The Central Park jogger case was a horrific crime made all the more worse by a heinous miscarriage of justice that put five innocent teenage boys in jail for a crime they did not commit. The scars these men bear were ripped open once again on Friday, October 14, when Donald Trump told CNN that he believes the Central Park Five, as they are known, are guilty despite DNA evidence and a confession that exonerated them in 2002.
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Yesterday, in an interview with The Washington Post, Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, spoke out against Trump’s latest attack: “When I heard Trump’s latest proclamation, it was like the worst feeling in the world. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. Since I was 15, my life has never been my own. I had no control over what happened to me. Being in the spotlight makes me wary and self-conscious again. I am overwhelmed with a nagging fear that an overzealous Trump supporter might take matters into his or her hands….. Black people across America know that because of the color of our skin, we are guilty before proven innocent. As a result, sometimes we lose the best years of our lives. Sometimes we lose our actual lives. We must not let this man ascend to the highest office in the land when he has always proven that he lets neither facts nor humanity lead his steps.”
On April 19, 1989, Trisha Melli, then a 28-year-old investment banker, went out for a jog along her usual path in Central Park shortly before 9pm. She was knocked down and dragged or chased into a shallow ravine, where she was found, four hours later, naked, gagged, tied up, and covered in blood and mud. She had been stabbed five times, raped, sodomized, and beaten almost to death. Melli was hospitalized while doctors worked around the clock to save her life. Melli had lost 75-80 percent of her blood, her skull had been fracture so badly that her left eye was removed from her eye socket, and she was in Class 4 (the most severe) hermorrhagic shock. She was given last rights and the police listed the attack as a probable homicide. Doctors thought it she lived, she would remains in a permanent coma for the rest of her life.
Twelve days later, she emerged from the coma, unable to talk, read, or walk and began a slow road to recovery which eventually included the 2004 publication of I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility (Scribner), where she came out to the public, although she had no memory of the attack.
The Central Park jogger case was one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980s, as the media rushed to exploit the fears that had been raging throughout New York City, which had been beaten and battered by two decades of systemic racism, crime, and drugs, with no signs of letting up. The press whipped the city into a frenzy with a barrage of sensationalized headlines that used this woman’s victimization to sell fear, creating an environment of public outrage that the police and prosecutors used to railroad five innocent teens on the basis of their race and ethnicity (four were African American and one was Latino).
Donald Trump inserted himself into the fray, spending more than $85,000 on four full-page ads in newspapers including The New York Times and Daily News that ran on May 1, 1989, demanding: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Trump advocated for the state-sanctioned execution of minors with the words: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”
All five boys, who gave coerced confessions during police interviews, plead not guilty to all charges in court. In 1990, Yusef Salaam, (15), Antron McCray (15), and Raymond Santana, Jr. (14) were convicted of rape, assault, robbery, and riot and given the maximum sentence allowed for juveniles, 5-10 years in a youth correctional facility. Kevin Richardson (14) was convicted of attempted murder, rape, assault, and robbery and received the same sentence. Korey Wise (16) was convicted of sexual abuse, assault, and riot, and sentenced to 5-15 years. After the verdict was read, Wise shouted at the prosecutor in open court: “You’re going to pay for this. Jesus is going to get you. You made this up.”
In 2001, Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer serving a life sentence for other crimes, met Wise in Auburn Correctional Facility, in upstate New York. A year later, he confessed to the attack on Melli, saying he acted alone. He provided a detailed account of the attack, and DNA evidence confirmed his participation in the crime, identifying him as the sole contributor to the semen found. Reyes was not prosecuted for the crime because the statue of limitations had passed. The convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated on December 19, 2002.
In 2003, Richardson, Santana, and McCray sued the city for $250 million for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. A settlement of $41 million was reached in 2014, and divided between the men. The city did nor admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement. A second suit against the New York Court of Claims, filed in 2014, is on-going.
Daily News front page April 22,1989 (Photo By: /NY Daily News via Getty Images).
Sarah Burns, daughter of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, had been working as a summer paralegal in the office of one of the lawyers handling the lawsuit against the city. She wrote her thesis on the topic of racism in the media coverage of the case, which inspired the documentary film she made with her father and David Mcmahon, The Central Park Five (2013), now screening for free on PBS.com
The film is a harrowing story of media bias, police brutality, and malicious prosecution that exploited the Central Park Five as well as Melli herself. The evidence of Reyes’s semen had been logged and disregarded, which suggests that it was not the truth the police or the prosecutors were after but something far more sinister: the criminalization of innocent men on the basis of race and ethnicity.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
