The trial of a former prison guard accused of killing a patient at the state’s Secure Psychiatric Unit began Tuesday, with the prosecution and defense telling competing stories about the death of Jason Rothe.
Rothe, a 50-year-old man with serious mental illness, died following a confrontation with corrections officers in April 2023. Prosecutors allege one of those officers, Matthew Millar, pressed his knee into Rothe’s back while he was lying handcuffed on the floor — a claim Millar’s attorneys deny — preventing him from getting enough air.
Millar faces a charge of second-degree murder alleging he “recklessly” caused Rothe’s death.
Read more: They needed psychiatric care. Instead, they died after confrontations with NH corrections officers.
“The defendant killed a patient in the secure psychiatric unit by kneeling on the patient's back, while the patient's arms were behind his back and handcuffed, and not a danger to anyone,” prosecutor Dan Jimenez said during opening arguments Tuesday in Merrimack County Superior Court.
Jimenez said officers are trained not to restrain people in that way, because of the risk to their breathing.
Not convicted, but confined to prison grounds
The case has refocused attention on New Hampshire’s long-standing policy of holding people deemed to pose a danger, but who have not been convicted of a crime, in a secure unit on state prison grounds that's managed by the Department of Correction. While the state is currently building a new, standalone secure psychiatric unit, mental health advocates have long criticized the practice of sending civilly committed patients to an institution that effectively serves as a prison and is not accredited as a mental health facility.
Born in California, Rothe grew up in New Hampshire and began experiencing symptoms of mental illness in his late teens and early 20s. In the years before his death, he was civilly committed to New Hampshire Hospital due to mental illness, but transferred to the Secure Psychiatric Unit when he was deemed too dangerous to stay at the hospital.
The confrontation that ended in Rothe’s death began with officers trying to forcibly remove him from a day room. Rothe fought back, and multiple officers tried to subdue him. They eventually got him in handcuffs, which is when prosecutors say Millar knelt on his back for a prolonged period.
Officers then strapped Rothe face down onto a stretcher and transported him to a restraint room before noticing he had stopped breathing.
'A slew . . . of screw-ups'
Jimenez said a cascade of failures led to Rothe’s death. He said the officer in charge that day, Lesley-Ann Cosgro, ordered officers to forcibly remove Rothe from a day room when he wasn’t endangering anyone, and went in with too few officers and insufficient protective gear — violations of department policies that let the situation spiral out of control. A nurse also failed to check on Rothe while he lay handcuffed on the ground, saying she thought he was playing dead, Jimenez said.
But Jimenez said Millar was ultimately to blame for Rothe’s death.
“There were a slew of policy violations, screw-ups, by almost every single employee directly involved in this incident, including the other corrections officers, civilian employees and the administration at the Department of Corrections,” he said. “But those individual and institutional failures do not change the fact that the defendant was indifferent to Jason's life and that Jason died.”
“The biggest mistake that the other individuals made was that they failed to stop the defendant from killing Jason,” Jimenez added.
Millar’s attorney, Jordan Strand, argued the state is making him a scapegoat for the Department of Corrections’ failings. She said those in charge created a “culture” at the Secure Psychiatric Unit where policies were routinely violated.
“This prosecution has never been about prosecuting a guilty man,” she said. “It's about finding someone to blame.”
Strand said Rothe died of a heart attack caused by underlying risk factors and the stress of the fight, and that her client never pressed his knee into Rothe’s back.
Strand said police relied on dubious or distorted witness statements to support that allegation – including one from Cosgro, who Strand said had reason to lie to divert attention from her own mistakes and has since recanted her claim.
“This was always a heart attack and never a homicide,” she said.
The trial is expected to last seven to 10 days.
