By John Annese
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — A former MDC Brooklyn guard committed a crime when he shot up a contraband smuggler’s car after a high-speed chase through Brooklyn, a federal jury decided Tuesday.
Leon Wilson, 51, blasted a half-dozen rounds at a fleeing BMW after chasing it for a mile from the Sunset Park jail’s staff parking lot in the wee hours of Sept. 4, 2023, firing a bullet into the back of a man sitting in the rear seat.
He then continued to follow the shot-up BMW to the Brooklyn Bridge and returned to work without calling 911 or reporting the shooting to his superiors.
Wilson, who took the stand in his own defense, told the jury that he thought he had interrupted a jailbreak in process but couldn’t reach his radio to call for help. He said he saw someone in the fleeing car point a gun at him and didn’t report the shooting because he was “in shock.” He said he wasn’t chasing the vehicle to the Brooklyn Bridge , but was simply frazzled and driving.
It took the Brooklyn Federal Court jury about three hours to weigh the evidence and determine Wilson’s story not credible. They found him guilty of depriving the shooting victim of his civil rights while acting under color of law, and use of a firearm in a crime of violence.
Dressed in a gray suit and bright multicolored tie, Wilson rocked back and forth as the jury read the verdict. He stared down at the defense table and at one point buried his head in his hands.
“It was unfair. These gangs, they come to the jail … to bring contraband. I thought it was an escape,” the shell-shocked Wilson said quietly, while surrounded by family and friends afterward outside the courtroom. He insisted he didn’t report the shooting because of anxiety and trauma from his military days.
“I wasn’t trying to hide nothing,” he said.
Wilson’s defense lawyer, Mark DeMarco, portrayed Wilson as a hero and Army veteran who was doing his job, and any mistakes he made were because he chose to do something instead of sit by, quoting Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1910 line, “It is not the critic who counts … the credit actually belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
“Leon Wilson wasn’t a good officer. He was a great officer,” DeMarco said. “He had to make a decision. He had to either stop the escape or at the very least stop and seize the car that had contraband. … He could have stopped, but that’s not how Leon’s built. He’s a soldier. He’s a great correction officer.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Silverberg scoffed at that description in his rebuttal to DeMarco’s closing arguments.
“He’s not a hero. He wants credit for shooting a guy in the back and trying to bury it? Come on,” he said. “He’s trying to make a self-defense claim appear out of whole cloth despite the evidence. … No one who’s threatened with a gun behaves the way the defendant did.”
Silverberg added, “There are tough cases. This isn’t one of them.”
The jury agreed.
Wilson was on perimeter duty the day of the early-morning car chase, a posting where he’s allowed to carry a service weapon. Prosecutors and Wilson’s defense attorneys differed on whether he used that gun or a different one.
He briefly stepped away from his post around 4:30 a.m., getting into a Bureau of Prisons-issued van so he could buy a MetroCard and a cup of coffee at a nearby subway station, and when he returned, a BMW with tinted windows pulled into the staff lot, where it didn’t belong.
Wilson parked the van across the street and watched the BMW, then drove into the lot and pulled in front of it. The driver sped off and Wilson gave chase — even though his authority ended once he left the jail property, prosecutors argued.
He opened fire after closing the distance near Hamilton Ave. and Hamilton Place, hitting passenger Erick Encarnacion in the back. Encarnacion testified no one in the car had a gun or pointed anything at Wilson, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Erin Reid told the jury the evidence backs up his claim.
“How do we know? It’s on video. We have the video,” she said.
Wilson told jurors he saw a rope come down from the side of the jail, noticed the glow of cell phones from inside the car, and moved in to stop a possible escape. Reid and Silverberg countered that there’s no way he could have seen what he claimed from across the street, through the parking lot gate and other cars, and through the BMW’s tinted windows.
“There is no escape procedure at the MDC where you follow the car without telling anyone for a mile,” Reid said.
Wilson’s turn on the stand Monday got heated several times during Silverberg’s cross-examination, including a moment when the prosecutor had Wilson go over every small detail of how he pulled his gun, to which Wilson muttered under his breath, “You’ve never fired a gun.”
On Tuesday, Silverberg quipped to the jury, “He’s activating escape orders, but not telling anyone else on Planet Earth that he thinks someone is escaping?”
Wilson faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison.
He remains free on bond until the judge determines whether he should be remanded without bail, which is usually required in cases of violence, barring special circumstances. Sending him to MDC Brooklyn is “not a realistic option,” Judge Pamela Chen said.
Chen has not set a sentencing date.
Rhonda Barnwell, the president of the MDC’s correction officers union, said Wilson got a raw deal when the judge wouldn’t allow testimony about the level of violence and the amount of contraband flowing into the jail.
| RELATED: Inside MDC Brooklyn
“Everything we felt that he could use to show his state of mind, we weren’t allowed to use,” she said.
Just a few months before the shooting, Barnwell penned a memo describing the severe staffing issues at MDC Brooklyn, calling the Bureau of Prisons’ handling of understaffing “inhumane to both staff and inmates.”
“We didn’t have the staff,” Barnwell said, explaining that Wilson was covering more than one perimeter post. “That’s the reason why he had the van.”
“They didn’t give him a fair chance,” she added. “They didn’t let him say why the institution was so bad.”
Wilson’s lawyer, Jeffrey Greco, called the verdict “deeply troubling.”
“What happened here represents more than one man’s conviction: It’s an indictment of a correctional system that too often leaves its officers vulnerable and unsupported,” he said. “My client acted in a split-second situation involving an individual attempting to smuggle weapons into a secure facility — a circumstance that posed a serious threat to officers and inmates alike.
“To now face prison for acting in the line of duty sends a chilling message to those sworn to protect our institutions: that doing your job can cost you your freedom.”
—
©2025 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
