20 new york | january 3–16, 2022
to Rikers. “Are we going to be good?” he
asked. “Yeah,” she told him, “we’re always
good.” Their eyes met. He asked again.
This time his voice shook, and tears were
coming down. She jumped up to hug him.
“How about you give me a ride?” he said.
Blake and Stewart talked every day
while he was at Rikers. He would be out
by July, he promised—maybe sooner if
the state passed the Less Is More Act,
which would release prisoners with non-
criminal parole violations to help reduce
the spread of covid. He had Stewart print
everything she could find about the act
and mail it to him.
On April 28, Blake called, frantic. “Calm
down,” Stewart said, thinking of his high
blood pressure. “Calm down.” Blake said
he’d had terrible heartburn earlier and then
he must have passed out and hit his head,
because he’d woken up in his bunk to find
a CO staring down at him. “I’m scared,” he
said. Stewart told him to go to the infir-
mary. For two days, she heard nothing andthen a friend whose relative worked at
Rikers called to say Blake was dead.
Later, a detainee named Vernal told her
what happened and wrote it down in a
statement. He had been on his way to make
a cup of hot chocolate when he noticed
Blake was unconscious. An officer, he said,
refused to call for help. “His exact words
were ‘It’s too late to call a captain or for a
medical emergency. We can handle,’ ” Ver-
nal said. It was 10:45 p.m. Blake stopped
breathing, which prompted another officer
to attempt CPR. When the medical staff
arrived, a full hour later, they had forgotten
the oxygen. “I truly believe,” Vernal wrote,
“that if this situation was handled with
the proper urgency and professionalism it
could’ve made a difference in life or death.”RICHARD BLAKE, 45APRIL 30Blake and his son.“IF YOU FEEL LIKE YOU
CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE,
I UNDERSTAND,” HE WROTE,
“BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T SIGN
UP FOR THIS JAIL SHIT!”PHOTOGRAPH: ANDY ZALKIN (BLAKE), COURTESY OF SHERSHARNA STEWARTRichard blake and Sher-
sharna Stewart met in 2012
at a speakeasy in Flatbush.
“He looked kind of like a
nerd,” she says. “Not at all
what you would expect.” Stewart learned
that Blake made his living off the street’s
shadow economy, like a lot of guys she
had grown up with. But Blake was fun—
he always had music on or was wise-
cracking—and he was considerate in
small, surprising ways. When Stewart, a
nurse, got home after a late shift, he’d
meet her outside and help hunt for park-
ing; if he knew she had a job interview,
he’d call and ask if she needed new panty-
hose; he’d whisk her daughter into a store
and buy her a coat. “Life sucked when
Rich wasn’t around,” Stewart says.
Between 2015 and 2018, Blake went to
prison on a gun charge. It was his second
time inside, after spending his 20s locked
up for assault. In the letters he wrote
Stewart, he said he wanted to get therapy
and do something different with his life.
Get a job. Establish credit. “If you feel like
you can’t do this anymore, I understand,”
he wrote to Stewart. “Because you didn’t
sign up for this jail shit!”
Things were good for a while after
Blake’s release. He got his osha certifica-
tion, and a friend said he could hire him for
a construction job. But before it could hap-
pen, the police stopped a car he was riding
in—it had a busted mirror—and found a
crack pipe. The four other passengers were
released, but because Blake was on parole,
he ended up in jail. The pandemic was just
getting under way, and nobody could get a
court appearance. It was nine and a half
months before he came home again.
Stewart and Blake had a big dinner
that night. Three months later, he was
riding in another car the police stopped,
this time for supposedly blowing through
a stop sign. The car smelled like weed,
and a search turned up a knife—another
potential parole violation.
On the morning of March 11, Blake hes-
itated at the foot of the bed where Stewart
lay. He was due to meet his parole officer,
and he told her that if she didn’t hear from
him later, it would mean he’d been sent