In May, 2010, Kalief Browder, a sixteen-year-old high-school sophomore,
was arrested in the Bronx for allegedly stealing a backpack. He
insisted that he was innocent, but he was taken to Rikers Island, New
York City’s four-hundred-acre jail complex. Browder spent the next three
years at Rikers, awaiting trial while his case was repeatedly delayed
by the courts. In May, 2013, the case against him was dismissed.
Yorker obtained two
surveillance-camera video clips that depict the dual horrors of
Browder’s years in jail: abuse by a guard and by fellow-inmates.
He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a
robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one
thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During
that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he
attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he
ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose,
and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.
In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted
suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a
bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas
Hospital, not far from his home, in the Bronx. When I met him, in the
spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.
This is the story written by the New York journalist who published his story for the first time.
Late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he
stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of
Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day
after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St.
Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like
himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently
thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was
watching me.”
After two weeks at St. Barnabas, Browder was released and sent back
home. The next day, his lawyer, Paul V. Prestia, got a call from an
official at Bronx Community College. An anonymous donor (who had likely
read the New Yorker story) had offered to pay his tuition for
the semester. This happy news prompted Browder to reënroll. For the next
few months he seemed to thrive. He rode his bicycle back and forth to
school every day, he no longer got panic attacks sitting in a classroom,
and he earned better grades than he had the prior semester.
Ever since I’d met him, Browder had been telling me stories about having
been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were
disturbing, but I did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until
this past April when I obtained surveillance footage of an officer
assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking
him. I sat next to Kalief while he watched these videos for the first
time. Afterward, we discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. I told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.
He was driven by the same motive that led him to talk to me for the
first time, a year earlier. He wanted the public to know what he had
gone through, so that nobody else would have to endure the same ordeals.
His willingness to tell his story publicly—and his ability to recount
it with great insight—ultimately helped persuade Mayor Bill de Blasio to
try to reform the city’s court system and end the sort of excessive
delays that kept him in jail for so long.
Browder’s story also caught the attention of Rand Paul, who began
talking about him on the campaign trail. Jay Z met with Browder after
watching the videos. Rosie O’Donnell invited him on “The View” last year
and recently had him over for dinner. Browder could be a very private
person, and he told almost nobody about meeting O’Donnell or Jay Z.
However, in a picture taken of him with Jay Z, who draped an arm around his shoulders, Browder looked euphoric.
Last Monday, Prestia, who had filed a lawsuit on Browder’s behalf
against the city, noticed that Browder had put up a couple of odd posts
on Facebook. When Prestia sent him a text message, asking what was going
on, Browder insisted he was O.K. “Are you sure everything is cool?”
Prestia wrote. Browder replied: “Yea I’m alright thanks man.” The two
spoke on Wednesday, and Browder did seem fine. On Saturday afternoon,
Prestia got a call from Browder’s mother: he had committed suicide.
That night, Prestia and I visited the family’s home in the Bronx.
Fifteen relatives—aunts, uncles, cousins—sat crammed together in the
front room with his parents and siblings. The mood was alternately
depressed, angry, and confused. Two empty bottles of Browder’s
antipsychotic drug sat on a table. Was it possible that taking the drug
had caused him to commit suicide? Or could he have stopped taking it and
become suicidal as a result?
His relatives recounted stories he’d told them about being starved and
beaten by guards on Rikers. They spoke about his paranoia, about how he
often suspected that the cops or some other authority figures were after
him. His mother explained that the night before he told her, “Ma, I
can’t take it anymore.” “Kalief, you’ve got a lot of people in your
corner,” she told him.
One cousin recalled that when Browder first got home from jail, he would
walk to G.E.D. prep class every day, almost an hour each way. Another
cousin remembered seeing him seated by the kitchen each morning with his
schoolwork spread out before him.
His parents showed me his bedroom on the second floor. Next to his bed
was his MacBook Air. (Rosie O’Donnell had given it to him.) A bicycle
stood by the closet. There were two holes near the door, which he had
made with his fist some months earlier. Mustard-yellow sheets covered
his bed. And, to the side of the room, atop a jumble of clothes, there
were two mustard-yellow strips that he had evidently torn from his
bedsheets.
As his father explained, he’d apparently decided that these torn strips
of sheet were not strong enough. That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he
went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed
himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord
wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at
the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise, she went upstairs to
investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until
she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that
her youngest child had hanged himself.
That evening, in a room packed with family members, Prestia said, “This
case is bigger than Michael Brown!” In that case, in which a police
officer shot Brown, an unarmed teen-ager, in Ferguson, Missouri, Prestia
recalled that there were conflicting stories about what happened. And
the incident took, he said, “one minute in time.” In the case of Kalief
Browder, he said, “When you go over the three years that he spent [in
jail] and all the horrific details he endured, it’s unbelievable that
this could happen to a teen-ager in New York City. He didn’t get
tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!”
Last year, the office of Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for
the Southern District, released a report denouncing the horrific
conditions in the adolescent jail on Rikers, describing it as a place
that “seems more inspired by Lord of the Flies than
any legitimate philosophy of humane detention.” Browder experienced this
firsthand during the many months he was held there.
In the fall of 2010, Browder, who was seventeen years old at the time,
found himself assigned to a housing unit that was ruled by a gang. He
was not a member of the gang, and on October 20, 2010, he recalls, a
gang leader spit in his face. He decided that he needed to retaliate. If
he had not, he said, it would have “meant they could keep spitting in
my face. I wasn’t going to have that.”
