In October 2014, The New Yorker ran a shattering story by staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman about a young Bronx man named Kalief Browder who, just before he turned sixteen years old, was arrested then locked up on Riker’s Island. There he remained for the next three years, without a trial, until finally the prosecutors who brought the charges, then dragged their collective legal feet with 36 months worth of unexplained continuances, simply dropped the case.
Kalief was accused of stealing a backpack, an accusation that was fuzzy from the beginning. The youngest of seven children and reportedly well liked at school, Kalief insisted that he was innocent, repeatedly refusing to take the deals the prosecutor offered, even the last one, which would have let him out for time served.
No, he had said. He would go to trial. “I did not do it.”
But the approximately 800 days he spent in solitary confinement during those three years in Rikers took a terrible toll on a once-upbeat boy’s psyche. And, in addition to the damage caused by the isolation, there was also also the beat down by at least one guard, maybe more than one, and another brutal beating by gang members that reportedly ran the area of the jail where Kalief was located—that is when he wasn’t shut up in a 12′ X 8′ solitary cell.
The New Yorker obtained surveillance footage of some of the beating incidents.
As months then years passed in Rikers with no seeming end in sight, Kalief began to emotionally decompensate. He tried suicide twice when he was locked up, and again a couple more times when he was finally released.
Gonnerman and others who knew Kalief felt that, for a while this spring, things seemed to be getting better for the young man who had grown so fragile after the ordeal that took away half of his teenage years.
Then, on Saturday, she got the news that Kalief had hanged himself.
On Sunday, the New Yorker ran one more, unutterably sad story by Gonnerman about the boy whom she’d gotten to know named Kalief.
The primary takeaway from Gonnerman’s fine reporting is this: Kalief Browder was a young man who could have been my son, could have been yours, who was failed and brutalized by multiple levels of the American justice system, and who—this weekend—succumbed to the effects of that 3-year-long psychological beating.
Here’s a clip from Jennifer Gonnerman’s story:
….Late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.”
After two weeks at St. Barnabas, Browder was released and sent back home. The next day, his lawyer, Paul V. Prestia, got a call from an official at Bronx Community College. An anonymous donor (who had likely read the New Yorker story) had offered to pay his tuition for the semester. This happy news prompted Browder to re-enroll. For the next few months he seemed to thrive. He rode his bicycle back and forth to school every day, he no longer got panic attacks sitting in a classroom, and he earned better grades than he had the prior semester.
Ever since I’d met him, Browder had been telling me stories about having been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were disturbing, but I did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until this past April when I obtained surveillance footage of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him. I sat next to Kalief while he watched these videos for the first time. Afterward, we discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. I told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.
He was driven by the same motive that led him to talk to me for the first time, a year earlier. He wanted the public to know what he had gone through, so that nobody else would have to endure the same ordeals. His willingness to tell his story publicly—and his ability to recount it with great insight—ultimately helped persuade Mayor Bill de Blasio to try to reform the city’s court system and end the sort of excessive delays that kept him in jail for so long.
Browder’s story also caught the attention of Rand Paul, who began talking about him on the campaign trail. Jay Z met with Browder after watching the videos. Rosie O’Donnell invited him on “The View” last year and recently had him over for dinner. Browder could be a very private person, and he told almost nobody about meeting O’Donnell or Jay Z. However, in a picture he took alongside Jay Z, who draped an arm around his shoulders, Browder looked euphoric.
Last Monday, Prestia, who had filed a lawsuit on Browder’s behalf against the city, noticed that Browder had put up a couple of odd posts on Facebook. When Prestia sent him a text message, asking what was going on, Browder insisted he was O.K. “Are you sure everything is cool?” Prestia wrote. Browder replied: “Yea I’m alright thanks man.” The two spoke on Wednesday, and Browder did seem fine. On Saturday afternoon, Prestia got a call from Browder’s mother: he had committed suicide…..
The photo of Kalief Browder is a screen shot of an ABC7 broadcast that was then put through WLA’s art process.
[…] Kalief Browderm, 1993-2015 Image from: Witness LA […]
My kid, your kid, or us at that tender age. Too young for such torture. We should not be surprised that his mind was compromised. What we should be surprised is that one person paid for this tragedy yet.