![]() ![]() Salaam, now 41, cannot remember exactly where he was when he first saw the ads. ![]() They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.” They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. Bring Back Our Police!” and above his signature, Trump wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. Under the headline “Bring Back The Death Penalty. He paid a reported $85,000 to take out advertising space in four of the city’s newspapers, including the New York Times. Just two weeks after the Central Park attack, before any of the boys had faced trial and while Meili remained critically ill in a coma, Donald Trump, whose office on Fifth Avenue commanded an exquisite view of the park’s opulent southern frontier, intervened. Photograph: NY Daily News Archive ‘He poisoned the minds of New York’ View image in fullscreen Trump’s ad in the New York Daily News. The case of a black woman, raped the same day in Brooklyn by two men who threw her from the roof of a four-storey building, received little media attention. The case came to embody not only fears that accompanied the dramatic rise of violent crime in New York, but also its perceived racial dynamics. “They would come and look at me and say: ‘You realise you’re next.’ The fear made me feel really like I was not going to be able to make it out.”įour of the boys signed confessions and appeared on video without a lawyer, each arguing that while they had not been the individual to commit the rape they had witnessed one of the others do it, thereby implicating the entire group. “I would hear them beating up Korey Wise in the next room,” recalled Salaam. ![]() They would all later deny any involvement in criminality that night, but as they were rounded up and interrogated by the police at length, they said, they were forced into confessing to the rape. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive/NY Daily News via Getty Images View image in fullscreen Yusef Salaam, left, is led away by a detective after being arrested in Central Park for allegedly attacking Trisha Meili. The teenagers – four African American and one Hispanic – would become known collectively as the Central Park Five. Among the group was Salaam, along with 14-year-olds Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson, 15-year-old Antron McCray and 16-year-old Korey Wise. Some engaged in a rampage of random criminality, hurling rocks at cars, assaulting and mugging passersby. That same night, a group of more than 30 youths had entered the park from East Harlem. The New York police department believed they already had the culprits in custody. She was left for dead but discovered hours later, unconscious and suffering from hypothermia and severe brain damage. On the evening of 19 April, as 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili, who was white, jogged across the northern, dilapidated section of Central Park, she was attacked – bludgeoned with a rock, gagged, tied and raped. The murder rate had risen to 1,896 killings a year 3,254 rapes would be reported in the five boroughs, but only one captured the city’s extended attention and later exposed bias in its criminal justice system and media establishment. ![]() The crack epidemic had torn through New York as poverty soared to 25% and the city’s elites reaped the rewards of a booming Wall Street. “Common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty.” “He was the firestarter,” Salaam said of Trump, in his first extended interview since Trump announced his run for the White House. ![]()
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