SECOND SON OF ROBERT BROOKS SPEAKS OUT, BLASTS GOV. KATHY HOCHUL AND STATE LAWMAKERS
FOR THE FIRST TIME, DA-TONA PERRY SPEAKS PUBLICLY ABOUT HIS FATHER'S MURDER AND ALBANY'S FAILURE TO DELIVER MEANINGFUL PRISON REFORM
Da-tona Perry, Robert Brooks Sr.’s second son. Photo credit: Uconda Perry.
ROCHESTER, NEW YORK Feb. 10, 2026 EXCLUSIVE
After Robert L. Brooks Sr. was murdered by an all-white gang of New York prison guards, his eldest son, Robert L. Brooks Jr., became the face of the family's pain and a grassroots movement to reform the state's prisons.
Now Da-tona Perry, Brooks Sr.'s second son, is speaking out for the first time.
Da-tona, 27, condemns Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature for failing to enact real reforms in the wake of his father's murder.
"The governor and the state legislature have not done enough to make sure what they did to my father doesn't happen to anyone else ever again," Da-tona told The Free Lance News on Sunday. "They have the potential to, but they haven't yet."
"They're in Albany right now, passing laws," Da-tona continued. "They need to prioritize the prison system."
Brooks Sr., a 43-year-old Black American from Rochester, was tortured, beaten and choked to death by guards at the Marcy Correctional Facility outside Utica on Dec. 9, 2024. The murder was unknowingly caught on video by body-worn cameras four of the guards were wearing. The video shocked and sickened the Nation.
"Beat-up squads" of guards have operated largely with impunity in New York's prisons for decades. The beat-up squad at Marcy is no exception. State Attorney General Letitia James ignored the Marcy squad, even though her office was warned of its existence in 2023.
Nurses who worked in Marcy's infirmary, where the beat-up squad regularly took prisoners to abuse because it lacked security cameras, also covered up the abuse of prisoners for years.
Less than three months after Brooks was murdered at Marcy, guards at the Mid-State Correctional Facility, which is across the road from Marcy, killed Messiah Nantwi on Mar. 1, 2025.
Robert Brooks Sr. and Robert Brooks Jr. Photo credit: unknown, via Robert Brooks Jr.
High-powered attorney Ben Crump represents Da-tona.
Crump is nationally renowned as the “Black People’s Attorney General." He told The Free Lance News he was still a child when he decided to become a civil rights lawyer.
"9 years old," Crump said. "I made a decision to be an attorney like Thurgood Marshall and fight for people who looked like me."
Crump made his name seeking justice for Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Black boy shot to death by George Zimmerman in 2012. But before Martin, Crump made his bones fighting for 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson, killed by guards at a "boot camp"-style Florida prison in 2006. Seven guards and a nurse were charged with manslaughter but acquitted.
“You kill a dog; you go to jail," Crump famously said after the shocking verdict. "You kill a little black boy, nothing happens.”
Still, Crump got Florida to pay Anderson's family $5 million.
The Free Lance News asked Crump where Brooks' murder stood among all the murdered Black Americans he's sought justice for.
"All these tragedies are horrendous," Crump answered. "All of them are egregious. You can't say any of them are worse than the other."
Still, he added, Brooks' killing was "extreme and unprovoked." It was especially bad "considering he was handcuffed and restrained the whole time and posed no threat whatsoever."
Robert Brooks Sr.’s casket. Photo credit: unknown, via Uconda Perry.
13 guards were charged with either killing Brooks, failing to stop it or covering it up.
David J. Kingsley III was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 25-years-to-life. Nicholas Kieffer and Mathew J. Galliher were tried with Kingsley on manslaughter and assault but acquitted. Kieffer was also aquitted of contributing to the attempted cover-up.
Anthony Farina and Nicholas Anzalone received 22 years after pleading guilty to first degree manslaughter. Christopher Walrath, who punched Brooks first, also pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He was sentenced to 15 years.
Sgt. Michael Mashaw and David Walters also pleaded guilty to manslaughter. They were sentenced to 3-to-9 and 2 1/3-to-7 years, respectively. Walters, however, was released on bail pending appeal in a shocking decision made on Dec. 10, 2025.
Sgt. Glenn Trombly and another guard, Robert Kessler, testified for the prosecution. Kessler pleaded guilty to gang assault and was promised a sentence between 5-7 years. Trombly pleaded guilty to attempted gang assault and was promised a 4-year sentence.
Another guard, Nicholas Gentile, was charged with evidence tampering. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor attempted evidence tampering and was sentenced to one year conditional discharge and a $250 fine, the Rome Sentinel reported.
A 12th guard whose name is not known with certainty agreed to help prosecutors and pleaded guilty to unknown charges in exchange for specific sentences also not known at this time.
Finally, Michael D. Fisher pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment for failing to stop Brooks' murder after a jury dead-locked on a manslaughter charge. He was sentenced to six months.
That sentence, however, won't be served unless and until an appeals court decides whether he could even be criminally prosecuted for failing to stop Brooks' killing in the first place.
The acquittals of Galliher and Kieffer, along with the hung jury in Fisher's trial, led the special prosecutor in Brooks' case, Onondaga County District Attorney William F. Fitzpatrick, to call on Gov. Hochul and the state legislature to pass a new law. The new law Fitzpatrick proposed would make it a felony for a law enforcement officer to stand by and watch a fellow officer seriously injure or kill a person in their custody.
"There has to be a statute," Fitzpatrick said after Fisher's mistrial, "making it assault and manslaughter if you watch your fellow officers beat someone so badly and so unnecessarily that it's reasonably foreseeable that serious physical injury or death will occur."
The new law should "not be just for correction officers," Fitzpatrick added. "It should be for all law enforcement officers."
In a letter to state lawmakers dated Feb. 3, Fitzpatrick asked them to pass what he called the "Duty to Intervene and Accountability Act or as I prefer it be known as The Robert Brooks Memorial Act."
Neither Gov. Hochul or any member of the state legislature has yet to propose the DIA Act—much less make it law.
However, a similar bill, named Cariol's Law, has been pending in the legislature since 2021.
Uconda Perry is Da-tona's mother.
"Robert Jr. has done amazing," she told The Free Lance News. "But we just want the world to know that we exist—it's not just him."
Now 47, Uconda knew Robert Brooks Sr. for years before they started dating in the summer of 1997, she said in a face-to-face interview on Sunday. They first met through Uconda's brother, Ronnie, who went to elementary school with Brooks.
Uconda and Brooks Sr. met again while she was a student at Genesee Community College. She was 19 when they started dating. She says he was kind. He never hit or threatened her.
"Robert never hurt me. He always treated me good," Uconda, now 47, said. "He wasn't abusive to me."
"We kinda trauma-bonded," she revealed. "His family wasn't doing so well."
They dated from the summer of 1997 until Christmas break. Da-tona was born in May 1998. A paternity test confirms he is Brooks Sr.'s son, according to court records.
Robert Brooks Jr. was born in November 1997. His mother is Dianna Rivera, court records show.
In 2016, Brooks and Rivera were still partners when he stabbed her in what Fitzpatrick, the special prosecutor, called "a drug induced rage." Prosecutors charged Brooks with attempted murder. He pleaded guilty to first degree assault and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Brooks was sent to the Mohawk Correctional Facility. Like Marcy, Mohawk is also near Utica. At Mohawk, Brooks befriended one of Uconda's cousins. Her cousin told her Brooks "was getting his life together."
"He was getting to know God better," Uconda said. "And he said that when he got out he planned to be a positive part of Da-tona's life."
"He told my cousin he was going to apologize to me," for failing to help her raise Da-tona, Uconda added.
(Uconda does not want to disclose her cousin's name because, she said, he is still in prison and she fears for his life.)
Uconda didn't tell Da-tona what her cousin told her because, she said, she wanted Brooks to first "get out and prove himself on the outside, his sincerity." Then she would tell her son.
He never got the chance.
Uconda Perry, mother of Da-tona Perry. Photo credit: unknown, via Uconda Perry.
Brooks was beaten by other prisoners at Mohawk at the direction of guard Sherri Abreu, The Free Lance News reported. He was transferred to Marcy for his protection, but was killed by guards 33 minutes after he arrived, testimony at the trials of his killers showed.
Uconda said her oldest daughter saw a news report about the murder, called her up and told her "I think they just killed Da-tona's father."
She turned on the news and saw it for herself.
"I lost my breath," Uconda said. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing."
Da-tona was at work. One of his brothers texted him: "I think your dad's just been murdered."
Da-tona told The Free Lance he felt "lost, stuck and hurt."
Then on Dec. 27, James, New York's Attorney General, publicly released the body camera video capturing his murder.
"It was like looking at my own son," Uconda said. "They look so much alike."
She couldn't stop thinking about the terrible things Brooks had told her he survived as a child.
"The things that I know hurt him," Uconda said, "to see him hurt like that—I couldn't stop crying."
Da-tona didn't want to watch the video of his father's murder—at first.
"But the child in me didn't want to leave him in that room by himself," Da-tona explained. "So I had to watch it to know what he went through."
Uconda and the rest of his family hesitated to talk with Da-tona about the murder.
"We all kind of tip-toed around it," Uconda disclosed. "We didn't really talk about it with him."
That changed after two of the officers charged with killing Brooks, Galliher and Kieffer, were acquitted after their October 2025 trial. Then Gov. Hochul further weakened an already-weak package of proposed laws that she and state legislators optimistically called "reform."
The laws added further oversight of the state prison system, but failed to address the root causes of Brooks' murder and the on-going crisis affecting New York's entire state prison system—a crisis so bad the National Guard has been deployed in almost all of New York's 42 prisons since April 2025, at the cost of about $57 million per month.
Gov. Hochul finally signed the so-called "reform" bills into law in December, seven months after the legislature passed them.
"I don't feel justice was done," Da-tona says. "The whole system is responsible."
Crump, Da-tona's lawyer, said New York needed to enact more laws "in Brooks' name" that actually address "what we saw happened."
He said a law like that proposed by Fitzpatrick, the Special Prosecutor, should be "part of the George Floyd Policing Law, codified, specialized to Robert Brooks. They should have something about prison reform in the George Floyd Policing Act, whether it's a prison guard or a police officer."
"That's true accountability that helps all of society," Crump added.
Da-tona himself, when asked what he would tell Gov. Hochul, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie if had the chance to meet them in person, said he would tell them "just do the right thing."
"We're not asking for the impossible," Da-tona emphasized. "We're just asking for laws to be put in place to protect people who may have made mistakes and are fighting for a second chance in life."
Laws, guidelines and rules with "real repercussions" for abusing prisoners.
Lawyers for Robert Brooks Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.
Mizzell Sciortino, Robert Brooks Sr.’s third son. Photo credit: unknown, via Facebook.
Robert Brooks Sr. may have also had a third son, Mizzell Sciortino, according to court records. Sciortino's lawyer did not respond to an emailed invitation to comment. The 22-year-old himself did not respond to a Facebook message, neither did his mother.
"You can't put a price on what his three sons are going to go through. This is for life," Da-tona's mother concluded. "All their lives they're going have to deal with their father being murdered on video."
She added: "All three of those boys deserve justice."
The Free Lance News's Blueprint for Justice in New York Prisons calls for
closing Marcy, the prison where Brooks was killed;
passing a new law requiring all law enforcement disciplinary hearings be open to the public;
passing a new law making prison health care providers mandatory reporters to an independent agency;
passing news laws creating new opportunities for prisoners to earn early release;
tweaking the HALT Act so prisoners can be sent to solitary confinement for up to 60 days for major misconduct; and
granting amnesty to the 2,000 guards Gov. Hochul fired for striking illegally in 2025.
Send tips or corrections to jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me