The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 68/No. 6           February 16, 2004  
 
 
New York demonstrators demand:
Prosecute cop who killed Black youth!
(front page)
 
BY DON MACKLE  
BROOKLYN, New York—Nearly 100 protesters marched here January 31 chanting, “No justice, no peace!” They demanded the prosecution of the cop who a week earlier had shot and killed Timothy Stansbury, Jr., an African-American youth.

Stansbury, 19, was killed on the roof of the Louis Armstrong Houses by New York Police Department (NYPD) officer Richard Neri.

“I want justice for my grandson,” Irene Clayburne, Stansbury’s grandmother, told demonstrators at the rally in front of the Housing Police Department office, where Neri was stationed. Stansbury lived with his grandmother in the apartment complex where he was shot.

The killing took place just after midnight January 24. Stansbury and two friends left a birthday party for another teenager and crossed the rooftop to an adjoining building, which they entered to pick up some more CDs. As they came back up the stairs they ran into Neri and his partner patrolling the rooftops. The cops reportedly claim that Neri was startled when the door swung out toward them as they opened it, the second cop stumbled, and Stansbury stood in the doorway. Neri already had his gun out of his holster and opened fire, shooting Stansbury in the chest.

“The door came open and they shot him,” said Mark Heller, an attorney for the Stansbury family who had talked to the two youth accompanying Stansbury. “Nobody said ‘Halt.’ Nobody said ‘Freeze.’ The door opened up and a bullet was fired. He never got out the door.”

“There is no way he is going to get away with what he is saying,” Timothy Stansbury, Sr., the youth’s father, told demonstrators, referring to the cop. “I know he knew there were people coming up those stairs. There is plenty of light in there. You can see everything.” The city has moved quickly to head off the kind of mass protests that have taken place in response to earlier brutality by cops. Top police officials have called the shooting “unjustified.” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials have visited the family. Bloomberg spoke at Stansbury’s January 30 funeral, which was attended by hundreds of residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the youth was killed.

Earlier in the week activists with Parents Against Police Brutality joined family members and others at a press conference in front of the apartment building where the shooting took place to demand Neri’s indictment.

At the same time, the city’s big-business media have begun to play up the theme that police working in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn confront dangerous conditions. “Parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant can be…among the most dangerous places in the city, state and nation,” stated the January 29 New York Post. “If it wasn’t for a minority of hard-bitten, drug-selling, gun-toting mutts who hold the honest hardworking majority of people in Bed-Stuy hostage, 19-year-old Timothy Stansbury would be alive today.… Stansbury was as much a victim of the mutts who roam Brooklyn’s Baghdad as anything else.”

At the January 31 action, residents responded to this criminalization of the neighborhood with signs reading “Being Black does not mean criminal.” One sign worn by Angel Yulfo said, “Low income does not mean low-life.”

“They claim there is drug dealing and pit bull fighting going on on the rooftops,” said Yulfo. “I say ‘show me that on paper.’ We use these rooftops all the time to go from one building to another.”

Margarita Rosario, whose son Anthony was shot and killed by police in 1995, marched and spoke at the January 31 rally. Cynthia Howell, niece of 57-year-old Alberta Spruill, who was killed in her Harlem apartment by NYPD cops last year, also spoke. Spruill was a longtime municipal worker and member of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 37, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Howell said it’s important to keep up the public pressure on the city to prosecute the guilty cop, pointing out that none of the police involved in the killing of Spruill have ever faced charges.

City authorities have convened a grand jury that is supposed to hear testimony to determine if any charges will be brought against Neri.  
 
 
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