Kalief Browder, The NYC Boy That Was Sent To Rikers For 3yrs On False Pretense KIlled Himself. RIP.

johntheblackjew

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Man who was kept in Rikers Island for THREE YEARS as a teen but never charged with a crime commits suicide aged 22
  • Kalief Browder was arrested in 2010 over a backpack someone claimed he had stolen, refusing to plead guilty and never being charged with a crime
  • Videos obtained showed him being slammed into the ground by a guard and beaten by several members of a gang


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...thout-charged-dead-suicide.html#ixzz3cRmSxqvL
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Six months from his release, he took a steak knife with him to the bedroom, which a visiting friend managed to snatch away, before trying to hang himself from a banister.

Browder disappeared into Rikers Island back in 2010 after being picked up for allegedly stealing a backpack that owner Roberto Bautista claimed had his credit card, debit card, digital camera, iPod and hundreds of dollars in cash inside.

He told his court-appointed lawyer he refused to accept a plea deal for the charge and wanted the case to go to trial.

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Troubled: In spite of antipsychotic medication and support from family, Browder suffered paranoia from physical and psychological abuse suffered at Rikers

His assertion of innocence would cost him more than a thousand days in Rikers, where he claimed guards beat inmates and threatened those who would report the abuse with time in solitary.

The New York Times reported as of March more than 400 people were in prison for two years or longer without having been charged with a crime.

Though Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to have the courts, prisons and prosecutors work to reduce the inmate population by decreasing delays, there are reports life on the inside is as brutal as it was for Browder.

One night early in Browder's time at the jail, guards lined up Browder with a group of other young inmates, punching each one as they questioned them about a fight that occurred earlier.

After they bloodied noses and eyes were beginning to swell shut, guards offered the inmates a choice - go get treatment at the infirmary or go back to their beds, stressing if the inmates told medical staff about the beatings, they would be punished in solitary, Browder claimed.

Browder claimed he was starved while in solitary as well, with guards withholding up to four consecutive meals. When he was fed, it often wasn't enough to sustain a teenager, and he tried to beg guards for extra slices of bread.

In a video obtained by the New Yorker of another incident of abuse, Browder is seen being led out of the Bing before a guard slams him into the ground.

For being 'involved in a use of force,' as the Department of Corrections injury to inmate report described it, Browder, not the guard, was punished, being placed back in solitary.

'After that happened,' Browder said then, 'I was scared to come out of my cell to get in the shower again, because I felt, if I come out of my cell and he slams me again, then I’m going to get more box days.'

His life seemed to briefly turn around outside the walls of the jail. After struggling at Bronx Community College and dropping out, an anonymous donor offered to pay a semester's tuition and he returned to school happier, earning better grades than before.

Jay-Z saw the videos obtained by the New Yorker and met Browder in person. Rosie O'Donnell had him on the view and later invited him to dinner at her home.

On Monday, Prestia noticed a few strange posts on Browder's Facebook and texted him to ask if everything was alright. 'Yea I’m alright thanks man,' was the reply.

Browder's mother spoke with her son the night before, when he told her he worried authorities were still after him and confided, 'Ma, I can’t take it anymore.'

'Kalief, you’ve got a lot of people in your corner,' she told him.

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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...thout-charged-dead-suicide.html#ixzz3cRmOJPlg
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L&HH

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I got a long lost friend who I just recently found out spent a year in Rikers a few years ago. I didn't get a chance to ask him about it but damn, idk if I even wanna know.
 
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Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. 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.

Then, 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 re-enroll. 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 upstairs, 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 exactly 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!
 
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