[I. Preface]
II. The Crime: April 19, 1989
By Thomas Clough
A full moon hung over Harlem, the “Capital of Black America.” It was a Wednesday, what suburbanites call a school night, but the countless youngsters who roamed the streets of Harlem as the night deepened felt no urge to return home and rest up for another day of scholarship.
By 8:30 in the evening a loose gang of Harlem “youths,” aged 12 to sixteen, had gathered at 117th Street and Madison Avenue in front of the Schomburg Plaza. They were just “hanging out” with nothing to do. Then someone suggested that they all go “wilding.” Energized by this idea, the gang set off for Central Park. As they neared the park, they met and joined another group of Harlem teenagers who were loose on the streets. They were a pack of 33 to 40 when they entered the park at 8:50 p.m. intent on raising hell, just for the fun of it. One of these young gangsters, Raymond Santana, recalled: “We planned to rob joggers and cyclists inside Central Park . . .I counted 33 people who were going into the park to rip people off.” They swarmed through the 110th Street entrance to the park and began their violent rampage.
Their first victim was a homeless man, Antonio Diaz, whom the gang knocked to the ground, brutally beat, and then dumped in the bushes. They were having fun. They roved south to 101st Street, where they formed a gauntlet that ensnared two tandem cyclists, Gerald Malone and Patricia Dean. Ms. Dean recalled: “I was terrified. They were grabbing at my legs and pushing at my shoulders. They were making animal noises, grunting.” Mr. Malone and Ms. Dean escaped these demons of the night; British jogger Robert Garner was not as fortunate. He was thrown down an embankment and beaten. He believed that he “was going to die.” John Laughlin, a teacher, was thrown face down and beaten with a pipe until he was a bloody mess. Mr. Laughlin recounted: “I yelled out ‘Fellas, why are you doing this to me? Stop!’” They were wasted words; the Harlem “youth” were having fun.
At least nine people were mindlessly savaged that April evening. At 10:05 this loose posse of teenagers crossed paths with a 28-year-old white woman who was jogging in Central Park to relax after a long day at Salomon Brothers, where she worked as an investment banker. She was a pretty Wellesley College grad from Pennsylvania and a rising star at Salomon Brothers. She was pounding her way across the park’s 102nd Street transverse on her nightly jog.
From the instant the wilding wolf pack spotted her it was a case of Beauty and the Beasts. They swarmed over her, they dragged her into a ravine where she was raped, tortured and savagely battered beyond recognition. They left her for dead.
Later, as the wolf pack drifted out of the park, the cops spotted a dozen teenagers on Central Park West at 100th Street and moved in. The police were on the lookout for the perps who had attacked so many innocent people earlier that evening. The police didn’t yet know about the woman lying unconscious in a lake of her own blood at the bottom of a ravine deep in the park. At the sight of the police, the punks scattered. The cops apprehended only a few of them. Among the catch of the night were Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Steve Lopez, Clarence Thomas and LaMont McCall. They were taken to the Central Park station house.
Sometime around 4 a.m. the next morning, Thursday, the cops were about to spring these suspects with summonses for assault when a call came in from Detective Jose Rosario who had responded to the discovery of an unconscious woman in the park. Two male joggers had chanced upon her comatose body at 1 a.m. Detective Rosario wanted the teens held for further questioning.
Suspects McCall and Thomas were tight lipped, but Kevin Richardson, who was questioned in the presence of his mother, Grace Cuffen [aka Cuffie], was more forthcoming. When questioned about the scratch on his face, Richardson finally blurted out, “All right. It was the girl. She scratched me when we had the fight.” Richardson handwrote a statement that implicated Raymond Santana and Steve Lopez. He pointed the finger at Antron McCray. The final line of Richardson’s handwritten statement reads: “I was the one that didn’t rape her.”
In the presence of two detectives and his grandmother, Raymond Santana said: “Antron came and started ripping her clothes off. Antron pulled her pants off and she was screaming . . .Kevin pulled down his pants and had sex with her. When she was on the floor, I grabbed her tits . . .I did not have sex with her.”
According to Detective Mike Sheehan, as he was transporting Raymond Santana uptown Santana said, “I had nothing to do with the rape of that lady. All I did was touch her tits.”
Antron McCray, who was picked up after being fingered by Kevin Richardson, was taken to the 20th Precinct for questioning in the presence of his parents Bobby and Linda. When questioning seemed at a standstill, McCray’s father stepped outside with Detective Gonzales. According to Det. Gonzales, Mr. McCray “said he knew his son very well and that he wasn’t giving us all the information and that maybe it would be better if the mother wasn’t there.” After Linda McCray departed, Antron became a fountain of information. “He described exactly how the female jogger was attacked, who hit her,” said Det. Harry Hildebrandt. “How he kicked her. How her clothes were ripped off and how different individuals, including himself being number three, jumped on her.”
Within a day the cops had taken custody of Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise. Salaam denied that he was even in the park that night, so Det. McKenna tested Salaam with one small lie: the detective told the suspect that the police crime laboratory was able to lift fingerprints from the jogger’s clothing. He told Salaam: “We have the jogger’s pants. They’re satin. They’re a very smooth surface and we have been able to get fingerprints off them. If they match, you’re going for rape.” Knowing where his hands had been, Yusef Salaam began to spill: “I was there but I didn’t rape her.”
In his second interview, suspect Kharey Wise admitted: “This is my first thing I did to any type of female in the street. This is my first rape. I never did this before, and this is gonna be my last time doing it.” Kharey Wise recalled: “They were going to kill her so she won’t identify us. Yusef say, ‘Don’t kill her, man. Bad enough you’re raping her. . .’” And, “Kevin and Raymond picked up a rock. Kevin hit her in the face with a rock . . .Steve was using a knife to cut her legs. I moved out of the way. Blood was scattering all over the place. I couldn’t look at it no more.”
The police charged six teens for rape: Kharey Wise, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson and Steve Lopez. As the jogger clung to life at Metropolitan Hospital, people across the city prayed for her recovery. Strangers erected a makeshift shrine at the site of her savage attack. Meanwhile, the perps were laughing it up in a 24th Precinct holding cell, singing the Tone Loc lyrics “That’s what happens when the bodies start slappin’, doin’ the wild thing.”
I. Preface
II. The Crime: April 19, 1989
III. Harlem Goes Bonkers
IV. Harlem Says They’re Innocent
V. The Harlem Spokesfolks Mobilize
VI. Three Detectives Remember
VII. A Prosecutor Remembers
VIII. The Star Witness
IX. His Story Stinks
X. The Confessions
XI. How Guilty is Harlem
XII. The Forgotten Victim
XIII. Update to the Central Park Rape Case
XIV. The Victim’s Doctor Breaks His Silence
XV. The Jogger Rape Saga Continues
XVI. Thursday, December 5, 2002
XVII. The Matias Reyes/Kharey Wise Connection
XVIII. Don’t Be Fooled
XIX. The End Game
XX. Here Comes the Judge
XXI. Is Nancy Ryan Trustworthy?
XXII. Nancy Ryan’s Twisted Vision
XXIII. Twisted Justice
Additional Material
(Stix: “‘It Was Fun’—Robert K. Tanenbaum vs. the Central Park Five, 25 Years Later”; and
Stix: “Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five: The New To Kill a Mockingbird—Fiction Designed to Induce White Guilt.”
(N.S.: These were not the first reports I wrote on the Central Park Jogger case. I’d already written many, going back at least to 2000.)
“The Report That Ken Burns Doesn’t Want You to Read: The Armstrong Report on the Central Park Five’s Many Violent Crimes, and Matias Reyes”
1 comment:
Clough has talent,no doubt. I saw the interviews with the CP 5. Guilty as nigs can be. How they got dough out of this is the head scratcher of all time.
--GRA
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