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DA Charges Tre’mall McGee, Teen Shot in Back While Prone, With Resisting Arrest

Daryl Khan — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 20:38:39 +0000

This story originally appeared on on June 24, 2020.

Above: Tre’mall McGee - photo courtesy of Tiffany McGee

The Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office in Louisiana plans to continue its criminal case against the 14-year-old shot in the back as he lay prone on his stomach. District Attorney Paul Connick Jr., filed charges against Tre’mall McGee for resisting arrest.

That Tre’mall was shot in the back during his arrest — information that came to light since the charges were filed in March — has not swayed the district attorney’s determination. The bullet tore through his back, entered his armpit and exited through his arm.

The first hearing in the case is Thursday.

The charges drawn up by Connick against Tre’mall McGee fails to mention that McGee was shot in the back while surrendering to a deputy from the same office bringing the charge. It also fails to note that for three months the shooting was concealed by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

Now the District Attorney’s Office knows about the shooting. But since the Sheriff’s Office never formally requested that the DA’s office investigate the shooting, the DA is proceeding with the case. It is unclear whether the deputy named in the bill –– Deputy Kyle Bonneval –– is the one who shot McGee, or whether he is just the officer on record for making the arrest.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office will not say.

‘A bunch of cowards’

Ron Haley, who is representing Tre’mall in a civil case against the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, is also representing him against the criminal charges pro bono. He said his client’s case is a distillation of the central complaint made at protests that have been raging around the country and the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd: the lack of accountability for unrestrained and unnecessary police violence.

Sheriff Joe Lopinto called Tre’mall’s shooting “non-life-threatening” at a Monday press conference where he defended his deputies.

“The sheriff’s flippant response –– and I hope it’s not the case, truly –– but his flippant response is giving the impression that if a deputy shoots a child in Jefferson Parish that it can go unreported and undetected and more importantly not investigated just because the victim is a child,” Haley said. “That is utterly ridiculous. How many children need to get shot before someone steps up and says we need to look into what’s going on with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.”

Tre’mall’s mother, Tiffany, said she is exhausted after months of amateur sleuthing on her own to get the Sheriff’s Office to finally admit that one of their deputies shot her son.

“I’ve been frustrated. Today was the first time that I just sat down and cried and cried and cried,” she said during an interview Friday night. “I’ve been as strong as I can as a mother for my kids and I’m doing this alone. But to not be able to get justice for my son with all he is going through, scared to leave the house now, and all for something he didn’t deserve. For them to try to deny even doing this, and then to hide behind their badge, to hide in their government offices like a bunch of cowards –– that really pisses me off.”

Many sheriff’s offices in the state have a memorandum of understanding to investigate officer-involved shootings with the Louisiana State Police. That is not the case in Jefferson Parish, however.

“Instead they investigate their own cases,” Haley said. “Which I believe is a conflict of interest that any blind person could see.”

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’’s Office said they did not comment on McGee’s shooting because it involved a minor. The Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on whether there is an investigation into the McGee shooting. The Louisiana State Police has not been notified of the shooting and is not investigating it. The LSP must be requested to be brought in to investigate officer-related shootings.

‘Fear of God’

In the New York Police Department, when an officer fires their gun, it is impossible to keep it a secret. As one veteran officer explained, “This is what happens when you shoot a locker, we’re not even talking about a kid.”

First, the NYPD officer said, a duty supervisor comes to the scene of the discharge. The supervisor takes the department-issued weapon and does a bullet count. The officer is required to go to the hospital to get checked for tinnitus, ringing from the ears from the gunshot. While at the hospital the officer is also checked for alcohol.

Then there is the mountain of paperwork. There is a firearms discharge assault report, a line of duty injury report, which triggers a witness form. The supervisor writes up a 49, basically a barebones memo that outlines where the discharge occurred, when, who was struck if anyone.

What follows is various levels of investigation from the district attorney’s office, the Internal Affairs Bureau and finally the Force Investigations Division, a unit dedicated to examining each incident of an officer firing their gun. If the shooting is controversial and high-profile enough, even the attorney general could investigate.

“You don’t get your gun back until you’re cleared,” the officer said. “If I shoot my locker I don’t get it back until they know exactly what happened.”

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office declined to acknowledge for nearly three months that one of its deputies shot the teen as he lay on his stomach with his hands behind his back waiting to be handcuffed. Only when Tiffany McGee relentlessly pursued the truth and came forward Crimefighter of the Year award last year by Crimefighters of Louisiana; his boss Connick was given the District Attorney of the Year award at the same ceremony. It’s an organization dedicated to victims of crime and strong law enforcement against violent criminals. In 2011, its founding chairman called for the military to be brought in to fight crime in New Orleans.

Haley said what is playing out in Jefferson Parish is a stark example of just the kind of rampant, unaccountable violence against Black people that has sparked the biggest street protests in the country since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

Those protests showed up at the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office last week. It led to a tense encounter on the off-ramp of the West Bank Expressway, where protesters were met with officers in riot shields crowded around a military-style Humvee.

‘They were the heroes’

McGee raised her son to run to the police when he was in trouble. She said she didn’t raise him to be a troublemaker or someone who thought the police were the enemy. She raised him to say hello and be respectful.

“The cops were our protectors. They were the heroes you call when you were in trouble,” she said. “They were your friend. They are there to help you.”

Now, after three months of scrambling to find out the truth about what happened to her son she has had to revisit her entire worldview.

These days Tre’mall is scared; he thinks the cops are out to get him.

“And now,” she paused to gather herself, overcome with emotion. “Now, you got to second-guess what the hell you’ve been teaching your kids their whole lives. Now I tell them you can’t trust them, not one, not one.”

Since the shooting, McGee has been restless. She has been worrying about her son, fighting for justice on his behalf, calling law enforcement agencies all over the state. But there is one thing that worries her more than anything else.

“You can only talk about the people we know that he shot,” she said. “How many other kids did he shoot? How many kids has he shot and the mom is too scared to come forward? What happens if the next kid he shoots ends up getting killed? I’m going to feel like I didn’t do enough to stop it. That’s what scares me –– that’s what really scares me –– I feel so helpless. That I was helpless, helpless to stop it from happening again.”

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Louisiana Law Enforcement Won’t Say Who Shot Teen in Back

Daryl Khan — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 02:25:56 +0000

Criminalization and Justice

This story originally appeared on Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office whose deputies initiated the chase that led to his shooting, to the Louisiana State Police who are responsible for investigating police shootings.

“I even called the FBI,” said Tre’mall’s mother Tiffany McGee, 36. “But I still haven’t gotten any answers.”

The odyssey she went on to find out what happened to her son is one part Cajun mystery, one part disorienting Kafkaesque journey in which she has a son who has been shot but no one pulled the trigger.

No one has identified which member of law enforcement shot the boy in his back as he lay prone after falling to the ground when commanded by police.

Monroe Dillon, a spokesman for the Louisiana State Police, said his agency does not have an open investigation into Tre’mall’s shooting, an indication that the shooting was never reported.

Tre’mall McGee - photo courtesy of Tiffany McGee

Tre’mall had a hole in his arm from the bullet that is healing into a scar. He has documentation from the hospital on how to treat a gunshot. But to this day, months later, he and his mother have no idea who pulled the trigger that sent the bullet tearing through his back, out his armpit and then back through his arm. But mother and son know it was someone with a badge.

“We have a situation where law enforcement is involved in the cover-up of the shooting of a child,” said Ronald Haley Jr., who is representing Tre’mall and his mother.

Presumably, McGee said, that very same officer who shot her son is still going out on patrol during his shift, armed with a gun, capable of shooting someone else for lying on the ground and doing what he was told. She said she has called law enforcement at every level of government and she still hasn’t gotten any answers.

Ron Haley - photo courtesy of Ron Haley

“You all wouldn’t be giving me the runaround like this if you all weren’t trying to hide something,” McGee said.

The Louisiana State Police, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Westwego Police Department have all declined to comment on this story. Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng also declined to comment. A spokesman thanked a reporter for bringing this issue to light but said it sounded like it was a sheriff’s office issue.

The chase

According to Tre’mall and another teenager in the car, he was picked up in the early evening of March 20. Tre’mall and three other teenagers were driving around and hanging out. He says he had no idea the car was stolen. Only the driver knew that.

When the driver noticed a squad car from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office behind him, he panicked. He started speeding, trying to get away. Inside the car it was pandemonium. Tre’mall and his friends didn’t understand what was going on and were yelling at him to slow down and pull over. The driver didn’t listen.

Other police cars joined the chase. Eventually, the driver screeched to a halt in Westwego, a New Orleans suburb. The driver jumped out of his seat and ran in one direction. The other boys jumped out and headed in the opposite direction.

Tre’mall was in the back seat. He had never been in trouble before so he had no idea what was going on. He saw the other boys running, so he started running, too, he said.

He didn’t make it far before officers commanded him to get down. They had their guns drawn already. He fell to the ground immediately on his stomach. The officers shouted commands to put his hands behind his back. Tre’mall complied.

Meanwhile another passenger, 18, had been caught at a nearby fence. Another had successfully hidden himself underneath an elevated shed in a yard. One officer stood over Tre’mall and screamed.

“Tell me where your partner is at or I’m going to kill you,” he shouted.

Tre’mall didn’t answer his question. He was scared.

“Tell me where your partner is at or I’m going to shoot you,” the officer shouted again.

Again, Tre’mall lay silent.

And that’s when the officer squeezed the trigger.

Mother decides to go on ‘little detective mission’

McGee was too discombobulated to even process what she had just heard. She held the phone in her hand frozen for a moment. She had had a pleasant evening with her sister-in-law and the last thing she could have expected was this phone call. She asked the voice on the phone, a nurse from the University Medical Center in New Orleans, to repeat what she had just said. “Tre’mall McGee has just been shot,” the voice repeated. “We need some information.”

Tre’mall McGee’s gunshot wound discharge instructions from University Medical Center in New Orleans - photo courtesy of Tiffany McGee

McGee gathered herself and told the nurse: “That’s my son. He is a minor. I am on my way.”

She grabbed her keys and dashed to the car. She lives on the west side of the city. The hospital is on the east side, a good 20-minute car ride away. McGee said she has never run so many red lights in her life as she did that night in a panic to get to her son. When she got to the hospital she was hysterical, she says.

McGee explained to security that her son had been shot and she needed to see him. The staff rushed her through the waiting room and to the nurse who had called her. As she led her to the back to fill out paperwork, the nurse explained what had happened. ”They dropped him off tonight,” McGee remembers her saying. She never explained who “they” was.

The nurse led her to a doctor and two police officers, a white detective and a black deputy. The doctor explained the trajectory of the bullet but didn’t say where it came from. The detectives didn’t say much, McGee said.

“They explained nothing, they said nothing. They left the impression like they were investigating the shooting of my son,” she said. “They didn’t … even try to tell me the truth. They didn’t tell me the truth at all. They left me with the impression that he got shot on the street and they were trying to figure out who shot him.”

McGee said nobody told her Tre’mall had been delivered to the hospital by paramedics who had been summoned by the police. She tried to see him at the hospital but the police told her she couldn’t.

“We can’t allow you to see your son right now,” she recalled them telling her. “He’s in police custody.”

After she left the hospital she reached out to the father of another boy who had been in the car. That father had no idea where his son was, McGee said.

“We went on our own little detective mission,” she said. “That’s when we found what was going on — what was really going on.”

McGee uses an app that tracks her son. She and the father drove to where the phone was pinging. It led them to the Westwego Police Department.

“I was like, why is my son’s phone in the back of this police department,” she wondered.

She thought maybe her son had dropped it when he was running from the police or that someone found it and turned it in to the police. She approached an officer coming out of the building and asked him if he could go in and check on Tre’mall’s phone.

Back to the hospital

At first the officer confused her son with a 14-year-old who was killed that same night and offered her his condolences. McGee corrected him and explained that her son was alive and recovering at the hospital. That’s when she found out what really happened, she said.

“Oh, so your son was shot by the officer tonight,” she recalls the officer telling her.

McGee heard the rest of the story after she took Tre’mall home the next day. Someone from Rivarde Juvenile Detention Center called her and told her to pick her son up. His gunshot wound had opened back up. She said they gave him napkins to stuff into the bandages. A spokeswoman declined to comment.

“I couldn’t hug him because his arm was hurt,” she said. “He seemed so sad; I’ve never seen my son so hurt like that. He said, ‘I’m hurting, I’m hurting bad.’”

McGee took Tre’mall back to the hospital and said she lectured them about the shoddy job they did on her son: “You can’t treat everybody like they’re criminals — he is not. You don’t know what he’s been through. My son wouldn’t have opened up if you sewed him up right in the first place.”

After they patched Tre’mall up properly, the staff gave her an after-visit summary. It suggests that the patient read the attached information. It recommends that Tre’mall take cephalexin, an antibiotic, and mupirocin, an antibiotic that stop bacterial growth on skin.

One part reads “Gunshot Wound Discharge Instructions.” At the bottom of the page it suggests “a follow up with trauma surgery clinic center in 1 week around 3/28. Why: jail to call to arrange follow up appt in trauma clinic.”

McGee shudders when she thinks about how easily things could have been different. Had the gunshot been a few inches in another direction her son could be paralyzed or dead. She is concerned that the officer who shot her son is still out there working.

“Still with a job, still working, still out there able to tote a gun and still able to point it at someone else’s child,” she said. “I don’t think that’s right. That’s what angers me inside, and I just keep that down there. They need to shut that Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office down and rebuild it all from bottom to top again.”

‘Justifies the distrust’

Tiffany McGee’s mission to seek acknowledgement and then justice for her son is happening against the backdrop of another controversial shooting that the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office has offered little information about. Modesto Reyes, 35, was shot and killed by Jefferson Parish deputies on May 27 after a short chase. One deputy used a stun gun on Reyes, another used a gun, with fatal results. The sheriff’s office has released eight seconds of stun gun cam video, but offered no statements.

“If we look at the shooting of Modesto Reyes and the protests of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office that are growing amidst others around the country after the killing of George Floyd, it shows they have a culture problem within the department with how they treat black folks,” said Haley, who is also representing Reyes’ family.

What happened to Tiffany and Tre’mall illustrates why there is so much anger and contempt for the sheriff’s office in the community, he said.

“This cover-up justifies the distrust that the families of those brutalized by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department have of the office,” Haley said. “If they would go so far as to cover up the shooting of a child, there is no question that they would possibly cover up other abuse of power by their officers.”

Pointing to what he characterizes as law enforcement’s bizarre reluctance to even acknowledge that the shooting happened, Haley said he wants the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office to open an investigation into who shot Tre’mall McGee immediately.

“Normally, even if they’re trying to cover up, at least they’ll get up and say the shooting was justified — in most cases you will hear the argument from law enforcement, their unions, or whatever investigative body is in charge of the investigation,” he said. “They will at least try to justify an officer shooting. They’re so brazen in Jefferson Parish they won’t even acknowledge that a shooting happened.”

Jefferson Parish President Lee Sheng is the daughter of the wildly popular, larger-than-life former Jefferson County Sheriff Harry Lee. He summed up the scope of the sheriff’s office in an interview with NPR in 2006:

“The sheriff of [Jefferson Parish] is the closest thing there is to being a king in the U.S. I have no unions, I don’t have civil service, I hire and fire at will. I don’t have to go to council and propose a budget. I approve the budget. I’m the head of the law-enforcement district, and the law-enforcement district only has one vote, which is me,” he said.

That story notes that the sheriffs in Louisiana operate with virtually no oversight. That law has not changed.

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‘The World Has Turned a Blind Eye on What’s Happening to Prisoners’

Daryl Khan — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 14:14:52 +0000

Criminalization and Justice

Editor’s Note: The following email, which was shared with Daryl Khan, is from an individual currently incarcerated in Angola. It has been lightly edited for clarity and the author's identity has been withheld for fear of retribution. This story originally appeared on Related: Desperate Louisiana Prisoners Say Wardens, Staff Not Following Coronavirus Rules Related: Shuttered Angola Facility Could House Teens, Adults in System With COVID-19]

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Desperate Louisiana Prisoners Say Wardens, Staff Not Following Coronavirus Rules

Daryl Khan — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:24:16 +0000

Criminalization and Justice

Editor’s note: Many of the women interviewed for this story requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. They said they are worried about what would happen to their loved ones on the inside for their speaking out or revealing their correspondence. This story originally appeared on Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola. He composed and sent it shortly after the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association and the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC) opened a shuttered camp previously notorious for being a site of solitary confinement and violence.

The facility is called Camp J. As the specter of the coronavirus pandemic became impossible to ignore, the authorities designated it as a quarantine center. A COVID-19 clearinghouse for anyone detained in the state’s vast criminal justice system. His correspondence is one of many offering a look inside Louisiana prisons as the pandemic spreads not just the virus, but fear, anxiety and despair on the inside.

Above: Wendy West Matherne and other members of Voice of the Experienced, a grassroots organization dedicated to prison reform in Louisiana, delivered N95 masks to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Facebook photo by Wendy West Matherne

When he drafted his will, the prisoner said protocols were not being observed. Inmates had no masks; guards wore theirs cavalierly around their neck. Guards had gloves but did not change them. They weren’t social distancing. Inmates were still going to the cafeteria where everyone would reach into a shared container to get their cutlery.

Some inmates had deputized themselves to be the “COVID Police,” doing their best to sanitize what they could with meager cleaning supplies. One grandfather was using bleach that he had been watering down to stretch out its use.

“I can go on and on about our healthcare here in Angola but now is not the time,” wrote one inmate at Angola who had received a life sentence decades ago as a juvenile. “I don’t want to scar anyone but if that is what it takes to get you to understand me, then you well have understood what I about to say. There is no doubt we are vonrabull to corona-19 and I feel that if it becomes loss in this environment we’re in trouble, probably wiping out ¼ of this population if not more.”

The correspondence with loved ones shows an anxiety creeping through the prison like nothing anyone had ever seen before, family members said, even during the height of hurricane season. That’s when a single biblical storm can flood the Mississippi River, wash away the levees around Angola and inundate the 5,500 inmates.

That dread of the virus and officials’ response is so palpable that it led one inmate to make arrangements for his death. When his fiancee opened the email and realized what it was she nearly collapsed. It summoned the pain of dealing with her mother’s will after she died a year ago.

“It is difficult to read,” she said. “It was a very emotional deal.”

The will laid out what you’d expect. He was of sound mind and sound body. Who gets what when he dies. A few final thoughts.

“He said a few words to his mom, and a few words to his kids. And a few words to me. It was very,” she paused to gather herself. “It was like him saying it and not being here. He’s,” and she went silent again to collect herself, “he’s a very strong person, and very healthy, thank God. But with this pandemic. It is what it is. He just wants to make sure that he’s not one of those that he dies today and they bury him tomorrow.”

And since he knew his correspondence was being monitored by censors, he wanted it on the record.

She said there was one thing he was very clear about. He wrote: “I don’t want to be cremated or buried on the grounds of Angola.”

‘This is a medical and moral problem’

Since he wrote his will nearly a month ago, things have happened. DOC has said they have redoubled their efforts to get personal protective equipment to staff and to prisoners. Gov. Jon Bel Edwards created a panel to review cases in an attempt to thin the prison population and increase the likelihood of social distancing on the inside.

“The entire Department is focused on minimizing the potential impact of this disease on our correctional system. We understand that this is a very trying time for everyone in Louisiana including our employees, prison population and their loved ones,” said James LeBlanc, the DOC secretary, in a press release. “We are making every effort to ensure that inmates in our state prisons are informed and able to remain connected to their loved ones throughout this time.”

But the correspondence with family and loved ones paint a different picture. The exchanges — between sister and brother, mother and son, boyfriend and girlfriend — capture the anxiety and desperation of the prisoners, and the frustration of loved ones who are helpless to do anything.

“They are not being transparent,” said one woman with a loved one in the inside. “What the governor and the DOC is saying is happening is not matching up with what is coming from the inside.” What they are reading has left them wondering when urgent, meaningful action will be taken. Some are pleas like this one from a son at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center to his mother:

“DO NOT STOP CALLING UP HERE…AND TELL THESE PEOPLE YOU ARE GONNA HAVE AN ATTORNEY AND THE NEWS PEOPLE AT THE FRONT GATE. PLUS, DON’T JUST LET THEM TELL YOU ANYTHING. MAKE THEM GET A WARDEN WHERE WE ARE, SINCE NOT ONE HAS BEEN TO THIS BUILDING SINCE WE HAVE BEEN REFUGEED IN HERE, AND GET HIM TO CALL U ON HIS PHONE SO U CAN HEAR FROM ME IF I AM OKAY!! I AIN’T PLAYING!!”

Others, like this one from a man sentenced to life as a juvenile at Angola to his sister, show the prisoner’s frustration at how rules are being haphazardly implemented if at all. And they suggest how the strain is wearing on them.

“I’m tired of these dumb ass people, people who are supposed to be in control and to sit here and watch them make such bad choice’s with the lives of everyone including their own,” he wrote. “I know it’s not the DOC, It’s the people here the wardons an Col [colonels]. And I also know that there is nothing I can do about it but it doesn’t stop the anger from injustices taking place.”

These digital letters-in-a-bottle being tossed from behind the bars show the urgency to do more to get inmates out, their loved ones say, especially the medically vulnerable and the elderly. Angola alone has a population of thousands of incarcerated men over 50.

Coronavirus-inspired violence broke out at the state’s main juvenile facility last week. Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office Deputies had to be called in to quell the disturbance at Bridge City Center for Youth, which had similarities to Voice of the Experienced, a grassroots organization of the family of the incarcerated dedicated to prison reform in Louisiana. “They just want their children to come home. They want to be the one to care for and take care of their children. They sit by the phone and they wait.”

A letter from a prisoner in Angola talked about different security teams doing things differently, such as leaving the door open in his dorm when it’s time to eat or go to the yard for recreation. With the door open, other prisoners could come in, risking the spread of the virus.

“This practice must stop immediately if LSP Staff is serious about stopping the spread of covid-19. I have personally addressed this problem to ranking officials, but each gives the expression of “I AM NOT CONCERN,”” he wrote. “This is a medical and moral problem that must be addressed now before more lives are lost to this deadly virus.”

‘Belly of the beast’

Prisoners are at the mercy of guards who are still not abiding by the regulations laid out by state officials, loved ones said. In some cases they are being ignored, in other cases they are impossible to put into place in dorms like Angola where men live on top of one another.

Over the past month, since Camp J was reopened, COVID-19 has spread through the facility as well as other jails and prisons in the state.

“Baton Rouge is giving directives, but by the time it gets to those guards that are in the dorms, in the facilities, in the belly of the beast, it’s nothing,” said the woman who received the will from her fiance. “And most of the guards don’t care. ‘They are all there for a reason,’ some of them think.”

Camp J is now at capacity with sick people, loved ones said. The sick are now being moved to the chapel, to Camp A.

All the efforts to furlough is a mirage, they said. Even if everyone laid out in the criteria governing the panel’s decision-making were released, they said, it would only lower the state’s prison population — the largest in the country — by a single inmate per facility. They feel betrayed by a governor who they campaigned for.

“Our government has abandoned our incarcerated population,” Matherne said. She is the mother of a son who has what is effectively a life sentence. She and other members of VOTE delivered N95 masks to DOC.

“We’re trying to keep our loved ones safe. They are reviewing less than 1% of the population for release. Many are infected and a few lives have needlessly been lost, including persons awaiting release. The situation is disheartening. Our loved ones are struggling to stay safe.”

The problem is particularly challenging in Louisiana where the emphasis on releasing prisoners has been on nonviolent offenders. Louisiana has more prisoners serving life without parole sentences than anywhere else in the country, a relic of what critics call draconian laws passed in 1979.

Nearly 15% of the state’s prison population won’t leave until they are carried out in a body bag. More than half of those are people charged with second-degree murder. Of the 51% in for life, half were imprisoned when they were younger than 25. Three-quarters of them are black, even though black people are only one-third of the state’s population.

One man sentenced to life as a juvenile in Angola said it was hard for people taking the pandemic seriously to keep their spirits up.

“I have to be honest with you, It’s getting hard being couped up like this, I’m doing my best to stay busy and on top of my cleaning,” he wrote. “I’ve been doing a lot of sleeping but noticed some depression setting in, I don’t need that right now. Everything is a struggle, to go on the yard, to go to the store, to go to eat.”

‘Try to find the beauty in all of this’

Stephanie Smith is a pastor, like her fiance, and the father of her oldest daughter, now 31. Her fiance is a pastor inside Angola who runs the Believers Builders Worship. As part of his ministry he works with people who are in the prison’s reentry program. He said he is doing his best to counsel them during this difficult time.

Smith said she has fielded calls from numerous family members with loved ones on the inside. Sometimes she gives them concrete advice, other times, she just stays on the phone and prays. During the calls, Smith said family members have shared that their loved ones are so consumed with pandemic anxiety that they are overdosing on mojo, a synthetic marijuana, and heroin. Smith also says they have told her that in some cases, the guards aren't doing anything to stop it.

“It’s a despair and despairing that reaches down into their souls,” she said. “The kind of despair that makes you want to fall to your knees and shout out and scream and cry. Can you imagine the level of helplessness you need to feel to do that? That helplessness is everywhere right now.”

The prisoner in Angola who drafted his coronavirus will felt that helplessness. His fiance had to call his mother to let her know what her son’s final requests were. She told her what her son’s arrangements were for his death. They both cried as she read it to her. They formulated a plan in case something happened.

“If I don’t hear from him for a few days, well then, I let her know,” she said. “Then his mom calls up there and finds out where he is or what happend, She doesn’t mess around. She’ll call over there and insist you better find him.”

If they discover the worst then they know from the will what to do.

The same couldn’t be said for Lloyd Meyers. Meyers, 69, was transported to Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center in Baton Rouge when he had symptoms consistent with the coronavirus. He did not have any family left on the outside. He signed a Do Not Resuscitate order and died on the evening of April 19. After he died, they drove his body back to where he spent most of his life. He is interred on the grounds of Angola.

The man writing to his sister was friends with the most recent prisoner to die of COVID-19. He updated her about how he was coping with the general uncertainty:

“Well I’m trying my best to not let all of this bother me but nothing good can come out of a bunch of guys couped up in a dorm twenty two hours a day,” he said. “Stay safe and try to find the beauty in all of this. I do know this, people will realize not to take the simple things in life for granted, being able to be next to the ones you love.”

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Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek

Bridge The Gulf — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 20:59:58 +0000

Featured Project

Climate and Environment

Culture and Traditions

ENCORE BROADCAST APRIL 21, 2020 FOLLOWED BY TWO MONTHS OF FREE STREAMING THROUGH JUNE 30 at  on Tues. April 21, 2020 at 8 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. CT / 5 p.m. PT. The film will start streaming at time of broadcast through the month of June on worldchannel.org, amdoc.org, and on all station-branded PBS platforms and apps including PBS.org.

Check your local listings: website.

"This intimate film tells a gigantic story -- about race, power and so-called development. But it is also a saga of community, resilience, resistance, and hope."

- Bill Bigelow, Rethinking Schools

"This powerful documentary illustrates a classic case of environmental injustice and exposes raw in-your-face Mississippi racial politics."

- Dr. Robert Bullard, Dean, School of Public Affairs, Texas Southern University, Author, Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina

"Turkey Creek is emblematic of so much of what is going on in the world right now, and that part of our country. These communities are not supposed to be considered resilient. These communities were not supposed to survive, but they've survived. And the solutions that they're coming up with are the solutions that we all really need to pay attention to and lift up."

- Leslie Fields, Sierra Club director of Policy and Legal

"The language of power and oppression is omnipresent in Come Hell or High Water, and it doesn't get any better as Katrina pounds Gulfport in 2005. Still no better when the BP oil disaster happens five years after that. The documentary captures Turkey Creek's responses to all of these tragedies - and a few remarkable victories against the powers that be."

- Brenton Mock, CityLab

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Shuttered Angola Facility Could House Teens, Adults in System With COVID-19

Daryl Khan — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 14:02:09 +0000

Criminalization and Justice

This story originally appeared on Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections and the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association, a lobbying organization, works like this: If you are in a jail or prison and you get sick with the novel coronavirus you will be sent to the recently shuttered Camp J building in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known to the rest of the country as Angola. That applies to pretrial detainees, who have not had a trial and retain a presumption of innocence, while they await their day in court at one of the dozens of local jails that dot the 64 parishes in the state.

It also goes for people in Department of Corrections custody, including any of the youth who are either charged with adult crimes or convicted of them and who continue to remain in Louisiana’s adult criminal justice system. State officials have decided that if you get the virus you are not headed to the hospital or a clinic. You’re going to the decommissioned building where solitary confinement once turned people mad or compelled them to violence.

Rev. Alexis Anderson

“We are literally taking people from medical facilities — these are people who are 15 minutes away from a medical facility — we are talking about taking them from a hospital where they probably weren’t going to die to a place where they probably will,” said the Rev. Alexis Anderson.

But she has a plan of her own to find out who that detainee is. As the head of the East Baton Rouge Prison Reform Coalition she is accustomed to monitoring what happens behind bars in the correctional facility. She and her organization have lobbied for a wide range of reforms in the jail, which has seen 41 deaths of people in its custody since 2012, including the murder of a slight teenager in 2015.

“All we can do is to look to identify him at the coroner’s office,” she said. “You know, once the death certificates start rolling in.”

Michael Cahoon, an organizer with the Louisiana-based Promise of Justice Initiative, said the consequences of this could be catastrophic, much worse than the horror stories coming out of the Federal Correctional Institution in Oakdale, La. There is no plan for doctors to be sent to Angola, and they are going to “deputize” nurses without any emergency room experience to treat the sick, he said. Unlicensed doctors and nurses are allowed to practice in prisons like Angola. They are not ordering ventilators or other essential medical equipment either, he said.

“We’ve been calling it a death camp because that’s how we see it, there’s no way that they are treating these people. None,” he said. “It’s about as bad a plan that could possibly be thought of. The plan is basically, ‘We need to stick them somewhere and we’re not going to send them to hospitals so, there you are.”

The state isn’t revealing the names of the detainees being sent to the makeshift sick ward at Angola, under the medical privacy law HIPAA, Cahoon said. That’s making it impossible for lawyers to challenge their placement there. He’s trying to identify the two people removed from East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, including the one taken from the hospital.

“We’re trying to figure out who these people are when they are transferred. I’m working on data scrapes to find out who these people are when they’re getting moved around,” he said. “Once we’ve done that we can find a lawyer and then they’re going to go to court — but they need to identify them first.”

‘We haven’t thought about that’

Rachel Gassert, Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights

In Louisiana, 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds who are charged with adult crimes are not in the custody of the Department of Corrections. Rachel Gassert, the policy director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, says she is not sure how many of those youths are either in prison or being held in pretrial detention.

“There are a handful in New Orleans and I assume there are more around the state,” she said.

Experts worry that if the young people get sick with COVID-19 they could be sent to Angola with the other adults. A spokesman for the Department of Corrections didn’t have a clear answer when asked what would happen if a teenager charged or convicted as an adult gets sick.

“We haven’t thought about that,” he said.

Gassert thinks the governor could get more kids out.

“The governor does have the authority to determine who will or will not be held in the custody of the Office of Juvenile Justice, which is a state agency,” she said. “Under his authority he has broad powers to suspend statute and regulations. We believe he has the authority to release children being held by the Office of Juvenile Justice.”

She thinks that youth who are in pretrial detention are a murkier question.

“It’s really an issue that hasn’t been tested by the courts,” Gassert said. “We’re in unprecedented, unchartered waters. … The urgency is great, but we are not seeing a reaction that matches that urgency, not from the courts, not from the governor, or the state agencies.

“… it’s been a little bit of an ad hoc approach; on the pretrial level each jurisdiction is figuring it out on their own,” she said. “In New Orleans we have seen a significant reduction of kids’ pretrial, but it’s been a process to achieve that. That’s partly because police aren’t making as many arrests and we’re not seeing the huge flow in that we normally have seen. … hearing from public defenders around the state, there is not really a proactive intentional effort to get kids out of this situation and get them out of harm’s way and that’s really frustrating.”

In addition, there are several hundred youths in what is known as “secure care” in facilities operated by the state’s juvenile justice system, plus more than 300 in nonsecure group homes, individual living facilities or psychiatric facilities. Gassert hopes the state can get more kids out so it will be easier to keep the ones left six feet apart and avoid harsh segregation techniques. The process has been slow and disorganized, with no apparent guidance from the governor’s office, she said.

“We’re very concerned about the possibility of the overuse of solitary confinement for quarantine and social purposes,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important to get as many young people out of these facilities as possible [so] they don’t have to rely on holding them in separate, individual cells to create that distance.”

Solitary confinement would strain already precarious pandemic circumstances.

“We know how detrimental that is to a kid’s health — it is essentially torture,” Gassert said. “This crisis has already created a very stressful situation for these kids. There are no visits from family, there are no visits from attorneys, from friends; they can’t go to school, they can’t go to their programs. It’s already a volatile situation. Putting them in solitary confinement is going to make it that much worse — much, much worse.”

In her conversations with the state Office of Juvenile Justice, she said they keep saying they are “looking at their population” to figure out ways to release more juveniles.

“But we don’t know what that means,” Gassert said. “The public defenders are filing motions, but they are not being treated like emergency motions. They are getting put on the calendar two or three weeks from now, and then it’s going to be too late. Time is of the essence.”

Grace Bauer-Lubow, Justice for Families

Grace Bauer-Lubow, senior associate and founder of Justice for Families, a national alliance of local organizations committed to ending youth incarceration, was less diplomatic with her critique.

“They’re going to be sick by then, you bunch of fucking idiots,” she said of the state’s sluggish response. Her son spent time in juvenile facilities as a teenager and her mother was a nurse in a prison in southern Louisiana. “The first thing I thought when I first heard about this pandemic coming here, I thought about nursing homes and prisons and I thought it’ll be worse in the prisons because there’s no way out. Health care is nothing … in these places. On a grand scale, i can’t imagine what we’re talking about here.”

‘A concrete bunker’

Camp J was recently shuttered, both for its deteriorating conditions but also for symbolic and safety reasons after a state partnership with the national Vera Institute of Justice to help reduce the facility’s use of solitary confinement as a punitive tool. In 2017, Warden Darrell Vannoy wrote to Department of Corrections Secretary James Le Blanc trying to persuade him to shutter the housing facility.

“The challenges staff encounter at Camp J are more complex than other areas of the institution,” Vannoy wrote in the letter. “Numerous times upon an officer’s knowledge that they will be assigned to Camp J or ‘loaned’ to Camp J for work detail they will leave work sick, walk off the job, or report to Human Resources to resign.”

It is unclear what medical personnel will be available to treat the sick sent to the camp, nor is it clear how many ventilators, masks or other medical supplies the staff will have to treat them. Vannoy directed questions to Ken Pastorick, the communications director for the Department of Corrections.

Pastorick acknowledged Monday that some sick people from jails and prisons from around the state were being held at Camp J but didn’t have a precise number. He did not have clear answers for how the plan would unfold once more sick people arrived — whether they would be kept in cells, put on gurneys, given medicine and have access to ventilators. Calls to the governor’s office were not returned.

East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux declined requests for interviews. His office directed inquiries to a prepared statement. He is the former president of the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association, which helped draft the Camp J plan.

Anderson said Gautreaux sat in on a March 25 conference call she participated in between city officials and advocacy organizations about a strategy for people in the prison. He made no mention of the Camp J plan. It was unveiled the next day.

The plan, rolled out with no apparent consultation with anyone from the state’s department of health or any medical personnel, is endemic of scattershot planning among state and parish agencies and the dozens of law enforcement agencies in the state, say experts, advocates and family members. The Camp J plan is just one of a number of plans that reflect a statewide chaos when it comes to a plan for people in some level of detention in the state, they say.

“In the best of times, they operate in a shroud of secrecy, and that’s in the best of times,” Bauer-Lubow said. “Now, we’re not talking about a shroud, we’re talking about a concrete bunker. No one knows what the hell is going on. When this is all over, we are going to be talking about a lot of dead bodies. A lot.”

‘A bunch of dead bodies’

One of those family members wondering what is going to happen next is Daughters Beyond Incarceration, any solace. It is incomprehensible to her that they would send people sick with COVID-19 to Angola, a place with so many elderly prisoners like her father.

“My biggest frustration is not knowing that my father is protected from this virus,” Jones said. “… They say they are making sure they are six feet away from each other, but come on.”

She and the other women in her organization are terrified that the staff aren’t doing enough to keep their fathers safe during the pandemic. Right now she said her father is trying to keep his cell clean with antibacterial soap and bleach that he has been watering down to stretch it out. He begged her to keep money in his Securus account so he can continue to buy cleaning supplies. He worries that if he gets sick they are just going to let him die. She recounted the phone call in a video just after she hung up with him.

Jones wants the governor to offer clemency for elderly prisoners and free communications via email, phone and video conferencing. She wants a mobile notification system to alert families to news and a functioning hotline so they can get reliable updates on the status of family behind bars. Right now, she said the Department of Corrections has one but it doesn’t work, leaving her and other family members wondering whether their loved ones are sick or healthy, alive or dead.

She worries, too, about what could be happening to people now that their visits have been taken away and very little information is coming out. A father in her organization who remains in work release inside East Baton Rouge Prison sent her a video. It shows a prisoner approaching the staff complaining about symptoms and asking to be tested. In the video, she says, they respond to his request by beating him.

“If something isn’t done,” she said, “you’re going to have a bunch of dead bodies.”

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Angola

juvenile justice

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Controversial Baton Rouge Police Shooting Case Slated to Go Before Grand Jury

Daryl Khan — Sat, 11 Jan 2020 22:15:35 +0000

Criminalization and Justice

Helen Frazier, the mother of Jordan Frazier, holds up a Christmas tree ornament memorializing her son in December. Photo credit: Clarissa Sosin

By Daryl Khan and Clarissa Sosin

This story originally appeared on East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney’s office did not reply to requests for comment for this story. Neither did a lawyer who has represented Hamadeh in the past. A spokesperson from the Louisiana State Police (LSP), the agency that investigated Frazier’s case, said they don’t have any comment on pending criminal proceedings.

Sgt. Don A. Coppola Jr. from the Baton Rouge Police Department (BRPD) emailed, “We are not going to comment.”

Helen and Henry Frazier, whose son Jordan was fatally shot by Hamadeh, said they were told by a special prosecutor assigned to the case that it was going before a grand jury after 2½ years of waiting and wondering.

“It’ll be three years in June, three years,” Henry Frazier said. “It was obviously being slow-walked off the front page to a point where the attention had gone away from it. But there are a lot of people who never gave up on it. And they’ve been praying and encouraging us all along.”

Ronald Haley Jr., the lawyer representing Howard in his civil case against the city and who consulted with the Frazier family in the wake of his killing, said he wasn’t always confident that Hamadeh would ever face justice. He thinks DA Moore is making a good-faith effort but acknowledges that Hamadeh could still not face charges.

“It’s great that they’re taking it to the grand jury but let’s get to the next step before we call this a victory lap,” Haley said. “We’re not ready to claim victory in this matter or the Frazier matter. I think it’s a great first step.”

Frazier’s case will be 3 years old in June and Howard’s case will be 2 years old in August. It’s been a long wait for the families, a wait that can destroy one’s faith in the criminal justice system, he said.

“We will not hold our breath until we get hopefully confirmation that some charges are brought onto Mr. Hamadeh,” Haley said.

He is concerned that Hamadeh will rejoin law enforcement in another department, Haley said. Asked if he would be surprised if Hamadeh would kill again under the color of law, his answer was quick and terse.

“No,” he said.

Striking similarities

The two cases have striking similarities. Both involved traffic stops. Both suspects were black young men. Both involved accusations that he fired at suspects said to be armed. One tragic difference is that Frazier did not live to give his account of what happened; Howard did.

After Frazier’s shooting, no disciplinary action was taken against Hamadeh. While the case remained under criminal investigation, he was put back on patrol and awarded a Medal of Valor for the shooting.

Howard, on the other hand, was alive. He desperately told local press that he was innocent, swearing he didn’t have a gun and begging for investigators to give him a battery of tests to prove his innocence.

He was telling the truth. Although Hamadeh had his body camera off and his dash camera tilted down, audio from the rear dash camera revealed that only one shot was fired, and that was from Hamadeh’s gun. The charges against Howard, attempted first degree murder of a police officer, were dropped.

Then-Baton Rouge Police Chief Murphy Paul fired Hamadeh in October 2018 but it was not for the shooting, it was because he lied about crashing his patrol vehicle into Howard’s car during the traffic stop. Hamadeh succeeded in getting the termination overturned due to a technicality and was reinstated. He then came to an agreement with the chief to resign. That same October, DA Moore announced that BRPD detectives said there was no probable cause a crime had been committed by Hamadeh during the incident with Howard.

As details emerged about the Howard case, the Fraziers thought back to the initial whirlwind in the wake of their son’s killing. They had accepted their son’s fate. They respected law enforcement and had raised their son to do so as well. If he had shot at an officer as the Louisiana State Police said he had, then he deserved the cards he was dealt. But then that same week at the funeral home, they found out their son had been shot in the back. And then LSP told them as well. The stories they were hearing about what happened that night stopped lining up.

The fence that Raheem Howard jumped while running away from former Officer Yuseff Hamadeh during their violent encounter in Baton Rouge. Photo credit: Clarissa Sosin

Investigators had cleared Hamadeh internally of any wrongdoing and produced a gun that they said Frazier pointed at him and the trainee he was partnered with that night. Nearly a year after the shooting, Hamadeh was awarded the medal of valor at a BRPD soiree called the Annual Meritorious Awards ceremony at L’auberge Casino. The award read: “As they exited their marked unit, Officer Hamadeh quickly observed the passenger exiting his vehicle with a handgun. Officer Hamadeh acted without hesitation to protect his trainee from an apparent ambush.”

There is a picture from that evening of Hamadeh smiling and shaking hands as he poses with Police Chief Murphy Paul. When the Fraziers saw that picture on the front page of The Advocate they were outraged. The decision to turn Hamadeh into a hero prompted outcries from the community and from his parents who said that the case was still being investigated by the Louisiana State Police and the District Attorney for possible criminal charges.

Never had a gun

Months later, a witness, the driver of the car the night of the fatal traffic stop a year earlier,
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race and racial justice

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Honoring David Underhill

Bridge The Gulf — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 20:22:37 +0000

Bridge the Gulf, along with many along the Gulf Coast and beyond, is mourning the loss of David Underhill, who passed away on November 8. David was a Bridge the Gulf contributor, an unwavering advocate for the Gulf Coast and a personal friend to many.

As Derrick Evans said,

"David was one of those few people, especially white people, and most especially uber-literate potential eggheads (smile), who did not wait for Katrina, or BP, or Keystone, or Donald Trump, or anything else cathartic before making it his habit and lifestyle to pay close attention and stand firm on the informed and correct side of climate justice issues, and more important, alongside neighbors living with those issues while keeping culture, faith, love and laughter alive somehow. Over many decades, David wrote, protested, offered solutions, and once had a radio show to pitch social and environmental sanity and humanity to Mobile area residents. Everyday marginalized people knew him and loved him like family. They trusted him with their stories, relationships and communities for many long years, and his own story and collective work belong in a museum somewhere. His death feels like yet another massive berg of Gulf Coast survival and resistance history breaking off to float and melt into both rising oceans that he warned of -- environmental and human inattention."

(Above - David Underhill in New Orleans, August 2016 Photo Credit: Karen Savage)

What follows are David's words of wisdom and reflection, as delivered at
But we can offer some boosting droplets wrung from experience.

The apocalypse loomed as the year 1000 approached. Either the End would come or the Lord would return or both together. Neither happened. As the next millennium approached techno nerds panicked. They feared a mass computer coma in the switch of dates from 1999 to 2000. That didn’t happen. And various cults have prepared their members for the Big Goodbye. They calculated the arrival of this event by vague signs in the skies and fanciful readings of religious texts. And they’ve been wrong every time.

This history could stoke doubt about the impending global climate crisis. The difference now is that the predictions of wreckage are drawn from current, observable data and from projections of that data into the near future. And those inclined to believe the ancient expectations of ruin should recall that most of those terminal visions involved floods and fires and suffocating fumes enveloping the helpless cursed – which is exactly what the best available science says we are facing.

Years ago this prospect was called global warming. But that phrase didn’t convey all that would occur as greenhouse gasses built up in the atmosphere. Besides rising temperatures in most places, some would get colder. Both rain and drought would increase. Also storms and calms.

So the term climate change has become the common description. It more accurately conveys the complex phenomena underway. But it can be mistaken to suggest that the things happening now are just another episode in the constant flux of climate throughout all time. That’s not true. The changes snaring us have no precedent in the geologic record for their speed and intensity.

This is societal suicide, and the proper name for how it comes about isn’t global warming or climate change but climacide. The convulsing climate is not something just happening on its own. This is being done by somebody. Climacide.

Lately capitalists and capitalism have often been fingered as the chief culprits. This accusation can easily overlook the energy and innovation that capitalism has brought to the world, which has served very generously those positioned to take advantage of the benefits, while leaving many others behind.

But the very name of this system tells you the main value it serves—capital. And when capital is invested it demands a return on that investment in the form of profit. All of you trying to pay off student loans understand this. Somebody invested in you by providing a loan. Yet when you pay it back you owe not only the loan but interest too. Over years of paying interest, plus the loan itself, you might deliver to the lender once-and-a-half or twice what you originally borrowed. The same applies to your credit card, and your car note, and your home mortgage.

Multiply that by millions of other people doing the same thing, and you have a system that requires constant economic expansion. This is the only way of generating enough resources to pay back one-and-a-half times or double the amount borrowed on all the outstanding loans.

And our leaders certify this system by making it seem essential and inevitable. As governor Ivey said about the proposed I-10 toll bridge and bayway: this project “is critical not only to Mobile and Baldwin counties but the entire Gulf Coast Region and would be important for the continued growth of all Alabama.”

That is an entirely familiar and normal demand for perpetual growth on a finite planet, which is unsustainable and insane. This form of capitalism must end if climacide is to end.

Some alternatives are reformist, others would be abrupt and wrenching shifts of systems. Some have been outlined in detail by sober visionaries. For an example Google steady state economy and Herman Daly.

But no purely economic alteration of systems can fully address climacide. Also implicated is the compulsion to treat the world like a warehouse of resources for extraction and use. This attitude has produced abundance and luxury for those able to reap the rewards, although it has left the rest deprived. But it is also laying waste to the biosphere upon which all life depends.

Climacide will continue unless this warehouse attitude surrenders to one that restores humanity to its place as a creature among the multitudes sharing the planet, rather than the Supreme Being ruling and exploiting all else. Many of us elders are dinosaurs, unable and uninterested in adapting to this necessity. We and our clotted notions are bound for extinction.

The children will have to take our place and set the pace. We will be, at best, foot soldiers following the youngsters’ vanguard.

In some versions of the Pied Piper tale the children marched off to their doom. In others they simply vanished. And in some they migrated to a more hopeful and promising place than the one they left.

The outcome isn’t ordained. Fate is chosen. It would be an uplifting honor to follow the children in the reverse Pied Piper throng."

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Jordan Frazier, Killed by Baton Rouge Police, Was Unarmed, Witness Says

Daryl Khan — Wed, 29 May 2019 13:42:27 +0000

Criminalization and Justice

By Daryl Khan and Clarissa Sosin

This story originally appeared on told local media that there was a driver in the car, but they never identified who it was; the department has refused to release the police report of the incident.

The gun the BRPD showed the public and local press was not Frazier’s and was not on his person or in the car that night, the woman who drove the car said. She doesn’t know whose it was or where it came from, but knows it wasn’t his. He wasn’t armed.

Officers spoke to her after the incident, but it is unclear whether her name is in the police report from that night. The police department has refused a public records request, as has the Louisiana State Police, which exonerated the officer in the shooting. Both agencies have cited the state’s exemption from the law, saying that the case remains under investigation. All the agencies involved in investigating the shooting have declined to comment for this story.

‘I’m about to go, Bae’

The woman and Frazier had been out for a drive on June 13, 2017 when the BRPD squad car did a U-turn and began to follow them. She figured the officer was pulling her over to give her a ticket for her headlight. There was a loose wire in her headlight, and bumps in the road, like the one she’d just hit on South Acadian Thruway, made it cut in and out. She had been meaning to get it fixed.

But her friend sitting in the passenger seat next to her thought otherwise. Frazier was panicking. He was cursing at her, something he had never done before.

“He used some foul words,” she said. He told her: “What the fuck you did to make them come behind us like that?”

The young woman had never seen him like this. She tried to calm him down and explained that the police weren’t going to bother with him. She was the driver. They were only going to run her driver’s license. But Frazier wasn’t listening to reason. He had a criminal record and ecstasy in his pockets. He was out on bail for trying to sell the drug following an arrest in March.

Then, according to her, the officers inside the car turned on their lights and siren, indicating she had to pull over. She did. Two officers climbed out of the car.

Frazier looked at her, an intense look in his eye. He kissed her on the hand, and then kissed her on the neck.

“I’m about to go, Bae,” she remembered him saying.

“No, don’t go nowhere,” she responded.

He didn’t listen to her. What happened next she’s played out in her mind many times.

Frazier opened the car door and bolted. Within seconds shots rang out, she said. Frazier had barely passed the front bumper when he tumbled to the ground. He fell on his stomach. Then, he managed to turn over and raise his hands, a motion pleading for the officer to stop.

She screamed. The other officer — a trainee at the time who did not fire the shots and remains unidentified by the BRPD — leaned into the car with his gun drawn and pointed it at her head.

A diary entry about Jordan Frazier written by the woman who was driving the car the night he was killed, photo by Clarissa Sosin

A look of fear crossed over her face as she remembered what he shouted at her.

“Shut the fuck up before I shoot you,” he yelled at her. “They really treated me like I was the one who did something,” she said.

Neither officer asked her for her license or registration, she said. And she never received a ticket. Instead, they started pouring over the car to see what they could find. More officers arrived, some in plainclothes, some uniformed. She was handcuffed and shoved in the back of a BRPD squad car, Frazier’s body no longer in sight. She sat there for hours while investigators remained at the scene.

Eventually officers took her to a nearby gas station to use the bathroom, then drove her to police headquarters where she was taken up to an interrogation room. She was never formally arrested, but was detained and questioned, she said. The interrogation didn’t make sense to her. Over the next few hours, she was puzzled by one line of questioning that kept coming up. It was about a gun. They insisted Frazier had it. Where was he keeping it? Where had he hidden it? What was he doing with it?

She had spent the whole afternoon with Frazier, she told the officers. He never had a gun that day.

The interrogation lasted until dawn, when she was finally released.

The young woman said she was confused by the news accounts after the shooting. They reported that the police officer had shot Frazier after he pulled out a gun and pointed it at the officer. She knew that wasn’t right. Frazier didn’t have a gun when he scrambled out of the car.

She was too shaken to come forward — until now. She eventually talked to her uncle about it in confidence. Aside from him, the only two people she talked to identified themselves as investigators. She doesn’t know what agency they were from, but the Baton Rouge Police Department and the state police have a memorandum of understanding that all shootings and fatalities will be investigated by the state police. They chatted with her on the sidewalk near her home for about 10 to 15 minutes, she said. They asked her a series of questions about what happened the night Hamadeh fatally shot Frazier.

They never asked her whether or not Frazier had a gun that night.

News reports said that Frazier had a distinctive handgun on him: a Ruger .22 Mark II. According to state police, it was stolen from nearby Ascension Parish. The woman said she couldn’t see Frazier’s body after they cuffed her and put her in the back of a squad car. She doesn’t know how it got there.

‘Even in death’

The Fraziers were upset, as any parent would be upon hearing the news that their child had been killed. But initially they were at peace with it. Jordan Frazier, their youngest child, had pointed a gun at a Baton Rouge Police officer during a traffic stop so the officer shot him, they were told by the state police.

They didn’t raise their son to act that way with law enforcement. His father, Henry, fought in Vietnam and served in NATO. His mother, Helen, worked in the local school system. It was a strict household, a “yes ma’am, no sir” household, the parents explained. They both had a respect for authority and tried to instil that in their children. So although they were despondent at the loss of their 35-year-old son, they thought he got what he deserved.

“I would never condone our son pointing a gun at an officer, and I was ready to settle for that, that Wednesday morning when we were briefed on what happened,” said Henry, sitting on a wooden chair in his living room a year after his son had been killed.

His wife, Helen, sat across the living room, a ladder shelf filled with framed cheerful family photos behind her. It had been more than a year since their son had been killed.

“If we believed in them and thought that what they were doing was right, we were behind them 100%. But if they were wrong, they got no support from mommy and daddy. And that’s just the way they were raised,” she said agreeing with her husband. “Even in death.”

Although the Fraziers’ home is just 20 miles north in the small town of Zachary, it seems a world apart from the streets of North Baton Rouge where their son died.

Their house sits on a large plot of land on a road that feels rural despite being so close to the state capital. Trees dot the horizon and a well-kept lawn separates them from their neighbors. Inside the house is impeccably clean. Family photos are scattered throughout and a get well poster for Henry, handmade by a grandchild, hangs on the wall.

Mementos from Jordan Frazier’s youth hang on the walls of the Frazier house in Zachary, La., photo by Clarissa Sosin

When they were told by investigators that their son had a gun, the Fraziers said they thought that chapter of their life was finished. The investigators had said that their son had been the passenger during a traffic stop and that he’d leaped out of the car and pulled a gun on Hamadeh and the trainee assigned to him that night. Hamadeh fired multiple shots in response. The case seemed straightforward to them and the shooting perfectly defensible.

“We thought it was over,” Henry said. “We made arrangements to have him buried.”

But two days later, when they were returning from finalizing the details for the funeral, they got a call.

“Those same state troopers called us, just like the barn was on fire,” Henry said.

Helen interrupted, finishing the thought: “Because they had a different story to tell.”

The state investigators were eager to talk to them, the Fraziers said, because they didn’t want them to hear about the coroner’s conclusions on the news. The report stated that their son had been shot in the back, not the front as they had originally been told.

“A police officer said that Jordan had pointed a gun, and that was the end of the story,” Helen said. “That was the end of the story, irrespectful of the fact that he received three bullets to his back and then you’re going to tell me that that’s the end of the story? It’s not the end of the story,” she said. “It’s just the beginning of the story.”

Henry twisted in his chair to try to illustrate the awkward mechanics of the second story the investigators told them. They explained that their son had pulled the gun out and twisted his body around to aim it at the officers, all while he ran in the opposite direction.

Hamadeh was investigated and cleared to go back to patrol just weeks later. Since then, Hamadeh’s reputation has gone through twists and turns. He is no longer on the force.

The Frazier case technically remains under investigation by East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III. But the Fraziers are skeptical of the investigation’s integrity. They fear the investigation into their son’s death has been buried. They’ve tried multiple times to get a copy of the coroner’s report but they have not been successful.

“Here we are, two citizens of this city, that should get the same respect as the police officers get, and are getting nothing. Nothing. It’s one-sided. It’s totally one-sided,” Henry said. “All we wanted was from an official source, ‘This is what happened.’”

They are still waiting.

‘All you have to do is change the names’

Nearly a year after Frazier’s killing, Hamadeh was involved in another shooting that shared a number of similarities with the Frazier incident. Except this time, the suspect, Raheem Howard, survived and fled the scene.

“If you would have put a gun on the ground in this young man’s case and a bullet in his back and you have the same thing,” Henry said, comparing Howard’s case to his son’s. “All you have to do is change the names. It’s the same story.”

The details of the incident are laid out in a civil suit filed for Howard by his lawyer Ronald Haley Jr. against the BRPD for excessive force.

Howard, 20 at the time, was driving his friends back from a job training at a nearby seafood restaurant when Hamadeh, while pulling him over, rammed his unmarked car into the back of Howard’s car in a residential neighborhood. Panicked, Howard jumped out of the car and ran.

Hamadeh chased after him. He pulled out his gun and fired at Howard, who disappeared into the neighborhood. Hamadeh put out a call over the radio saying that Howard shot at him first. A manhunt ensued. Howard ultimately turned himself in and during a “perp walk” vigorously maintained his innocence.

“I didn’t have no gun,” he said to local reporters, his voice quivering with fear. “They got the body camera, the dash camera. I didn’t do nothing but run.”

Howard asserted in his civil suit that during his interrogation, officers encouraged him to confess to shooting at Hamadeh. He said BRPD investigators kept telling him that they had everything on video. This turned out not to be true. Hamadeh’s body camera and his front dash camera were turned off at the time of the incident. But there was a police record: an audio recording from the rear dash camera, which had been pointed down.

While Howard sat in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison facing a possible life sentence for attempted murder of a police officer, there was an outcry from witnesses in the neighborhood who said they only heard one gunshot. Residents and advocates pressured the BRPD to release any recordings of the incident.

When the audio was made public, Howard’s innocence was confirmed. There was only one gun shot in the recording — the one from Hamadeh’s gun. District Attorney Moore dropped the charges against Howard, saying there was not enough evidence to prosecute him. Moore has further promised to review all the cases Hamadeh was involved in. The district attorney’s office now doubts his credibility in court. So far there have been numerous criminal cases that Hamadeh investigated where the charges were either dropped or reduced.

In October 2018, BRPD Chief Murphy Paul fired the officer for lying about that day; he hadn’t told internal affairs investigators he’d crashed his patrol car into Howard’s car during the traffic stop that led to the chase, the shooting and the manhunt.

But after a hearing in front of the Baton Rouge Municipal Fire and Police Civil Service Board on Jan. 17, 2019, Hamadeh got his job back.

It was a 3-2 decision that broke along racial lines. The three white members of the board voted to reinstate Hamadeh. Shortly after the decision, he and Chief Paul negotiated terms for his resignation.

The decision horrified the Frazier and Howard families.

Hamadeh’s lawyer, Thomas “Tommy” Dewey of Dewey & Braud Law, acknowledged that the accusations against his client were serious but said his client deserved due process.

“What is getting lost in all this is that my client was cleared by Chief Paul for use of force. For the worst part of this, the accusations of force and the shooting, he was cleared. They conducted an investigation, internal affairs did, and they found that it was not sustained, that’s the language they used,” he said.

Dewey said Hamadeh now works in the private sector and that he declined both a request for an interview and to comment for this story.

Haley, Howard’s lawyer, wants the Department of Justice to re-investigate the case.

“Punishing bad cops is something they seem immune to,” he said of the BRPD and the state police. “That’s that blue wall, it’s more powerful than the one Trump is trying to build — that wall of silence is deafening.”

So far, no officer from the BRPD will say there is probable cause to charge Hamadeh. If there is no police officer who goes on the record and testifies to that before a grand jury, the district attorney won’t charge Hamadeh with anything related to the Howard case. The Police Officers Bill of Rights ties the district attorney’s hands. He can’t use anything that was presented in Hamadeh’s termination hearing in a grand jury proceeding, Haley said. And unless new information comes up in the Frazier case, he won’t indict him for that either.

Myra Richardson, 20, an activist for police reform and Dialogue on Race and Policing last year, said there are multiple obstacles in the way of police reform and proper community oversight of the police. The Civil Service Board that gave Hamadeh his job back, made up of people appointed by the mayor, City Council and the police and fire departments, needs to also have representatives appointed by the community, she said.

“When we talk about, like, what are the systemic problems, it’s like the board is systematically being comprised in a specific way that doesn’t allow for justice,” Richardson said.

Richardson said that in an ideal world, Baton Rouge would establish a civilian oversight committee, like the Independent Police Monitor in New Orleans or the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City, but she said she doesn’t think it is politically feasible.

In May 2017, the BRPD Union came out against more civilian oversight saying the Civil Service Board was enough.

Where the wind blows

The response to Hamadeh’s actions revealed how ultimately the only agency holding the BRPD accountable for its excesses is the BRPD itself — creating what critics and the families of victims say is a conflict of interest.

The independent agencies that are supposed to scrutinize the BRPD for its excesses are not holding the department accountable, victims say. After an officer-involved shooting, the district attorney relies on the findings of the BRPD and the state police. The district attorney’s investigators are trained for case management — for example, making sure witnesses show up to court on time. They are not trained to vigorously investigate complicated criminal cases, defense attorneys familiar with the office said. If there were a more rigorous and independent review of police abuse, critics of the police department and family said, then Hamadeh would not have been back with the Street Crime Unit in a position to shoot and possibly kill Howard, or anyone else again.

Carl Dunn, a member of the BRPD for three decades, says the Louisiana State Police and the district attorney’s office work too closely with the department to be fair and objective. He is currently the police chief in Baker, the small town just to the north of Baton Rouge. He worked the streets of Baton Rouge as a patrol officer and the hallways of headquarters as an administrator.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a formal ‘We’re going to get together and cover this up,’” Dunn said. “I wouldn’t say that because that’s not what it takes. It takes their being in unison to see which way the wind is blowing on it and everybody falling in line. You don’t have to sit down and conspire a lot of times. I just want to know your way of thinking, and if we work together every day, that’s the first thing you’re going to learn.”

Dunn left the BRPD because he thought the department was encouraging a culture of excessive force instead of trying to rein it in. During his time as an administrator, he helped update the BRPD’s policy book, known as the “Blue Book.” If they followed just 50% of the policies in the updated book, instances of excessive force would be far less rampant, he said. But they don’t, he said.

Over the years the BRPD has done nothing to discourage excessive force because it’s not investigated rigorously by the department, Dunn said.

Even when it is, there are still cases such as Corp. Robert Moruzzi, a BRPD officer who was involved in two federal lawsuits accusing him of excessive force. He was fired in 2009 for his involvement in a downtown fight outside a bar in which he threatened to kill the manager, but appealed to get his job back. He was charged with simple battery, aggravated assault, simple assault, disturbing the peace by intoxication and misdemeanor theft but the charges were dropped in 2010. The next day he was back on the force after reaching an agreement with Jeff Leduff, the police chief at the time.

Then, in 2013, Moruzzi was accused of repeatedly shocking Jed Bricker with a Taser stun gun. Bricker sued him in federal court but the case was dismissed. In 2014, Moruzzi was accused of calling Brett Percle a “jack-o-lantern” after he kicked Percle’s head against the curb, knocking out teeth. The court found that Moruzzi had used excessive force and awarded Percle $51,412.

Moruzzi remains on the force today. On Jan. 17, 2019, he sat on the civil service board that determined that Hamadeh should get his job back.

‘I was just fighting for survival’

Tanisha Howard had never heard the name Jordan Frazier. It wasn’t until her son, Raheem, had an encounter with the same officer who killed Frazier that she learned the details of the case. After her son’s ordeal — being shot at, subjected to a manhunt, accused of attempted murder of a police officer and sitting in prison — she realized how lucky her son was to be alive.

She read up on the case and, like Frazier’s parents, was startled by the similarities. In fact, in another unexpected connection, a former colleague told her that she used to work at the same school where Frazier’s mother was a secretary. Now, after what has come out around her son’s case, she questions the integrity of the investigation into Frazier’s death.

“They didn’t give it as much attention that they should have,” she said about the media coverage of Frazier’s death. “You knew something about the report wasn’t right. And it was a young black man — you think they care?”

At first Howard thought her son had met the same fate as Frazier after his encounter with Hamadeh. That day she received a frantic phone call — she can’t remember from who — that her son had been killed by the BRPD. The person told her they thought her son’s body was by the church. She needed to come identify it.

“Our life changed. Not only Raheem’s life changed, but my life also changed. To come home from work to get a call that says your son just got killed by police officers,” she said. “Can you imagine, as a mother, what I’ve been through?”

Raheem is still haunted by the ordeal. He’s had to deal with financial problems, like the loss of his car, and missed job opportunities. And when people look his name up, they see it associated with the attempted murder of a police officer. But it’s the psychological toll that has been the hardest. When he reflects both on running for his life and sitting in a cell thinking about a life sentence behind bars, he holds back tears.

“I was just fighting for survival, I really don’t like talking about it,” he said. “Nobody wants to sit down and see what I’m going through.”

He was released from prison in October and has been trying to get his life back on track since. He even moved to Jacksonville, Fla., to start over. But he is angry at losing two months of his life on a made-up charge. Now, as he works on his civil suit, he has one mission.

“I want justice — and when I mean justice, I should see [Hamadeh] the same way I was on the news. I should be seeing him with his head down on the news knowing that I’ll be going to every court date to testify against him because he tried to kill me,” Howard said. He worries that if Hamadeh ever gets hired again as law enforcement, he’ll try to kill someone else.

Haley, Howard’s lawyer, who also worked briefly on the Frazier case, said he thinks the ordeal that the BRPD put Howard through makes taking a second look at Frazier’s death all the more urgent. If the district attorney is dropping cases Hamadeh was involved in because they doubt his credibility, then it means they need to return to the Frazier case as well, he said.

“What happened to Raheem — and what we now know about what happened to him — it makes everything else possible,” Haley said. “If y’all are willing to do all that for a mistake where no one gets hurt, what are you going to make up if you accidentally kill somebody? Or intentionally kill somebody? Ask yourself: What would that cover-up look like?”

‘I want to reassure the citizens of Baton Rouge’

The Frazier house in Zachary is a warehouse of Jordan’s mementos. There are the ones that commemorate his triumphs. Team photos from his years of high school sports hang on the walls of the game room across from a bureau crammed with trophies. Then there other mementos — an ornament with his photo that says “First Christmas in Heaven,” and a stack of old newspapers filled with articles related to his case.

One of the articles describes the ceremony during which Hamadeh was awarded a Medal of Valor for killing their son.

Helen, his mother, had always supported the police. She had faith in the system. But the investigation into her son’s death hardened her. After hearing different stories from the state police, and then being ignored for more than a year by the district attorney’s office, she said she doesn’t believe in the system anymore.

“To me there’s just no truth. We don’t know. We can’t get anyone to talk to us. We only know what we know: We’ve lost our son,” she said.

What happened to her son is a harsh reminder of where they live, she said. This is the deep South, she reminded visitors, where the vestiges of Jim Crow can be seen everywhere from the ubiquitous Confederate battle flags hanging from porches or slapped onto car bumpers to law enforcement’s treatment of black residents.

“That’s the consensus here. That if you’re a black young man and you get stopped by a police officer you run. Ours ended up dead,” she said.

After the second high-profile shooting, involving Hamadeh and Raheem Howard, Chief Paul wrote a public letter to the citizens of Baton Rouge.

“As your Chief, I wholeheartedly believe in transparency. I have worked hard to gain the public’s trust since I took the oath of office in January of this year,” he wrote. “I want to reassure the citizens of Baton Rouge that our Baton Rouge Police Officers are conducting a thorough investigation into this incident.”

But Helen and Henry Frazier said they, too, were assured of a thorough and independent investigation. But all they have heard were a series of stories from investigators, each more unbelievable than the last.

“Shoot first and ask questions later,” Helen said of the police department that killed her son. “You know, all I see, all I see they see is that my son is just another dead nigger. I’m sorry, but that’s all they see. It’s just another dead nigger. That is it.”

The Fraziers said they feel as though black residents and police are held to different standards in Baton Rouge.

“The police should have to face the same laws that we face,” Henry said.

Growing up, Henry experienced firsthand what it was like to live under two standards. As a teenager, he risked his life fighting for civil rights. He integrated the first segregated public school in Southern Louisiana. The memories still trouble him. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Now, as he nears the end of his life, he finds himself, almost 60 years later, embroiled in another civil rights battle.

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Africatown Remains Overburdened by Polluting Industries, Overlooked by Local Political Leaders

Joe Womack — Thu, 16 May 2019 21:56:31 +0000

Race and Racial Justice

In recent years, Mobile's historic Africatown community has made great strides. It developed its own community plan. Its rich history has been featured in

Hosea Weaver Asphalt Plant

Twenty years ago Africatown historian and community leader Henry Williams, led a group of 40 Africatown residents to Mobile's City Planning Commission meeting to protest the construction of an asphalt plant being constructed by Hosea Weaver & Sons Inc. on Bay Bridge Cut-Off Road in Africatown.

(Above: dust blows as trucks enter the Hosea Weaver driveway in Africatown.)

It seemed as though the plant was 75 percent complete before its layout and subdivision of the property came before the Planning Commission. Company president Paul Weaver endured criticism from Africatown residents as well as Planning Commission members. When asked why he continued construction even after the city learned of it and issued a stop-work order, Weaver told the commission that he did not stop work because he was fighting at the time to get the permit. When pressed he finally admitted that he really did not have an excuse and that he was the "Goat".

Weaver previously had admitted that he did not think that he needed a permit to build in that area of the city (Africatown). He also said the plant was valued at more than $3 million, but earlier he told the Planning Commission that his company would have invested $7 million in it by the time it is finished. Commissioners voted 4-2 to give preliminary approval to the project. One commission member did not vote and said after the meeting that he had disqualified himself from voting because he had worked with the Weaver Company on the project.

Africatown residents have said that "it's too close, it's noisy and dusty". The permit to build and operate was granted to the Hosea Weaver Asphalt Plant with only one requirement, that a tree planting and landscaping be designed to create a buffer between the plant and nearby residents. The commission

Earlier this year, Kemira applied for permission from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) to construct a facility that would allow the company to produce its own acrylamide monomer, thus allowing even more of this highly volatile material to be stored within the confines of Africatown.

Mobile, Alabama has very hot weather during the summer months. In its application to ADEM Kemira did not say anything about steps it would take to ensure that this same incident will not repeat at a larger level.

When word got out that Kemira had plans to expand their plant and put the community more at risk, the community demanded a public hearing to express its concerns about the company's proposed expansion. ADEM granted the public hearing but did not allow the hearing to be held in Africatown.

Kemira is located in Africatown and it is Africatown residents who are concerned. Nonetheless, Africatown residents showed up in mass to speak up against the proposed expansion of Kemira. Africatown residents spoke 23 to 2 against the proposed expansion, but ADEM has granted Kemira permission to expand anyway.

The Africatown community has their own plan that the Mobile City Council spent $50,000 to get done and the Mobile City Planning Commission has approved. The community plan states that the residents of Africatown do not want any more hazardous industrial expansion into the community. Approval of Kemira's expansion is a violation of that plan.

Mobile's $2 Billion Bridge Project

In 1974 I left the military and decided to return to Mobile in part because word had been circulated around the country that the Tennessee-Tombigsbee Waterway Project, which took 10 years to complete and cost billions of dollars, would do for Mobile what the Atlanta Airport has done for the city of Atlanta.

Today that waterway is laughed at for being the largest man-made fishing hole in America. Later, I saw Mobile spend millions of dollars to improve the municipal airport in West Mobile, when everyone in their right mind knew that the airport should have been relocated at Brookley Field, where large airplanes could land, thus turning our airport into an international airport.

Mobile now trails smaller cities such as Gulfport and Pensacola in flights available and pricing. A few years ago, Mobile spent $65 million in taxpayers dollars to build a museum on the downtown waterfront dedicated to merchants and shipping in Mobile. Less than a year later the doors to that museum were closed due to lack of visitors. Because of the aforementioned and other questionable decisions made by those that have been entrusted to keep mobile financially solvent, I do not have much confidence in projects that claim they will have a huge positive impact on Mobile - especially when these projects usually end up having a negative impact on the historic Africatown community.

One issue is the traffic problem, which Mobile does not have. Mobile has two hours of peak traffic periods twice a day, and even then only three or four streets in Mobile are congested. During the summer months there is traffic going to the beaches on Friday and coming back from the beaches on Sunday. Yes, traffic does back up whenever there is an accident in the tunnel, but accidents happen all over the world and will continue to happen. If you want to see real southern traffic go to Houston, New Orleans, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham or Nashville. In those southern cities, traffic begins at 5 am and lasts until 10 pm. I know, because I drove 18-wheelers for 11 years.

Now a proposed new toll to pay for a proposed new bridge over Interstate 10 could divert between 15,000 and 50,000 vehicles a day through the Africatown community. Alabama Department of Transportation studies show that if a toll were implemented to help pay for this $2 billion boondoggle of a bridge, drivers would reroute their trips through Africatown to avoid paying tolls.

This type of traffic flow will inflict unnecessary harm upon Africatown residents. The increased traffic flow will make it more dangerous for residents to move in and out of the community freely. Noise and air pollution problems will increase.

Right now, there are no pollution monitoring devices in Africatown. Once again, the city of Mobile has chosen Africatown, a historic and underserved community, as a place to dump its unwanted problem (traffic) and make Africatown residents bear the burdens of this $2 billion dollar project.

Because of the physical and environmental harm the implementation of the toll will inflict on our historic Africatown community, Africatown residents are demanding a percent of that toll be directed into an account for the improvement and upkeep of the community.

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