On June 6, 2015, Kalief Browder took his own life at his home, in the Bronx. He was twenty-two years old. He had been released from Rikers Island two years earlier, ending an ordeal that had begun on a spring night in 2010, when he had been arrested for robbery, at sixteen. He spent the next three years in jail trying to prove his innocence, and, for about two of those years, he was held in solitary confinement, where he attempted suicide several times. The charges against him were eventually dropped. I met him after his release and wrote a story about him in the fall of 2014.

At the end of 2014 and in the first half of 2015, a lawyer for the New York City Law Department interviewed Browder about his time on Rikers Island, as part of a lawsuit that Browder had filed against the city. I obtained these depositions last week, and they offer new information about his time on Rikers, revealing it to be not only a frightening and depressing place but also where Browder learned how to kill himself.

Before Browder ever attempted to take his own life, he saw another inmate in the jail for adolescent boys try to end his. “I didn’t see him when he did it, but I seen him when they took him out of his cell, and he had the sheet around his neck,” Browder said during his deposition. This prisoner did not die, but the image of a fellow-inmate with a bedsheet tied around his neck stuck with Browder. “So, when I thought about suicide, that was the first tactic that I thought about.”

He attempted to use this method a few times when he was locked in solitary. He concluded that “using the sheet as it was, it was too big,” so he found a way to cut the sheet into strips: “I ripped the edges with my teeth.” A single strip would not be strong enough to hold his weight, he decided, so he tore off “three or four” strips and “twisted them” together.

Browder sat through three depositions. The last one, conducted over five hours, on May 22, 2015, focussed on his suicide attempts. He recalled trying to kill himself about five times while in jail. Once, in February of 2012, he tried to hang himself from a light fixture. (He had to be “pulled out of his cell,” according to a report later written by Rikers employees, “on a medical emergency for an alleged hang-up.”) The following month, he said at the deposition, he stood on a ledge above his sink, tied one end of a sheet to a metal fixture on his ceiling and the other around his neck, and stepped off the ledge—and a correction officer and captain came into his cell and cut him down. After he fell to the ground, he said, one “grabbed me, he put me in a bear hug, he slammed me on the bed, and he started throwing punches at me.” Surveillance footage shows the captain and officer entering Browder’s cell. About ten seconds later, their fight with Browder spills out of the cell, and all three are brawling in the corridor. Reports written afterward by Rikers employees make no mention of a suicide attempt; instead, the captain and officer said that Browder was lying on his bed when they entered, and that he jumped up and attacked them. (Both men are named as defendants in the lawsuit.)

In July, 2014, a front-page article in the Times cited several similar incidents in the city’s jails in which officers assaulted inmates after they had attempted suicide. On Rikers, suicide attempts are sometimes referred to as “manipulative gestures”; at times, officers view them as efforts by inmates to escape from solitary confinement by faking the symptoms of a serious mental illness. Browder had another theory about why a suicidal inmate might anger an officer: “They don’t want to do extra work. And once they cut me down, they’re going to have to do paperwork.”

At the end of his final deposition, Browder recalled the first time he tried to take his life, in early 2011, after he had been in jail for about ten months. He was locked in a twelve-by-seven-foot cell, for at least twenty-three hours a day. He said that he was distressed not only because of his constant confinement but because the officers were withholding some of his meals and not allowing him to shower. There was a vent above his sink, and he decided his best option was to tear up his bedsheet and loop the sheet through the vent’s tiny holes. “I stuffed it inside the hole with a pen,” he said, “then I kept twisting it and twisting it until it curved through the other hole, and then I pulled it out.” The process took “twenty or twenty-five minutes,” as correction officers kept peering inside his cell, checking on his progress. Finally, he stood atop his sink, with the sheet looped through the holes in the vent, and tied it in a knot around his neck.

In the deposition, the city’s lawyer asked, “What happened after you tied the sheet around your neck?”

Browder replied, “The correction officers was telling me, ‘Go ahead and jump, you got it ready, right, go ahead and jump.’ And by then I was scared to jump. I never committed suicide before, and I was scared to jump. They said, ‘If you don’t jump, we’re going to go in there anyway, so you might as well go ahead and jump, go ahead and jump. You want to commit suicide, so go ahead.’ I didn’t jump, and they ended up coming in my cell anyway.”

“Why didn’t you jump?”

“Because I was scared at that point.”

“What were you scared of?”

“Of dying.”

At the time this interview occurred, Browder had been home from jail for two years and was enrolled at Bronx Community College, where he had a grade-point average of 3.5. His mental-health problems had continued after his release from Rikers: he had made another serious suicide attempt, been confined three times to a hospital psychiatric ward, and struggled with paranoia and delusions. Fifteen days after the interview, at home in his second-floor bedroom, he ripped his bedsheet into long strips, which he twisted into a cord. In a nearby room, he removed an air-conditioner from the wall, tied the homemade cord around his neck, and jumped out through the opening.

Read more of Jennifer Gonnerman’s reporting on Kalief Browder.