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Mom to file $25M lawsuit after son ‘baked to death’ at Rikers

The mother of the mentally ill, homeless ex-Marine who baked to death in a Rikers Island jail cell following a trespassing arrest said Friday that she plans to sock the city with a $25 million wrongful-death lawsuit.

An irate Alma Murdough ripped the city over the Feb. 15 death of her son, Jerome Murdough, who was found by correction officers roasted in a stifling, unventilated 100-degree cell that apparently overheated due to an equipment malfunction.

“I ain’t got my son! I don’t got my son! No money could ever bring him back,” the grieving mom said during a press conference at her lawyer’s Broadway office.

The 75-year-old senior also said she was sickened after viewing her son’s remains at the morgue and finding him “with mouth open.” She called for heads to roll at Riker’s and the prison to be shuttered.

“It gives the impression he was hollering for help” and no one responded — “and that really tore me up,” she said. “I keep thinking about this every day.”

Her lawyer, Derek Sells, confirmed filing a notice of claim, the first procedural step necessary for a civil suit that will soon be filed against the city in Manhattan federal court. In the claim notice, he alleges Murdough’s death was caused by carelessness and negligence by city Department of Correction staffers.

Murdough, a 56-year-old vagrant, was jailed for trespassing only after slipping into a Harlem housing-project stairwell seeking a warm place to sleep. He was sent to Riker’s Island when he was unable to make $2,500 bail.

Sells said the trespassing charge against Murdough “wound up being a death sentence – and that’s not acceptable.”

Murdough was in a section of the jail reserved for the mentally ill and was on psychotropic medication at the time of his death. Experts say such meds make people sensitive to heat.

DOC officials have confirmed he was left unattended for hours.

Alma Murdough also ripped city officials for not returning her phone phones and not reaching out to “say they’re sorry.”

Jasmine Carayol, a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department, said “this case involves a tragic incident and we will review the [expected] lawsuit and respond accordingly.”

Sells said he plans to ask the city to preserve all communications and 911 recordings regarding the ex-Marine’s death.

Prosecutors in the Bronx are investigating the death.

Court documents filed last month and reviewed by the Associated Press in a separate federal case say Murdough’s body temperature, taken nearly four hours after he was found dead, was 103 degrees and that the cell was 101 degrees.

Murdough was slumped at the edge of the foot of his bed with “a pool of vomit and blood on the floor,” the documents said.

The documents also say the medical examiner investigator assigned to Murdough’s case preliminarily found he likely died of hyperthermia.