Sunday, January 26, 2020

COP MURDERS IN AMERICA - THE NEVER ENDING TRAGEDY

They Shared a Bunk Bed Growing Up. Both Were Killed by the Police.

How the shooting of one brother paved the way for the other’s death, seven years later.
Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times
The brothers shared a bunk bed growing up in Brooklyn.
Khiel, who was tall and willowy, slept on top. Na’im, who was two years younger and admired his big brother unreservedly, took the bottom.
In death, they flipped. In 2007, Khiel was buried at age 18 in a grave with no marker in a New Jersey cemetery. His younger brother followed in 2014, buried in the same plot on top of Khiel.
The brothers also shared the same cause of death. Each brother was shot and killed by New York City police officers. The first was unarmed and clutching a hairbrush as he died. The other was wildly firing a snub-nosed revolver as officers chased him down an empty street.
Stories of young black men in fatal encounters with police have become a painfully routine part of the news cycle. But for a family to lose two sons to police shootings is all but unheard-of in 21st century America.
The police department found both shootings to have been procedurally sound. Whatever their circumstances, the deaths threatened to hollow out a resilient family that had struggled against long odds and had great hopes for their children’s success.
The shooting of the first son helped set in motion a downward spiral that would unfold over years and lead to the death of his brother. For many young men and women in this part of Brooklyn, when it comes time to talk to their own children about the police, the story of Khiel and Na’im is the one they will tell.
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It happened amid the low-income housing developments that straddle Gates Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. That’s where a former schoolteacher from Trinidad named Denise Elliott-Owens was raising two sons and two daughters. Her sons were shot within a block of her front door.
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“It’s like the Bible,” Ms. Elliott-Owens said. “We have plagues — every seven years.”
Today Ms. Elliott-Owens is approaching 60. She still lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant with her daughters, who are just beginning their careers. One is a lawyer at a prestigious Manhattan law firm, the other a child welfare investigator.
Her sons died as the nation was on the verge of a reckoning over police killings of black men, touched off by a shooting in Ferguson, a chokehold in Staten Island, and all that had come before. In the years since, there have been some changes. Body cameras became standard. Some police departments moved away from heavy-handed patrol tactics. In New York City, stop-and-frisk has been largely disavowed.
Yet police shootings continue at a steady rate. About 5,000 people have been fatally shot by police officers across the country since Na’im was buried with Khiel in 2014.
In this corner of Bed-Stuy, the story of the two brothers lives on: in songs by local rappers and in candles lit on anniversaries, in tattoos and in, at least one case, the name young parents chose for their newborn.
Ms. Elliott-Owens rarely talks about what happened. People — like the women in her building, and the other nurses at the hospital where she works — tend not to ask about it.
She knows that her very presence elicits sympathy, but it can also bring out an instinct to find fault. Where did she go wrong as a mother? “They always try to blame the parents, but the parents can only do so much,” she said.
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Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times
In Trinidad and Tobago, Ms. Elliott-Owens had been a married elementary schoolteacher, but she wanted a bigger life. She came to New York City in 1990, after her marriage ended. She left behind her five children. The youngest, Khiel, was 1 year old. Her own mother did the same thing, leaving Denise at home with her grandmother while she went to New York in search of opportunity.
Like many immigrants, Ms. Elliott-Owens arrived an optimist. She imagined becoming a lawyer. At first she cleaned houses.
She spent her free time in black-owned bookstores, finding her bearings. In one she struck up a conversation with an intense man named Reginald Owens, who had recently come home to Brooklyn after working as a counselor in a jail in Nebraska.
They soon had a son, Na’im. They eventually married but kept separate apartments across the street from each other in Bed-Stuy.
After some time, Ms. Elliott-Owens’s children from Trinidad began joining her. Khiel, who has his father’s surname, Coppin, was the first to arrive. He moved in when he was about 3 with his mother and his new baby half brother, Na’im Owens.
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Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
As the years passed, Ms. Elliott-Owens worked as a train attendant for Amtrak, a sheet metal worker, and a caseworker for the homeless. She and Reginald had two more children, both daughters. Two more of her children from Trinidad joined her in Brooklyn.
Her husband worked afternoons and evenings. He stopped by sometimes, but his absence, she recalled, was felt more than his presence. Sometimes her children would gather on her bed and talk about the house they would move into someday. She would laugh, but she didn’t doubt it would happen.
They were poor, and she sometimes felt overwhelmed. But Ms. Elliott-Owens had a sense that her family was on its way to flourishing here.
She also believed in phonics, standardized testing, and the transformative power of education. Each year she would buy textbooks for the grade above her children’s current classes, drilling them in next year’s lessons and warning them against complacency.
They thrived in school, except for Khiel. When recess ended, he was the last child left on the playground. In class, he struggled to stay in his seat. He once brought home a teacher’s eyeglasses.
At the school’s urging, Ms. Elliott-Owens took Khiel to doctors when he was 6 or 7, and he was given a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder. His family already knew he could be prickly. “He was the kind of kid, you just couldn’t hug him,” Ms. Elliott-Owens said.
But Khiel (pronounced Kyle) was also gentle and playful with his younger siblings and proud to walk them to school in the mornings. “He was deep and introverted,” said one of his younger sisters, who is currently a lawyer and asked to be identified only as Kay, a nickname.
And Khiel and Na’im were inseparable. They would shoot hoops together and then return home and sit side-by-side sketching in their notebooks.
One time Khiel swallowed a lot of pills, or he claimed to. Ms. Elliott-Owens couldn’t get a straight answer from him. He was later taken to a psychiatric facility for children for a few days.
Ms. Elliott-Owens wondered if his troubles traced back to her decision to move to New York without him. “I don’t know if being left behind, if he was traumatized,” she said.
In January 2005, a 23-year-old woman was walking down Gates Avenue when someone jumped on her back. It was Khiel, and he had a gun.
Khiel, who was now 15, committed other robberies that month too, and his mother eventually found a stolen credit card in his room. Not much later, the police picked up Khiel for truancy and brought him home. Ms. Elliott-Owens seized the moment and encouraged him to confess to the robberies. He did. Then he was sent to a juvenile prison.
“I tell my kids, Whatever situation you get in,” Ms. Elliott-Owens said, “you deal with it, you pray about it and you do what you need to do. And let that be a lesson.”
While Khiel was incarcerated, a fire tore through the family’s building, forcing them to move. They ended up in a first-floor unit in the Medgar Evers apartments, a grim collection of nine large brick buildings on Gates Avenue.
With her mother’s help, Kay had gotten a scholarship to Phillips Academy, an elite boarding school in Andover, Mass. She went off to New England, where she marveled at the huge campus, the number of white people, and her discovery that opportunity was not some abstract concept but a palpable force whose sway she now felt, constantly.
In August 2007, Khiel, now 18, returned home.
He found work at a bodega, but mostly he hung around home, listening to hip-hop and writing lyrics. His mother sometimes told him to take “a time out,” her code that he should leave the apartment. He would step outside for a smoke wearing his headphones.
His behavior could be worrisome. At times, he retreated to the bathroom, switched off the lights and lay down. “He would talk to himself and we would hear him laughing,” his stepfather, Reginald, recalled. “It was terrible.”
His parents tried to get Khiel psychiatric help. Sometimes he would agree to go to a hospital, but when he reached the front door of the apartment, he would change his mind.
On Nov. 12, 2007, Ms. Elliott-Owens called a mobile crisis team — a group of mental health workers who do home visits. But Khiel left before they arrived. With no patient to treat, the team handed Ms. Elliott-Owens a card and departed.
When Khiel returned home, his mother told him what had happened. He demanded the card. His mother, by now exasperated, said that she would keep the card, as he would only lose it.
They began to argue. He was 18, he said, and wanted control of his life. This was her home, she said, and she was in charge.
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So she called 911.
Once, when Khiel was younger, she had done the same, and the police calmed him down and told him to mind his mother. For a while he did.
On this night, she was hoping for the same outcome. “This kid is a problem,” she told the dispatcher, according to a recording of the call.
Khiel grew increasingly agitated. “I got a gun and I’m going to shoot you,” he can be heard ranting in the background.
“Who is that?” the operator asked.
“That’s supposed to be my son,” Ms. Elliott-Owens said before the call ended.
Khiel grabbed two large knives from the kitchen. He showed them to his mother and laughed. He said he was prepared to die. His mother had heard this before. Ms. Elliott-Owens stood by the door, waiting for the officers.
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Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Officer James K. Dudley was patrolling nearby when the call came over for a 10-52 — code for a family dispute with a firearm.
Minutes later, he stood inside the apartment, facing down Khiel in a darkened hallway. Khiel lunged forward, a knife in each hand.
The officer drew an imaginary line and committed to shooting Khiel if he crossed it. But Khiel never did, according to a deposition Officer Dudley later gave.
Khiel charged, then retreated to his bedroom. He reappeared in the doorway without the knives. Now his left hand was in his sweatshirt. He said he had a gun.
“If this is about an argument with your mother,” Officer Dudley called out, “it doesn’t have to go this far.”
“Shoot me,” Khiel demanded before disappearing back into his bedroom. After a moment, Officer Dudley heard something behind the door and rushed in. Khiel had climbed onto the windowsill outside the first-floor apartment.
A row of officers stood outside, guns drawn. “Take your hands out of your pockets!” they shouted.
Khiel hopped to the ground, four feet below. He walked toward the officers, his hand tucked inside his sweatshirt. Officers scrambled for cover, crouching behind squad cars. Show your hands, they shouted. Khiel was walking faster now, his arm rising, as he pulled something from his sweatshirt.
Five officers opened fire. Afterward, they rolled Khiel over and found a hairbrush in his hand.
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Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
Hundreds turned out for Khiel’s funeral at the Nazarene Congregational United Church of Christ. The eulogies were as much about the police as about him.
“Why do they act with such deliberate caution in some neighborhoods and such recklessness in our neighborhoods?” asked the Rev. Al Sharpton.
A group of police officers stood guard outside the church. Khiel’s younger brother, Na’im, now 15, glared at them. He would get them, he shouted as he approached the officers, his mother recalled. His youngest sister Jannah, then 11, remembers it differently. “You killed my brother,” Na’im shouted. “And y’all just standing there like you did nothing wrong.”
Then Na’im burst into tears.
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Credit...New York Daily News
Growing up with a troubled big brother, Na’im had early on developed a sensitivity to others.
He was popular with his classmates. They would flip through his notebooks to copy his math homework or admire his drawings.
One morning, his friend Kasandra Reid came to school with her shirt — blue, with spaceships — inside out. When the teasing began, she burned with embarrassment until Na’im chimed in, “Don’t worry, you still look good.” Kasandra always remembered it.
“He was quiet and very smart,” recalled Sonia Gulardo, who was the principal of Beginning With Children, the charter school Na’im attended. “I do not remember ever having a discipline problem with Na’im.”
After eighth grade, he left his small school for Clara Barton High School, a larger public school in a different neighborhood. The transition was tough.
“He came home kicking mad one day,” his mother recalled. “Some kids had jumped him and taken his school ID.” Searching for new friends, he fell in with other teenagers from Gates Avenue. Some had formed a rap collective called Stack Paper. With them, Na’im felt like he belonged.
But even with his friends, he wouldn’t open up about Khiel’s death. “You would bring up his brother, he would just shut down,” recalled his girlfriend from that time, Tennisha Grant. “There would be this deep sadness.”
When Khiel was killed, Na’im had been walking home, still a block or two away. He felt that had he been home, maybe he could have calmed Khiel down, Jannah recalled. “He carried a bunch of guilt for that,” she said.
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Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
Na’im’s school attendance dropped, and increasingly he could be found hanging out on Gates Avenue. Two months after his brother’s death, he was walking home with friends one night when a police car pulled up. The officers told the group to stop. Na’im kept walking. He felt an officer grab his arm.
For several years then, the Police Department, under the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, had been ratcheting up the pressure in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The police’s preferred tactic was to stop, question, and frisk a growing number of teenagers and young men.
Na’im had reached an age when the police began to notice him.
When Na’im was stopped that night, Jan. 11, 2008, it would be one of 540,000 street stops in New York City that year. After grabbing Na’im, the officer searched his pockets. He found nothing, but arrested Na’im anyway for disorderly conduct.
Ms. Elliott-Owens rushed to the 81st Precinct station house to retrieve her son. Officers there told her that Na’im had been “uncooperative and anti-cop,” she recalled. Eventually Na’im was released.
The next day Ms. Elliott-Owens called a government hotline to complain about police harassment. She reported that she and Na’im were frightened. She explained that her other son had just been killed by police officers.
“Callers 16 year old is scared he will get shoot like his brother did,” the city’s typo-ridden notes from that conversation indicate.
Soon, the police were regularly stopping Na’im. His girlfriend Tennisha remembered walking alongside Na’im down Gates Avenue, when a group of officers approached. Before any words had been exchanged, Na’im put his hands on the nearest parked car and widened his stance.
“Go ahead,” he said. The officers frisked Na’im.
It upset Tennisha that the police would pat down Na’im for no apparent reason, and that Na’im expected such treatment.
“That’s normal,” Na’im told her. “They just do that.”
Sometimes Na’im was allowed to continue on his way. Other times, he was taken to the precinct in handcuffs and released after a few hours.
“He’d come out so shaken up,” recalled his sister Jannah, who often accompanied her mother to the precinct to collect Na’im.
The stops usually left little paper trail. But a partial picture of his interactions with the police can be pieced together from interviews with Na’im’s friends, his family, and police officers, along with various records, such as the complaints the family repeatedly filed. Those complaints led investigators from the Civilian Complaint Review Board to interview Na’im several times.
In the recorded interviews, Na’im speaks in a soft voice. He described too-tight handcuffs and station-house strip searches. He told of how an officer hit him with a baton. He described taking off running when the police approached.
But his heart wasn’t always in it. “I didn’t do nothing,” he said, describing one occasion when he stopped running and waited for the officer to catch him.
Na’im would ask why he was being arrested. The officers did not always answer. “You should know what you’re here for,” one officer told him. That bothered him. “They were just talking to me as though I’m their age,” he said in one recorded interview.
Not all his friends thought the police were targeting Na’im personally. “We wasn’t special,” a Stack Paper friend known as Lil Ock said. “Kids our age and living in them neighborhoods are going through the same thing.”
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Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times
But Na’im and his family were sure the police were after him because he was Khiel’s brother.
“It’s weird to say, but they wanted Na’im so bad,” his sister Jannah said.
All the stops and police harassment had a profound effect on Na’im, his family says. “It changed how I think he saw himself,” his sister Kay said. “Stop-and-frisk is one of the reasons I think why our paths diverged and Na’im went toward the street.”
In April 2008, Na’im was accused of stealing an iPhone from a girl at a bus stop. When the police arrested him, they found 45 bags of crack cocaine on him, officers claimed in court records.
The next day, he was arrested again, accused of participating in a mugging. On that occasion, he claimed, the officers punched and kicked him, opening a two-inch cut under his left eye. Still a minor, he was taken to a pediatric unit at Woodhull Hospital in handcuffs and shackles, and given stitches. “I was beaten up by the cops,” he explained, according to the medical staff’s notes.
Ms. Elliott-Owens asked Na’im’s defense lawyer what she should do. His advice was to move. Take the family someplace the police did not know Na’im.
In November, an acquaintance of Na’im’s became an informant and told the police that Na’im had a gun, according to court testimony.
The police set a trap and had the friend lure Na’im outside with the gun. When Na’im spotted officers closing in, he took off running, a pistol in his hand.
One of the officers fired a shot. Na’im stopped running and put his hands up.
“When that bullet flew by my ear,” he later told his mother, “I said, ‘This is it.’”
His brother had been dead just over a year. Now the police had shot at him, too.
When Na’im arrived on Rikers Island, he was 16 years old, just over 5-foot-4. He got in fights, racked up infractions, and wound up in solitary confinement. In a cell near him was a Stack Paper friend. If they laid on the floor, their voices carried under the cell doors. They tried to make sense of jail by telling each other they were becoming men.
Eventually his family was able to pay his bail. Soon after, he was arrested again for possession of another gun and sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
Na’im came home from prison in August 2013. He was 21, and nearly five inches taller. He got a job as a janitor. He attended church with his father, and spoke about getting into construction. He cut off his braids. He had a new girlfriend.
But Na’im was having difficulty staying out of trouble. His name popped up during an investigation into a crew that sold heroin, crack, and guns along Gates Avenue.
Detectives had pieced together that one of their targets — a suspected heroin dealer — owed Na’im money and was debating whether to pay Na’im or shoot him, according to a police official familiar with the case. Police procedure required that detectives notify Na’im of the danger.
So in June 2014, detectives knocked on Na’im’s door, according to law enforcement documents and interviews with Na’im’s relatives. Na’im stepped into the hallway rather than let the police inside. The detectives kept their warning vague.
“I have an idea who it is,” Na’im said, not sounding surprised. Then he ended the conversation.
On the night of Aug. 30, 2014, Na’im was hanging with friends from Stack Paper, the rap collective. They had finished shooting a music video earlier. Sometime after 2 a.m., Na’im headed home, three blocks away.
He was carrying a gun, possibly because of the warning from the detectives. A Crown Victoria drove by. Na’im locked eyes with the large plainclothes police officer at the wheel, and according to the officer’s account, he touched his waistband and began to run. Officers scrambled out of the car and chased after him.
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Security footage showing Na’im firing over his shoulder at pursuing officers while running up the block.
Surveillance footage shows Na’im shooting in two directions as he ran: Behind him at the plainclothes cops chasing him, and to his left at two uniformed officers trying to cut off his escape. One of his shots grazed an officer.
The police were firing, too. A bullet hit Na’im in the back. He collapsed on Gates Avenue, a block and a half from home.
Na’im’s father raced to Kings County Hospital. But he couldn’t enter Na’im’s room without a permission slip from the 81st Precinct. When he finally was allowed in, he began anointing Na’im with oil and reading the Bible aloud.
Na’im regained consciousness. The breathing tubes kept him from talking, but he could write. Using the permission slips his visitors brought, he wrote that he was thirsty and scared. He asked his visitors to organize a march. He expressed fear the officers guarding him would try to kill him.
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The bullet had damaged several organs. After six days, during which his health seemed to improve, Na’im died. He was buried in the same plot as Khiel, about four feet above his brother. Their grave at Rosedale Cemetery has no headstone and is covered in white clover.
Ms. Elliott-Owens never visited Na’im in the hospital. She had been in Tobago for her father’s funeral. Everyone said Na’im was healing. By the time she returned, he was dead.
Her last memory of Na’im: He carries her suitcase outside for her trip to her father’s funeral. They say goodbye on Gates Avenue next to where Khiel died.
“See you,” Na’im said.
“See you,” she responded.
That was more than five years ago. Some mornings, when she passes by this spot on the sidewalk, she lets herself imagine that her sons are not dead. “Walking by here, I’ll think that it’s just a dream,” she said.
She’ll look down the block to see if one of her sons is walking home. She squints a little, because of the tears, and because she wants to see which one.
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Credit...Ruddy Roye for The New York Times

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