A more than two-decade employee of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is facing up to 10 years in prison on charges that he recklessly chased a civilian vehicle for about five miles from the federal jail in Brooklyn where he worked, shot multiple times at the vehicle and struck and injured a passenger in the back seat.
Leon Wilson, a 49-year-old Bronxite who worked as a correction officer at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, was taken into federal custody on Sunday for allegedly depriving the passenger of his civil rights while on duty last September, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York announced on Monday. He was scheduled to be arraigned later in the day.
Wilson, who prosecutors say joined the prisons bureau in 2000, is accused of using a bureau-issued minivan to pursue a BMW from the jail’s staff parking lot to the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge early on the morning of Sept. 4, 2023, all while exceeding the speed limit, running red lights and narrowly avoiding other drivers. A license plate reader near 27th Street and Third Avenue, just a couple of blocks from the jail along the Gowanus Expressway, captured him driving 55 mph in a 25-mph zone, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Monday.
The complaint says Wilson first saw the BMW — a sedan with tinted windows — in the jail staff lot around 4:45 a.m. on the day of the incident, and that the car sped off after he pulled the minivan directly in front of it. Just a few minutes later, prosecutors say, Wilson fired three times at the BMW near the Gowanus Canal and hit one of the occupants, referred to as “John Doe” in the complaint.
Then, he allegedly continued to chase the car for several minutes and ultimately never reported he had fired his weapon in the line of duty, in violation of both the jail’s and prison bureau’s policies. Wilson lacked the authority to chase the BMW beyond the jail’s property line, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
If convicted, he could be sentenced to prison for as long as a decade. An attorney for Wilson could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately return requests for comment.
The operations of the Metropolitan Detention Center have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, with some judges citing dangerous and inhumane conditions in refusing to send defendants there as they await trial. The jail made headlines lately as the place where some high-profile defendants, including Sean “Diddy” Combs, R. Kelly, Sam Bankman-Fried and Ghislaine Maxwell.