On March 23, 2020, 41-year-old Daniel Prude was having a mental health crisis brought on by the drug PCP when he encountered Rochester police on Jefferson Avenue. Prude was naked and shouting, and police handcuffed him, placed a spit hood over his head, and placed him face down on the sidewalk while holding him motionless. Eventually he stopped breathing and fell unconscious. He never woke up, and died a week later.
One year later, on March 23, 2021, hundreds of demonstrators marched through Rochester to make sure people remembered.
They gathered in the morning on Parcel Five downtown, then marched up St. Paul Street and closed down the Transit Center by blocking the entrances and exits. They next marched along East Avenue to the East Avenue Wegmans and blockaded the parking lot and entrances to the store. Wegmans closed and locked its doors, announcing it would reopen on Wednesday morning. Shoppers were sent out a side exit.
Demonstrators said their intent was to make people uncomfortable in their comfortable spaces so they would think about what happened to Daniel Prude.
Protesters who had eaten pizza and listened to music in the parking lot moved on to an evening celebration of Prude’s life.
The city kept quiet on Prude’s death until his family obtained police body camera footage and released it to the media in September. There have been frequent protests since, the top leadership of the Rochester Police Department was replaced, the Attorney General investigated as did a grand jury.
The grand jury decided not to indict any of the seven officers involved. An investigation commissioned by City Council recently reported that members of the Rochester city government suppressed the information about the Prude case.