Vol. 80/No. 2 January 18, 2016
Hawa Bah: ‘Join fight against
NY police killing of my son’
Hawa Bah, a businesswoman in Guinea, West Africa, visited her son in September 2012 and found him suffering from depression. She called 911 to ask for an ambulance to take him to the hospital, and went downstairs to wait. Instead, five cops in SWAT gear arrived.
“I told them, ‘My son didn’t do anything wrong. He’s sick and needs to go to the hospital,’” Bah said. The cops pushed past her, went up to Mohamed Bah’s apartment and fired 10 shots, striking him eight times, once in the head. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
The police claimed Mohamed Bah threatened them with a knife.
“They treated him that way because he was Black,” Hawa Bah said. She and her attorneys demanded the police test the knife they claimed Mohamed had for fingerprints. They never did. Today the cops say the knife and other potentially important items from the scene were “contaminated” when the evidence warehouse was flooded during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012.
In November 2013 Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said a grand jury had ruled the cops’ “use of deadly physical force was not unlawful.”
Bah says the city covered up the real facts and demands the investigation be reopened. She filed a lawsuit demanding damages. During legal discovery the cover-up is unraveling, Randolph McLaughlin, an attorney with Newman Ferrara, the law firm representing the Bah family, told the Militant.
Some of the police changed their stories in sworn depositions, the attorney said. The cops said earlier that Mohamed Bah had slashed at them with his knife, even after they used stun guns. Then Detective Edwin Mateo yelled, “He’s stabbing me! Shoot him!” and the cops opened fire.
Now they say when they fired stun guns and a bean bag at Bah, the wire from a stun gun shocked Mateo, who cried out and fell to the floor. Then he and two other officers started shooting.
“I asked Mateo whether at the time he yelled, ‘Shoot him!’ was Mohamed Bah stabbing him?” McLaughlin said. “He answered, ‘No.’ I asked if he was stabbing anybody, and he said, ‘No.’”
“Forensic evidence in the coroner’s report shows that all bullets entered in a slightly downward direction, indicating the shooters had to be standing above Mr. Bah,” the attorney added. “And the bullet to his head was shot at close range, from 12 to 18 inches away.”
Hawa Bah has become a stalwart of the fight against police brutality and killings here. Along with Iris Baez, Gwen Carr, Katiadou Diallo, Constance Malcolm and Juanita Young — all of whom had sons killed by the New York police — she can be found in the front line of area rallies and marches.
Related articles:
Chicago actions continue against killings by cops
‘Arrest cops who shot down student, neighbor!’
UK gov’t moves to arm more cops, let them ‘shoot to kill’
NJ: ‘The autopsy showed my son’s death was homicide’
Protests demand charges against Paradise cop
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