Lorenzo McNeil, a 29-year-old Hispanic male, was caught in the final, violent moments of the Attica Prison uprising on September 13, 1971. The four-day standoff between inmates demanding more humane living conditions and state authorities culminated in a bloody retaking of the facility that morning. McNeil was serving a five to seven-year sentence for robbery at the time of the riot.
The chaotic and violent reclamation of the prison by state troopers and correction officers involved a
massive show of force. Under a cloud of tear gas, law enforcement officers fired thousands of rounds into the prison yard where the inmates were holding hostages. In the ensuing hail of gunfire, Lorenzo McNeil was struck by a bullet to his head and died. He was one of 29 inmates killed that day, in addition to 10 hostages who also died from law enforcement gunfire. Autopsies would later confirm that the vast majority of deaths on September 13th were the result of the armed assault by state forces.
In the aftermath of the uprising, there were no specific arrests or identified suspects in the individual death of Lorenzo McNeil. The sheer scale and indiscriminate nature of the gunfire during the retaking made accountability for each fatality difficult to establish. The official response initially, and falsely, claimed that the inmates had killed the hostages, a narrative that was quickly debunked by medical examinations. The broader legal recourse for the inmates and their families came in the form of a class-action lawsuit filed against prison and state officials for civil rights violations and the brutality that occurred during and after the retaking. Decades later, in January 2000, New York State agreed to an $8 million settlement for the inmates who survived and the families of those who were killed.
