four deputies after allegations of serious misconduct, meaning they kept their licenses and were still eligible to work in law enforcement in New York State.

Shortly after the news station began asking questions, Garcia’s office decertified two of the officers, one of whom had been convicted of cocaine possession and the other of promoting prison contraband. The third officer, who was convicted of failing to report inappropriate contact with a detainee and violating a protective order, was later decertified days after journalists questioned Garcia about it. The sheriff’s office claimed that the fourth officer, who pleaded guilty to violating a domestic violence order of protection, had been decertified years earlier, but in fact the office only reported his decertification to the state after the news station started asking questions.

“Transparency is so important between law enforcement in [sic] the public, because they do have to have their trust in law enforcement, and everybody that takes the oath of office has to hold themselves to a higher standard,” Garcia said after the Granville story broke in March. “And if [Buffalo police officers] did not respond properly [to Granville] that evening, then you and I and everybody else should know that.” Four months later, Buffalo residents—and, he has said, Garcia himself—are none the wiser.

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As Garcia weathers scandals involving his deputies, local prisoners’ rights advocates have separately been battling the construction of the costly jail expansion he says the county needs.

In May, Garcia joined Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz, a Democrat, and other county officials to announce a $428 million proposal to close the Erie County Holding Center in downtown Buffalo and expand the county correctional facility in Alden, New York. Garcia and county officials who support the project insisted it will benefit staff and people who are incarcerated at the facility, with the sheriff saying, “For the staff itself, having a lunch room, having a locker room, having an exercise room, having, in the summer, air conditioning…this is good for everybody.”

County legislators are expected to vote on the proposal in September.

Reform advocates and some lawmakers are skeptical of Garcia’s claim that a multimillion-dollar jail expansion would benefit everyone. For one, new research indicates that higher rates of jail incarceration are associated with increased deaths. Building and expanding jails is also costly for taxpayers, even if such projects can be lucrative for county officials and organizations that rely on county contracts. 

Hart, the activist with the #HALTsolitary campaign, told Bolts that even if expanding the Alden facility helps address some issues, it won’t fix the core problems in the jails.

“What the jail needs is a new heart, soul and mind, not just a new building,” Hart said. “That’s just a distraction from the real problems in the jails…the lack of good healthcare, the lack of good or even enough food, restrictions on visits and mail, the exorbitant price of phone calls and commissary, the paucity of programs, leading to utter boredom—all of the things that unnecessarily degrade and harm the people who are incarcerated there.”

Lynch, whose brother died in the county holding center in 2019, was similarly unmoved. “Why do you have to wait to build a new building to treat them better?” she said. “Why are these people not being treated like human beings right now?”

Closing the county’s detention center in Buffalo and centralizing jail operations in Alden—a 93 percent white, 2,600-person village about 40 minutes from Buffalo by car—would make it more difficult for Buffalo residents to visit loved ones in lockup (there is no direct bus service from Buffalo to the facility in Alden). 

Moving all of the county’s inmates to Alden would also make it harder for local groups to protest jail conditions—demonstrations that are currently usually held in downtown Buffalo are unlikely to draw similar support in Alden.

Taisha St. Jean Tard, an Erie County legislator who has pushed for more oversight of the jails, said she also worries that moving inmates to Alden would reduce access to their lawyers, many of whom have offices in downtown Buffalo. She told Bolts she also has concerns that downtown Buffalo would lose “all the deputies that would park and bring economic development to that area.”

Wright, the advocate for prisoners’ rights who also works on the #HALTsolitary campaign, told Bolts that the uphill battle that organizers face in Erie County—jails that remain deadly despite a new sheriff who promised transparency and accountability but now avoids scrutiny, a jail expansion project that officials promise will solve problems but could make life even harder for incarcerated people and their families—reflects the broader issues that people in jails and prisons face across the country.

Erie County’s jails, Wright said, clearly aren’t working; more than 80 percent of those released are sent back within a year of getting out. Even if the recidivism rate has notably improved for inmates who participate in the Project Blue reentry program, its funding and future remain uncertain. (County legislators are now trying to figure out whether the county will be able to pay for two helicopters Garcia bought last year, as lawsuits, settlements, and trials, many involving the sheriff’s office, continue to cost millions of dollars.)

“The problems facing these county jails are the problems that are facing county jails throughout the state of New York,” Wright said. “County jails are their own fiefdom run by the sheriffs, and they don’t feel like they have to answer to anybody.”