The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 78/No. 14      April 14, 2014

 
Rally slams jail conditions in NYC
 
BY CANDACE WAGNER  
NEW YORK — “They tried to say my daughter was a bum,” said Anita Neal, the mother of Kyam Livingston, who died in a Brooklyn Central Booking jail cell July 21 last year after her pleas for medical attention were ignored for seven hours. “My daughter was a hard-working woman. On the 21st of every month we’re out demanding justice. I’ll be out in April, May, until we get justice.”

Neal spoke at a March 21 meeting organized by the Justice for Kyam Livingston committee at the Flatbush Reformed Church in Brooklyn.

Terry Hubbard described how she went to the police precinct looking for her son who has a mental disability. “Never heard of your son,” cops told her. It took her two days to find out he had been sent to Brooklyn Central Booking. After arriving there she waited for hours only to be told that her son had been taken before a judge and transferred to Rikers Island.

Program chair Djibril Toure, of the Malcolm X Grass Roots Movement, noted that Jerome Murdough, a homeless veteran, died Feb. 15 at Rikers Island from extreme temperatures in his cell. Cops arrested him for trespassing in an apartment building on a cold night.

“Kyam Livingston is not an isolated case at all,” said Haley Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for the NYC Jails Action Coalition.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home