Kalief Browder committed suicide. He was a young New York student who spent three years in Rikers Island jail without being convicted of a crime. On Saturday, Kalief took his own life at his home in the Bronx. He was 22 years old. In 2010, when he was just 16 years old he was sent to Rikers Island without trial on suspicion of stealing a backpack. Earlier this year, The New Yorker obtained explosive video showing the violence to which Kalief was subjected to there. Surveillance camera footage shows him being abused on two separate occasions. In one clip from 2012, the teenager is seen inside Rikers’ Central Punitive Segregation Unit, better known as the Bing. As a guard escorts Browder to the showers, Kalief appears to speak, and then the guard suddenly violently hurls him to the floor, although he’s already handcuffed. In a separate video clip from 2010, Kalief is attacked by almost a dozen other teenage inmates after he punches a gang member who spat in his face. The other inmates pile onto Kalief and pummel him until guards finally intervene. Kalief’s case led to calls for reforming New York’s criminal justice system.
Kalief Browder did not return home for 33 months, almost three years, even though he was never tried or convicted. For nearly 800 days of that time, he was held in solitary confinement. He maintained his innocence, requested a trial, but was only offered plea deals while the trial was repeatedly delayed. Near the end of his time in jail, the judge offered to sentence him to time served if he entered a guilty plea, and told him he could face 15 years in prison if he was convicted. He refused to accept the plea deal, was only released when the case was dismissed.
Jennifer Gonnerman talking:
He spent about two years in solitary confinement on Rikers Island and attempted to end his life several times while he was there. And described some of those instances for me. And I wrote about some of it in The New Yorker. And then, after he was released, he was released in 2013, several months later he again made another very serious suicide attempt and spent about a week in a psychiatric hospital. And yet, he tried every day to beat back the nightmares and transcend what he had lived through and make up for all of this lost time. He was — in recent months he was enrolled at Bronx Community College and he was doing well. I spoke to somebody there yesterday. He had a 3.5 GPA for this semester, which is extraordinary. I mean, he lost his junior year and his senior year of high school while he was locked up. So every day he was grappling with sort of trying to move past what he had endured. But, I guess trauma was too much.
At the end of last year, the mayor eliminated solitary confinement for juvenile offenders on Rikers Island. I mean the New York Times has been doing very aggressive coverage about the outrages on Rikers Island. But Mayor Bill de Blasio did cite Kalief’s case a couple months ago when he talked about a new initiative to try to speed up court cases, especially in the Bronx, but across the city. And that, sort of, excessive court delays that have been going on, that is part of the reason he spent so much time in jail there. Trying to address that. Now, whether these reforms are going to lead to lasting change, I don’t know. We can only, sort of, hope that, you know, that his death is not in vain and that real systematic change happens.
From the first moment I met him, he said, Jen, you have to get that video from September 23, 2012 when this officer, sort of, threw me to the ground and assaulted me. And I thought, how am I going to get that video? And then I thought, how does he know the exact date? And he remembered — he had an incredible recall for details and dates and for what had happened him. And he knew that this assault had happened right on camera. And I sat next to him and he watched it a few months ago. On the one hand, it’s like incredibly disturbing to watch, and on the other hand, he was gratified that finally people were going to know exactly what happened to him. And it was just, the whole thing is just so disturbing. It’s almost beyond words.
He was suing the New York City system. He has been for almost two years, had a lawsuit against New York City, against the Department of Corrections, the district attorney for his case, hoping to get some justice. And like his criminal case, his civil case has been dragging on and on. And he’s been through many days of depositions, which essentially means sitting in a room with city lawyers and being grilled about exactly what happened, including being grilled about his suicide attempts on Rikers Island.
His family is very private and didn’t want to be public or talk publicly about what happened. But, as you can imagine, appeared to me completely devastated and confused and angry, as you would imagine, by this tragedy.
He was getting some treatment and was on medication at the time and had been for many months.
— source democracynow.org