Edwin Segarra
Note: This memorial contains references to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. If you have questions about how the vaccine is being administered in correctional facilities, or questions about how the vaccine works, we encourage you to read this FAQ from The Marshall Project.
Photograph of Edwin Segarra with his son, Eddie Segarra, obtained from Eddie’s GoFundMe page for his father.
Edwin Segarra was born on April 4, 1974 in the Bronx, New York and was a loving father of four. His life was cut short on February 5, 2021, when he succumbed to the coronavirus in NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn at the age of 46. He was rushed there from the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), testing positive just four days after receiving the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine — just weeks before he would have developed full immunity.
After receiving his first dose, Edwin had excitedly texted his sister, Wendy Sanchez, from MDC. “Hey sis hope alls well with you and the family,” Segarra wrote on January 22nd. “Just took the 1st shot of the covid vaccine. 21 days til the next one.” [sic] Wendy didn’t believe that anything was wrong until February 4th, when she received another text from her brother: “Hey sis i tested positive on the 23′ 4 day after I took the shot. crazy i was bad for 10-days but i’m doing better. love you” [sic]
Edwin died the next day.
After his passing, prison management refused to release his body to his family for funeral preparations and did not respond to requests for further information about Edwin’s death. To support Edwin’s family’s calls for greater transparency, Black Lives Matter Greater New York helped his family organize a rally outside MDC in Sunset Park, which drew large crowds of demonstrators holding megaphones and pictures and banners of Edwin.
Photograph of a poster displayed in the demonstration for Edwin outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center, by Dean Moses, obtained from the Brooklyn Paper.
Since Edwin suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure, his family is worried that his health may not have been properly monitored before he received the vaccine. Their concerns were only heightened after they did not receive any clarity or additional information from prison management after their request for Edwin’s body was denied by the prison.
“I want to know, where are the medical records? I just want to see those documents, his vitals,” Edwin’s son Eddie told the Brooklyn Paper. “Without any of that information, we are just left here without any answers. That is the worst you can do — at least give us something.”
Eddie, who described his father as his hero on the GoFundMe fundraiser page he created, “JUSTICE FOR EDWIN SEGARRA,” is distraught by his father’s death. “I’m in shock still,” Eddie told the NY Daily News. “I feel like I lost a part of myself. Me and my father were very close. We were best friends. That was my best friend for real.”
Photograph of Edwin and Eddie, obtained from Eddie’s GoFundMe page.
Although Edwin was incarcerated for most of his son’s life, Eddie credits his father with inspiring and motivating him to become a correctional officer. Eddie, who is 28 years old, currently works at a state prison in Florida. When he was a teenager, Eddie told PIX11, his father encouraged him to follow the law, coinciding with a time where he was “going down the wrong path. [My dad] was in my ear, ‘Don’t make the same mistakes I made.’” With help from dedicated guidance counsellors, who would call him every morning to make sure he was going to school and attending his classes, Eddie graduated high school. After school, he began to pursue his career in law enforcement. His father was proud of him for becoming “a working man, a blue collar man,” Eddie recalled.
Photograph of Edwin and Eddie, obtained from Eddie’s GoFundMe page.
After working for 3 years in corrections, Eddie, who also has two children of his own, now hopes to transition to work as a parole officer. “I want to be able to help people coming out of prison,” he told PIX11. “[My dad] would want me to continue fighting for those guys,” he said of the men at MDC who shared hallways with his father. “They’re still human beings.”
Edwin’s family and lawyer believe that Edwin had turned his life around during his time in jail. In the last year of his life, Edwin converted to Islam, working as a trusted orderly at MDC, and was also taking several online courses at Columbia University. One professor told the NY Daily News that Edwin was “moved by a genuine sense of intellectual curiosity.” Lisa Sanchez, Edwin’s youngest daughter who was also close to her father, told the NY Daily News, “It’s frustrating because he wanted to come out and have another chance. He was a person full of hopes. Even if he was in a difficult situation, he was just dealing with it the best way he could.”
We stand with Edwin Segarra’s family in demanding justice and transparency for his death, and we mourn his loss.
This memorial was written by MOL team member Ilyana Benjelloun with information from reporting by Noah Goldberg of the NY Daily News, Dean Moses of the Brooklyn Paper, Mary Murphy of PIX11, and information from Eddie Segarra’s GoFundMe page and his online Tribute Archive.
Messages and Memories
Close but yet so far. You are THE realest person I ever met. I love you indio. You are my brother for life. We had future plans but god always has a wierd plan.
-Rich