A 51-year-old detainee died at Bellevue Hospital while in the custody of the Department of Correction (NYCDOC) on Tuesday, July 2, a day after his attorney petitioned a Queens judge to release the terminally ill man battling stage four cancer.
Christian Collado, who was receiving end-of-life care in the jail ward of the Manhattan hospital, died early Wednesday morning, Department of Correction officials said. Though his cause of death was not immediately clear, Collado’s attorney, Judah Maltz, told the Eagle that the 51-year-old had been in poor health as a result of a cancer diagnosis for months.
Collado is the eighth person to die in NYCDOC custody this year and the third to die in as many weeks after two men died within approximately an hour of each other on June 20.
“Our thoughts are with Mr. Collado’s loved ones at this time,” NYCDOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie said in a statement on Wednesday. “On behalf of the department, I share our deepest sympathies and support to everyone who knew him.”
According to the NYCDOC, Collado’s brother was with the detainee at the time of his death.
Maltz, who was representing Collado in two separate criminal cases in Queens, said that the 51-year-old’s health had long been a concern — he’d been transferred from the hospital to Rikers Island and back to the hospital multiple times during his detention — and that efforts to get him released from NYCDOC custody had been futile.
According to the attorney, Maltz had made several informal requests to the Queens district attorney’s office, which had charged Collado — who was also facing federal charges in Pennsylvania for a burglary and a separate drug dealing case — to drop the charges against the ill detainee.
However, the DA’s office rebuffed the attorney’s pleas.
“He couldn’t sit through a trial,” Maltz said. “Is he going to come into the courtroom on a hospital bed or a wheelchair and wear a mask on his face?”
“It would have been horrible,” he added.
On June 3, Maltz said he had received a letter that he had requested from Collado’s doctors, detailing that Collado’s illness had left him with only a couple of weeks or months to live.
Using the letter, Maltz prepared a motion to dismiss the case over the July 4th holiday weekend. He filed it with the court on Tuesday, less than 24 hours before his client died.
“I don’t blame anyone,” Maltz said of his client’s death on Wednesday. “I just wish there had been more sympathy.”
Without support for dropping the case from the DA’s office, Maltz had few other options than to file a motion to dismiss in the interest of justice, a type of motion that rarely gets granted, the attorney said.
Maltz said that he was frustrated that there currently isn’t a legal process in New York that allows defendants to be examined by a doctor and determine their physical ability to stand trial, like how physicians evaluate defendants with potential mental illnesses.
“If someone is very, very sick and unable to face trial, let two doctors be ordered,” Maltz said.
Brendan Bosh, a spokesperson for the Queens DA’s office, defended their pursuit of Collado’s prosecution, citing his alleged crimes.
“The defendant was indicted on charges of burglary in the second degree and other crimes for breaking into the home of an 82-year-old victim and stealing her possessions, including her wheelchair, after she was taken to the hospital,” Bosh said in a statement to the Eagle. “When he was arraigned, based on his extensive criminal record both in and out of state, already diagnosed with late-stage cancer, he was remanded by the court.”
“While Correctional Health Services has been giving periodic updates on the defendant’s condition to all parties including the last one which was on July 3, 2025, for the first time, the attorney for the defendant filed with the court and served on our office a Clayton Motion based on the defendant’s medical condition,” Bosh added.
Collado’s death came less than three weeks after the deaths of James Maldonado and Benjamin Kelly, who died a little more than an hour apart from each other.
Kelly was allegedly spotted by a correctional officer on Rikers Island having a medical episode around 3 p.m. on June 20. Though he was given medical aid, Kelly was pronounced dead around half an hour later, according to the NYCDOC.
Not long after, the NYCDOC said Maldonado experienced a medical emergency while on a correction department bus heading to Rikers Island. He died around 20 minutes later.
The spike in detainee deaths comes as a federal judge has begun to map out a takeover of Rikers Island, where over 100 people have died in the past decade.
Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Laura Swain, will soon receive recommendations and applications from those hoping to serve as the “remedial manager” at Rikers, otherwise known as a receiver.
The receiver will generally be tasked with tamping down violent conditions in the jails, which Swain said the city had failed to do over the 10 years it’s been operating under court orders stemming from a case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.
The receiver will answer only to the judge and, in a number of instances, supplant the power of the NYCDOC commissioner and the mayor of New York City.
They will be able to make changes to NYCDOC policies, procedures, protocols and systems related to the Nunez court orders; review, investigate and discipline officers who violate use of force rules; hire, promote and deploy staff throughout the jails; renegotiate contracts the city has with the correctional officers’ union, which has long opposed receivership; and ask Swain to “waive any legal or contractual requirements that impede [the receiver] from carrying out their duties.”
The remedial manager, whose powers will remain until the judge finds the city is in compliance with the court orders, will also be allowed to direct the NYCDOC commissioner and any other NYCDOC executive regarding the Nunez orders.
Swain is expected to receive the names of all candidates for the role by the end of August.
