Black lives matter?

[jtssrx]

A Mother Is Shot Dead on a Playground, and a Sea of Witnesses Goes Silent

One of the towers of the John Adams Houses in the South Bronx, where Jessica White, 28, was fatally shot on June 11.

Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

Jessica White died shielding her children from gunfire on a Bronx playground in June. Few witnesses have emerged, frustrating overworked detectives, and her killer eluded the police.

 

By BENJAMIN MUELLER and AL BAKER

October 7, 2016

To the right of where the hooded gunman paused and lifted his revolver, Jessica White’s three young children were twirling down a pockmarked metal slide.

They paid no mind to the swirl of life in the housing project playground around them: men rolling blunts at a graffitied concrete table, tenants playing bingo, rap and R&B blaring from a boombox. Their mother, buoyant after a long day behind the counter at a Shake Shack, was sitting nearby on a paint-chipped bench, unspooling her dream of getting her first apartment.

Sorrows had come to her family in stampedes. First, her father and older sister were killed in an apartment fire in 1997, when Ms. White was 9. Next, in 2012, in a different tower of the same South Bronx project, her brother was lured into a stairwell and shot to death. But on this evening, Ms. White, 28, was telling her mother that after five stays in a homeless shelter, she had saved just enough to move into a place of her own.

It was just after 10 on June 11, a busy Saturday night. The rain had stopped and the air was swampy. Ms. White’s children savored being outside their grandmother’s stuffy first-floor apartment, above the building’s boiler room.

“Five minutes, five minutes, five minutes!” the children kept calling. Again and again Ms. White and her mother, Gola White, caved: “O.K., five more minutes and we’re going inside the house.”

Ms. White with two of her children, Jessiah, left, and Damian Jr.

The first gunshot exploded from the walkway, between two London plane trees.

“Mommy, the kids!” Ms. White screamed.

“The kids!” her mother yelled back.

Ms. White bolted from the bench, her body low to the hopscotch court as she reached for Damian Jr., Jessiah and Danielle — 3, 5 and 9 — who were already scurrying toward her.

A bullet whistled past the play set, passed through her left breast and pierced her heart. Ms. White’s brothers ran out of their apartment and cradled her as she took her last breaths.

She joined the ranks of the unintended, as detectives call those who bleed over someone else’s beef.

In the days that followed, at marches and speeches and basketball games in Ms. White’s memory, everyone promised that the outcome would be different — that in 2016, with a plunge in crime freeing up police resources, a man could not shoot a young mother dead on a crowded playground and walk free.

But tenants of the project, the John Adams Houses, say they got what they have come to expect in one of the poorest communities in the country: public safety on a budget.

A $2,500 reward for tips, the bare minimum. Detectives shouldering caseloads that, by July, already exceeded what the department’s chiefs considered manageable over an entire year. Promises by a local police commander to look into adding tower lights at the playground, made more difficult by the fact that those he had — just two — were being used in other high-risk spots.

Detectives, in turn, were frustrated that even the killing of an innocent woman did not get the tip line ringing. Wanted posters with pictures of the gunman and his getaway car were torn off lampposts and trees. The young men at the playground claimed not to know a thing. “Y’all far from the hunch,” one said in an interview, and left it at that, a line detectives heard again and again.

The playground is deserted now. Tenants organized a nighttime check-in system in one of the high-rises to keep out strangers with guns.

And Gola White, who raised eight children in the Adams Houses, all of them homebodies with big, brown eyes, is trying in vain to move out before she loses another.

 

Interactive Feature | Murder in the 4-0 To understand how murder lives on in a city that has seen crime fall to historic lows, The New York Times is examining the life and death of each person whose murder is recorded this year in the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx.

With weariness more than anger, she said that the government skimps on public safety for black families like hers. She said she had asked the police about the $2,500 reward, which was not one-tenth the reward offered this summer after a young white woman was killed while jogging in Queens, generating weeks of intense news coverage.

“I think it’s a racist thing — I can’t beat around it,” Gola White said. “If you look at things on TV and somebody says, ‘I need this donated,’ if they’re white, they’ll get it faster than a black person.”

Her daughter’s fiancé, Damian Bell, was stung by an encounter about three weeks after her killing when he asked two patrol officers just outside the Adams Houses for an update. He said they did not recognize Ms. White’s name.

“They feel like we don’t care, so they don’t care,” Diana Void, Mr. Bell’s mother, said of city officials. “But it’s not everybody that doesn’t care. There’s a lot of us who do care.”

Few Clues and Leads

The crimes, the rivalries and, often enough, the gang or drug ties in a murder victim’s past usually fill the first pages of the manila homicide file. Before forensic evidence is back from the lab, that history acts as a road map for detectives.

Gola White, in red shirt, Ms. White’s mother, hugging her family the night her daughter died.

Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

Ms. White was a blank page.

The crime scene did not reveal any better clues.

Witnesses heard anywhere from three to six shots, but detectives found only a single bullet: the one in Ms. White’s chest. They thought it was a .38 caliber, but the bullet was so deformed that they could not say for sure. There were no fresh nicks on the trees, the jungle gyms or the church wall behind the playground that detectives noticed. No guns in the garbage chutes. And no bullet casings on the pavement or in the grass, which indicated that the weapon was a revolver.

Virtually the only sign detectives found of anyone having been killed there was Ms. White’s black sneaker lying near the bench.

Detective John Caruso and a team of 40th Precinct investigators set out to find surveillance video of the gunman fleeing. Some witnesses said he had made a sharp left onto East 152nd Street. Others were sure it was a sharp right. Detective Caruso pulled video from areas in both directions but found no trace of the black-hooded gunman or his pearly white sneakers.

Their search was delayed by a problem technology could not solve. Many of the bodegas and barbershops in the neighborhood were closed the day after the murder, for the Puerto Rican Day Parade, so the police could not immediately access their cameras.

Two days after the killing, Detective Caruso found crucial video of the gunman darting across East 152nd onto a side street. As he sprinted toward a getaway car, a silvery-blue Volkswagen Jetta, the killer made a mistake: He rested his hand on the hood of an S.U.V. for balance, most likely leaving fingerprints. But by the time the detectives got the video and found the S.U.V., the prints were smudged and a dozen other hands could have left theirs.

Likewise, images of the getaway car’s license plate were too blurry for the Police Department’s standard video software to enhance. Detective Caruso played the video again and again on his computer at home, looking in vain for any extra clues.

The clock was ticking. Detectives in the 40th Precinct get four days to work a homicide before they start picking up other cases again — the robberies, the assaults and the grand larcenies that are the public’s barometer of street crime and that can attract outsize attention from One Police Plaza. Every day without an arrest, the embers of the White case grew colder.

It was the ninth murder logged this year by the precinct. With three more murders since, the precinct is the second deadliest in the city, behind the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn.

“Someone like that, with her kids, you take it personal and you take it home with you,” Detective Caruso said. “What else can I do? What angle can I go?”

Persistent Drug Violence

Money and muscle have a way of making witnesses and crime victims around the Adams Houses forget a lot. Gola White worries that the $2,500 offered by the city is no match for those forces, especially when drugs are involved, as detectives believe they may be in Ms. White’s killing.

 

Map | John Adams Houses, Bronx 

One of the men at the playground that night was a dealer who had recently gotten out of prison, said Sgt. Michael J. LoPuzzo, the commander of the 40th Precinct detective squad. Witnesses said he had been rolling blunts at a concrete table where the White family usually sat, just a few paces in front of the bench they took that night instead. The dealer had once worked for a well-known drug boss and now wanted the crown for himself, residents said. So he recruited a few teenagers to sell for him around the Adams Houses, boys who used to go to school and were now causing headaches for their parents. Their wares were crack, powder cocaine and marijuana.

The Adams Houses had been open territory since 2013, when the police and federal prosecutors stitched together wiretaps, surveillance and tips from street informants into a takedown of the drug ring that had controlled the development for more than a decade and killed Ms. White’s brother.

Recently, a new dealer had looked to claim the project. The dealer with deeper roots told the interloper he had to leave. Detectives believe, in what they say is the most solid of many competing theories in Ms. White’s case, that the new dealer may have taken offense. “He comes back there, fires some shots, just to show, ‘You can’t push me off this easy,’” Sergeant LoPuzzo said. “And now a woman is dead.”

The ebb and flow of drug violence never ends, residents say. The takedown of the drug ring gave way to a peaceful spell, but last year the tide started to turn again.

“Every time they shut down one, another one comes about,” Gola White said of the drug crews. “You want to take over the world.”

In a community like the Adams Houses, densely packed and secluded, the crews exert insidious influence. Prosecutors said Gola White’s son Doneil White, who was killed in 2012, had been a nickel- and dime-bag drug dealer. No one cared much about his sales except for Jamal Smalls, a leader of the Bloods gang who was nicknamed Poo Black (a spin on Winnie the Pooh) and Mack (for Machiavelli).

Hundreds of pages of court transcripts detail how petty drug feuds, undetected in their early stages by the police, spawned fear that touched everyday citizens — as well as the long-term investment required of the authorities to snare a two-time killer who kept moving drugs, even from a Rikers Island jail cell.

The first time Mr. Smalls tried to shoot Mr. White, on July 18, 2012, he wounded a bystander in the Adams Houses, who identified Mr. Smalls as the gunman to a state grand jury. Soon, prosecutors said, Mr. Smalls paid or tried to pay the victim to forget; the man, confronted with his grand jury statements at a recent trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, said he could not identify the shooter.

The second time Mr. Smalls tried to shoot Mr. White, on July 25, he missed again, but a 16-year-old girl was in the lobby and witnessed part of the setup. When she was called to testify, Mr. Smalls’s associates filled the court benches in front of her, causing her to break down in tears on the stand and equivocate for nearly half an hour before pointing him out.

Mr. Smalls finally paid $10,000 to a friend, nicknamed Boo Banger, to lure Mr. White into a project stairwell and kill him. During Mr. White’s autopsy, pathologists found an old bullet lodged in his pelvic bone from an earlier shooting in the same housing project.

Ms. White and her mother attended Mr. Smalls’s trial dressed in memorial T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. White’s picture — a courageous statement, given that Mr. White’s daughter was wearing it on the day of her father’s funeral when Mr. Smalls pointed at it and taunted that he had “got slaughtered.”

Before Mr. Smalls was sentenced in August to 55 years in prison, a prosecutor, Joshua Naftalis, read a letter from Gola White.

“I don’t think anyone can understand this pain unless they have been through it themselves,” she wrote. “I hope that no mother would have to go through the pain of losing not one but two children to gun violence.”

A Cooling Case

The blacktop playground in the Adams Houses looked different when Ms. White was a little girl. There were concrete turtles to sit on and a net to climb where there are now plastic yellow cylinders to spin and a play set with a sailor’s wheel. Ms. White, ebullient and curious, used to run through the canyonlike corridors of the Adams Houses before heading to sleepovers in friends’ apartments.

The police said they had been paying attention to a robbery crew there called Jack Boyz, and had arrested young men on theft and gun charges nearby in the days before Ms. White’s killing. But residents said they rarely saw officers patrolling for very long on foot.

“At night, the project takes on a whole ’nother life,” said Gloria, 41, a family friend of the Whites, who like many people interviewed for this article declined to give her full name for fear of the killer. Officers make their rounds and check the roofs around 7 or 8 p.m., Gloria said, and “then you see the drug addicts come out, you see the drug dealers come out, you see the riffraff.”

After Ms. White was killed, almost no one played there; tenants said ghosts had moved in. Most days, around the time school lets out and young men start flashing wads of cash and getting antsy, patrol officers pull a car onto the walkway and stand outside the playground. Young men have complained about police harassment, but many tenants are thankful for the heavier presence.

As a patrol officer in the 40th Precinct in the mid-2000s, Detective Caruso had played stickball with boys in the neighborhood, among them the dealer who was rolling blunts in the park that night.

That camaraderie opened doors when he got the White case. The dealer even invited Detective Caruso inside to speak with him and his mother. But he denied being the target.

Another clue kept tugging at Detective Caruso. Surveillance footage at 745 East 152nd Street, one of the seven towers in the complex, had caught the gunman stepping onto the elevator from the 12th floor before he rode down, paced in the lobby, put a bandanna over his face and, after a minute of peering out the back door, strode toward the playground.

An anonymous 911 caller identified a young man who lived in that building, whose apartment had been robbed several months earlier in what appeared to be either a search for drugs or an attempt to terrorize the man’s family.

But that lead took a puzzling turn when Detective Caruso, on a visit to the apartment of the drug dealer who the police were told was the target, discovered the young man who the 911 caller said was the gunman hanging out there, too.

In the second-floor squad room of the 40th Precinct’s station house, the air stagnant and the shades drawn, detectives debriefed people arrested in other crimes to see if they had heard anything about the White killing. But tips were sparse and hard to corroborate.

Soon Detective Caruso was forced to divide his attention with other cases. By September, most of the squad’s detectives were handling more than 200 cases. Police officials said the department advises that 180 cases is manageable for the entire year.

Different Treatment

Two residents of the Adams Houses said in interviews that they recognized the gunman from a surveillance image posted by the Police Department — the same man who was identified by the anonymous 911 caller. They said he was in a gang and sold drugs around the playground.

But they said that day-to-day life in the project came with enough threats, including sexual assaults in the stairwells, and that they feared cooperating with the police could get them killed. One of them also said that when he once reported being threatened elsewhere in the city, officers said they did not believe him. He acknowledged he may not have truly been in danger, but said that encounter with the police made him feel that “my dignity is lost.”

They were unaware there was any reward at all for tips. Other residents, and some retired detectives, were skeptical that raising it would make a difference.

“I don’t need 22 bands” — $22,000 — “to give closure to the family,” said one project resident, though, he added, “it would be a bonus.”

Some retired police officials said the White case looked especially neglected next to the investigation into the murder of Karina Vetrano later in the summer. The daughter of a retired city firefighter and neighbor of a police commander, Ms. Vetrano was raped and beaten during a jog through a park in Howard Beach, Queens.

Her case was in the headlines almost every day for weeks, whereas Ms. White’s killing drew a few newspaper and television reports, laying bare the different treatment the news media often gives murder victims depending on their race and where they live.

Before long, the city had installed eight surveillance cameras around the Queens park at a cost of $280,000, using money from the borough president’s office. And Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office had put up a $10,000 reward for tips on top of an additional $25,000 from the Police Department and city-affiliated foundations, funds that were not made available in Ms. White’s case.

“Unfortunately, the woman in the Bronx is being treated like collateral damage,” said Thomas D. Nerney, a retired 36-year veteran of the Police Department and a former detective on the Major Case Squad. “It’s a signal to the people in that area of the Bronx that if you’re not high-profile then you don’t count. And that irks me.”

The city’s tips website, CrimeStoppers, lists two unsolved homicides in the Bronx with rewards above $10,000.

Since the beginning of 2015, there have been at least 122 felony crimes in and around the Adams Houses, according to a city crime map. By comparison, the killing of Ms. Vetrano in Queens was one of three felony crimes recorded within 10 square blocks over the same period.

The Police Department pulled detectives from around the city to comb Ms. Vetrano’s crime scene, sampling every scrap for evidence. The playground at the Adams Houses had just the usual two-person crime scene team assisting the detectives.

In an interview, the city councilman for that part of the Bronx, Rafael Salamanca Jr., said that the reward should be higher, but that he had not spoken to City Hall about it. He was distressed to hear about the experience of Ms. White’s fiancé outside the housing project, when patrol officers had not known her name.

“These are the types of things that affect the community-police relationship,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing that makes the community feel like they don’t care.”

At a packed tenants’ meeting after Ms. White’s death, people said they were grateful for the additional patrols, but asked why it took a murder to get the police walking through the development.

“Maybe just for that one second that you walk past, you can stop, maybe slow the process or stop someone getting hurt,” one woman called out to a police commander. “Y’all not God, y’all can’t see everything. But your presence walking through here would make a big difference.”

A Family Mourns

After Gola White’s son was killed, she bought a burial plot for two. The second grave was going to be hers. She put a down payment on a tombstone, and gave her children instructions for adding an icon of an open Bible next to her name when she died.

Instead, in June, she told the tombstone maker to add her daughter’s name. She is still $200 short of what she needs to get the black stone placed.

“Never in my imagination did I think I would be burying another one of my kids,” Ms. White said.

She often lies in bed awake past 3 a.m. She is cajoling city workers to help her move into other subsidized housing, among them the same official who had tried to get her a new apartment after her son was killed. One apartment the official offered her then was too small; another was in a neighborhood where she said she had tense relationships. She cries when she wonders if she could have done more to protect her daughter.

Her grandchildren no longer like being outside. A grandson, Tyshon, 5, heard a bang from workers taking down scaffolding after school and asked to go home. Another time, he dove under a play set when someone started lighting firecrackers.

“Every bang, every boom, everything he hears — if he hears people fighting — everything is just, ‘I want to go in the house, I want to go home, when are we leaving?’” Ms. White said.

Early on, Jessica White’s younger two children, Damian Jr. and Jessiah, would sometimes tell their father, Mr. Bell, “Go to the doctor and get Mommy.” The oldest, Danielle, had no choice but to confront what had happened. Her father showed her the Facebook page of a man he had heard committed the killing and asked if she recognized his face from the playground.

One afternoon in July, Mr. Bell’s mother, Ms. Void, was doing the girls’ hair before a trip to the movies. Danielle, named after her mother’s sister who had died in the fire, got it straightened with a flat iron. Jessiah had wanted a ponytail until she looked up at her sister. She decided she wanted the same.

A great-uncle dropped by and kissed Danielle on the forehead. “You looking just like your mama,” he said. The girl took a look in the mirror to make sure.

[Cold War]

The BLM movement, the $15 hr movement, will quietly go away after the election......just like code pink did. 

Only white guilt ridden liberals believe it is legitimate.

[Zambroski]

1 hour ago, Cold War said:

The BLM movement, the $15 hr movement, will quietly go away after the election......just like code pink did. 

Only white guilt ridden liberals believe it is legitimate.

X2.  

[sear]

1 hour ago, Cold War said:

"The BLM movement, the $15 hr movement, will quietly go away after the election......just like code pink did. 

Only white guilt ridden liberals believe it is legitimate." Cold War

"X2." Zambrowski 

Let me take a wild guess:

Two White guys?

[Zambroski]

3 minutes ago, sear said:

Let me take a wild guess:

Two White guys?

No, I'm a stupid negro.  But I still know how to use a fucking quote button!

[sear]

" I still know how to use a fucking quote button! " Einstein 

Well don't squander your talent inventing gravity lieutenant.

Why don't you declare your candidacy for president of the United States? If you " still know how to use a fucking quote button! " the cosmos would obviously benefit from your taking a top ranking executive position. Fill in as U.S. president until there's an opening for Emperor of the Cosmos.

[Cold War]

27 minutes ago, sear said:

Let me take a wild guess:

Two White guys?

Steve Martin: The Television Stuff (5/11) Best Show Ever Clip - YouTube

[Zambroski]

17 minutes ago, sear said:

 

 

Well don't squander your talent inventing gravity lieutenant.

Why don't you declare your candidacy for president of the United States? If you " still know how to use a fucking quote button! " the cosmos would obviously benefit from your taking a top ranking executive position. Fill in as U.S. president until there's an opening for Emperor of the Cosmos.

That's actually not a bad idea.  I can debate better than either of our two hopefuls.  And I'm honest to boot!  But, that last part will sink me.  So, I'll just watch it like the circus side show that it is.