LETTER FROM NEW YORK
In an advertisement published the day after the tragedy, in five New York newspapers, Donald Trump, then real estate magnate, had asked for the death penalty for them. They were the “Central Park Five”, four African-American teenagers and a Hispanic wrongly accused of raping and beating a jogger in Manhattan park in April 1989. Sentenced to long years in prison, they were cleared in 2002 and then compensated in 2014.
Thirty-four years after the tragedy, one of them, Yusef Salaam, is about to enter the New York City Council, elected for the district of Harlem. On Wednesday, July 5, at age 49, he was declared the winner of the Democratic primary, unexpectedly beating Inez Dickens, 73, the candidate backed by the city’s centrist Democratic mayor, Eric Adams. The result of the final election in November against a Republican candidate is hardly in doubt in this Democratic stronghold.
Yusef Salaam, who campaigned primarily on his tragic past, takes revenge on history worthy of American legends. “I have no political record”declared during his campaign the forty-year-old who has been involved for years in the reform of the American judicial system. “I have an excellent record, over the thirty-four years of the Central Park jogger case, in the fight for freedom, justice and equality. »
Six years and eight months behind bars
The drama begins on April 19, 1989, in the midst of a crime crisis in New York. Shortly after 9 p.m., a 29-year-old white woman, Trisha Meili, is assaulted while jogging; she is dragged into a ditch, raped, hit with a stone and left for dead. She lost three-quarters of her blood, suffered a bulging eye and 21 broken bones when she was found in a coma more than four hours later “She looked like she had been tortured,” will say the first policeman to discover it. Kids are arrested, confessions on video recorded the day after. “I heard them beating Korey Wise [un des « cinq »] in the next roomYusef Salaam told the Guardian in 2016. They came to look at me and said to me: “You understand that you are next”. The fear really made me feel like I wasn’t going to be able to get out of this. »
In this time of the war on drugs and record violence in New York, the pressure is immense to find the culprits, and quickly. Despite their retraction, the “five” are sentenced to the maximum penalty for minors under 16, five to ten years in prison. The case rebounds more than ten years later, when in a prison, in 2002, Matias Reyes, born in 1971, confesses to having committed the crime. The case is prescribed for him but allows the file to be reopened.
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