The owners of the Knockdown Center are being sued by the mother of Damani Alexander, an East New York man whose body was found dead in Newtown Creek in the summer of 2024. 

“Knockdown Center forcibly removed [Alexander] from its premises and left him to wander the ill-lit streets and industrial wreckage of the area of Maspeth, Queens,” the lawsuit reads, filed late last month in a state court in Queens by a lawyer representing Desiree Nicholson, his mother. Read the full lawsuit here.  

Alexander had been ejected from Knockdown during one of Eli Escobar’s regular Sunday nights at the club, which has also been a recent target for police activity.

The lawsuit seeks to hold the club’s owners responsible for Alexander’s death under a variety of negligence claims. An amount in damages is not listed and his lawyer did not return a request for comment. Knockdown’s management has yet to respond or comment, either.  

“Despite his visible intoxication and disorientation, [the Knockdown Center] failed to offer [Alexander] first-responder care, and/or call for emergency medical services,” the suit claims, pointing to “two recent drowning deaths from club attendees in the area.” 

“It was reasonably foreseeable that a guest of defendant would suffer harm and possible death due to its failure to ensure adequate safety personnel were present on its premises and failure to follow its policy and procedures in responding to a visibly intoxicated and disoriented guest,” the suit reads.

News reports of Alexander’s death describe him as “a beloved man who loved to party.” He worked most nights as a security guard at the Box, a different club in the Lower East Side, which was once accused of allowing its “customers to sexually harass” waitstaff. 

On the night of his death, he had texted a friend, “I think dudes [are trying to] kill me,” according to a New York Times story on the spate of deaths around clubs in the area. 

No cause of death is mentioned in the lawsuit and the story from the Times says that “there were no signs of violence[,] and that a toxicology report found cocaine and alcohol in his system, but he did not die of an overdose.” The death, among others that year, has remained a subject of morbid interest in the area.     

“For them [police] to say that there is no foul play and no blunt trauma, and no marks of violence is very unusual,” Nicholson told News12 later that year. Another body would be found in the creek by late September.   

---