That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself.
June 9, 2015
"Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. "
Writes Jennifer Gonnerman, in a new New Yorker piece, an update on Browder, who has now killed himself.
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14 comments:
Life for a young black man in the New York City of Bloomberg and de Blasio.
Pretty sure paranoia is not a result of abuse. Too bad what the guards did, but that wasn't why he hung himself. He had issues.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.
Once again, a story where the reader is left with the strong impression that far too many facts are left out.
Why was Browder in solitary confinement? Solitary for a man not yet convicted seems pretty harsh. My guess as to what happened: Browder was put in solitary because his fellow prisoners quickly discovered he was "a nut job", and began to torment him just to see the reaction. Also left unmentioned -- was Browder being treated for his psychosis in jail? If so, he might have been left there because it was a de facto "insane asylum", and it was the least awful of multiple awful options.
It's really difficult to work with individuals suffering from psychosis at the level where you think your TV is watching you. Sometimes, even individuals in far better financial & educational situations don't have good outcomes.
Sad story about the young man, Browder, no doubt.
Riker's Island is an ugly place, housed with many ugly people.
The New Yorker pieces glides over the racial angle, because it doesn't fit the narrative: the guard that threw him to the ground was black, the inmates who are pummeling him are black, the 2 guards who are trying to protect him appear to be white.
The New Yorker piece raises, but then quickly glides over the prescription drug angle
"Two empty bottles of Browder’s antipsychotic drug sat on a table. Was it possible that taking the drug had caused him to commit suicide? Or could he have stopped taking it and become suicidal as a result?"
The New Yorker piece seizes on the injustice angle and the lawsuit angle - black kid wrongly accused of stealing backpack, endures Hell at Riker's Island, is driven to suicide, shades of Ferguson, etc, etc.
Did the intervention of Jay-Z and Rosie McDonnell help the kid or hurt the kid by adding limelight to his pain and confusion?
I have sympathy for the kid. It's sad. Clearly, he needed some help and guidance. But, the New Yorker piece is disjointed, weak and all over the map.
Hey, kids, THIS is what government looks like. THIS is what government does. And you want MORE of this?
Idiots.
If Charlie Manson was Black . . .
"Mr Manson, now over 70, says he never killed anyone, yet has been in prison for over forty years. For this he blames a racist criminal justice system and the personal animus of members of the parole board. This is NPR reporting."
Why is thinking your TV is watching you paranoid?
There are now game boxes and TVs that do precisely that. All for your own good and you can (supposedly) turn off the watching feature. Or the new Amazon device (Echo? I forget the name) that is always listening.
Or the camera and mike on your laptop? How can you ever know that someone is not watching through that. Look at those school kids in PA a few years ago where the school was peeping on them in their bedrooms through school provided computers. Or the gay guy in NJ (Rutgers?)that committed suicide after someone surreptitiously recorded a sexual encounter through his own laptop. Even though the camera was supposedly turned off.
He may have been erroneously worried about the TV spying on him. Depending on model, it may not have been capable. If it was, probably nobody was listening. That is being mistaken, though, not necessarily paranoid.
First thing I do when I get a new laptop is remove the camera and mike software then physically destroy or obstruct them.
Duct tape works well or you can get a camera cover by donating $10 to Rand Paul.
And don't get me started about the Bluetooth trackers along every highway and interstate! http://www.postoaktraffic.com/images/field_solar.gif
Strictly for traffic flow management, of course. (heh, heh, heh...)
John Henry
I do not for the life of me understand how anyone can be thrown in jail and just forgotten for 3 years with no trial.
Someone should go to jail for this. Nobody will.
The only politician who I have heard speaking of this problem, though not this case specifically, has been Rand Paul. Not much the president can do about Rikers, being a city jail, but he may be able to affect federal prisons and by raising the issue he may be able to get voters to hold local pols to account and change some things.
Our prison system is a national tragedy.
I have no idea whether this imprisonment contributed to the suicide or not. Gut feeling is probably, but even if not, it certainly didn't help.
This kind of thing is not supposed to happen in America.
John Henry
It doesn't matter if he was crazy. Crazy people don't deserve to be in pretrial detention for years. No one does. It's unconstitutional. That's the problem, not the details.
3 years without a trial, without being charged or even bail? How does the NYC court system get away with such blatant violations of basic civil rights?
Like others have said, this story strikes me as one of those "news" stories where they don't bother to give you all the facts.
It would be nice if they'd bother. Too often in my lifetime I've read stories where I was directly involved and I find myself shaking my head, "That's not how it happened at all."
As an example, there was a news story about a man, I believe the headline was something like, "US Citizen locked up for 8 months in immigration prison."
Not an exact quote. The story goes on to tell you that this man, who also happened to be black, was targeted by immigration because of the color of his skin. That he was lawfully in the United States and never should have been locked up. And several other sympathetic angles to the story, and almost all the quotes in the story were from his lawyer.
Well, the headline was true. The man, at the time of the writing of the story, was now a US Citizen. But when he was locked up, he wasn't. He had no status in the Untied States. He was only released after his girlfriend married him while he was in detention. Nor did it mention that he was arrested on a day that 7 others were arrested right along with him. Those 7 others were not black. He was the only black person, and yet his claim that he was targeted because of the color of his skin left that fact out.
There was a lot more wrong with the story, but, we aren't allowed to call up the reporter and set them right. Or to write our own story. It gets put out there and, facts be damned, enters our cultural consciousness as truth.
Which is why I always take stories like this with a huge grain of salt. Because I have direct knowledge of how they conveniently leave facts out of these stories.
I do not for the life of me understand how anyone can be thrown in jail and just forgotten for 3 years with no trial.
Someone should go to jail for this. Nobody will.
That's government for you. Nothing says "Professional service" like no repurcussions whatsoever for terrible performance.
How does the NYC court system get away with such blatant violations of basic civil rights?
How do they get away with it? To paraphrase government employees everywhere "Because...fuck you. That's how"
Although the original article glosses over it, the writer does say that Browder had "several run-ins" with the police before the arrest which landed him in jail for three years. Eight months before his arrest for robbery, grand theft and assault, he was caught stealing a delivery van which he then wrecked. He pled guilty to that charge of grand theft and was on probation at the time of the new arrest. He was walking with a friend when the robbery victim saw him recognized him and flagged down a cop, who arrested him. Because he was on probation, he was not eligible for bond, and was held until trial, pretty standard.
What's not standard is the 3 year delay, although again the article glosses over how much of that was due to defense continuances and tries to portray it as totally a result of the government's inability to go to trial. In the real world, delays typically benefit the defense, because witnesses get tired of showing up and finally quit coming, and the case is dismissed, which is what happened in this instance.
It sounds as though Browder had a predisposition to mental illness, which manifested itself during the stress of confinement, and eventually led to his suicide. Blaming the suicide on his three year confinement is simplistic and misleading, but the three year delay in coming to trial really is shameful, as it prevented society and the victim from having their day in court too.
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