East New York in the early ’90s was a dumping ground for the city’s marginalized, each immigrant group that moved up and out replaced by the next off the boat. The population was primarily black and Latino and, for the most part, freshly arrived to these shores. It had, as yet, failed to enjoy the gentrification brought to other parts of Brooklyn by young families seeking spare bedrooms and middle-class professional singles pushed out of the Manhattan housing market. Crime, isolation, poor schools, and drugs would keep such potential gentrification groups uninterested for quite some time.
East New York was a strange island of impoverished, neglected housing projects amidst a sea of burned-out homes and commercial buildings that were never restored to use—by people with rent money, anyway. It was a long subway ride from the business centers of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and, lacking shopping centers, museums, decent housing, or any type of job prospects, the neighborhood offered the outside world little reason to ever stop by. It was a place where the isolation of its residents made them distrustful of outsiders, especially the law, meaning the police. And like any group of people left to their own devices, the rules of the outside world ceased to matter.
Handguns were plentiful and cheap, but were not regarded as flashy ornaments. Many residents, including teenagers, carried concealed guns and knives because they genuinely feared for their own safety. But though the 75th Precinct reportedly confiscated numerous unregistered weapons on a daily basis, countless more went unnoticed.
In ’91, the story of a skinny twitch named Bernhard Goetz was still fresh in everyone’s minds. Several years earlier, Goetz, who had taken to carrying an unlicensed handgun after his second mugging, encountered four black teenagers on the subway. The boys were carrying blunt screwdrivers they planned to use to break into video arcade games. When the boys approached him and asked for money, Goetz—in a fit of rage, fear, desperation, prejudice, or hatred, depending on the account you believe—fired his gun repeatedly into each of them at close range. The boys survived, with one left a paraplegic. Goetz, ultimately convicted only of illegal weapons possession, went on to run for mayor, then public advocate—both futile campaigns.
After the shooting, the “subway vigilante,” as Goetz was tagged by the tabloids, became the embodiment of either the proposition that a middle-class white male can shoot black kids with impunity, or of the desperation of law-abiding citizens fed up with crime run amok. Either way you looked at it, it was a sign of the racial polarization of the time.
In August 1991, this point was driven home even harder in Crown Heights, when a young Guyanese boy was hit and killed by a rabbi’s motorcade. Within hours, an angry mob looking to kill a Jew—any Jew—wreaked vengeance upon Yankel Rosenbaum, a bystander with the poor luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For the following four days, a torrent of unchecked, pent-up outrage from the neighborhood’s black Caribbean community poured onto the streets.
“The racial divide then was palpable and high,” recalled Michael Shapiro, a lawyer who defended one of the Jewish motorcade drivers whose out-of-control limousine caused another vehicle to collide, fatally, with the Guyanese boy.
The ensuing political fallout would shed light on a police department that hung back without getting involved, a conspicuously absent police commissioner, and Mayor David N. Dinkins—who appeared to lack any ability to manage the racial polarization.
The rest of the city stopped for a while and stared, jaws agape, then went about business as usual. This was, after all, blasé New York.
In the early 1990s, after years of steady escalation, the crime rate in New York City had hit its peak. In 1990, the city suffered 2,262 murders, 109 of them in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, just a year before three teenage boys met their end in the halls of their own high school.
Jason Bentley was a fourteen-year-old boy who was smart but underachieving, typical of a kid trying to fit in at Thomas Jefferson High School. He also adored his older brother Jermaine, whom he had followed to “Jeff.” Jason, like so many others teens, owned a handgun for what he believed to be personal protection.
Jermaine, unfortunately, had “beef” with another boy, Jesse, over an issue most adults would consider minor—an inaccurate rumor that Jermaine “disrespected” Jesse’s sister. But in the culture of adolescent boys in East New York, things escalated and, predictably, turned deadly.
So it was that on November 25, 1991, in the hallway of Thomas Jefferson High School, Jermaine and Jesse began a fight over a book bag that quickly heated up. And when Jason thought he saw his brother in danger, he pulled the gun to defend him and fired twice, missing Jesse, but unintentionally hitting sixteen-year-old Darryl Sharpe and a teacher.
The teacher was wounded and eventually recovered. Darryl Sharpe died.
“I did what I had to do,” Jason stated ten years later to researchers from the National Academy of Sciences, who came seeking answers about why kids shoot kids. To the boys themselves, it was simple. It was a matter of survival.
“A lot of the kids felt like they had to arm themselves,” recalled Maria Newman, who wrote extensively about the shooting and the kids at Jeff for the
New York Times
. “It makes me sad that it was so commonplace.”
To the
Times
and its readers, the shooting was news. To the teens at Jeff, the only thing new about it was the attention it garnered.
For some time, Thomas Jefferson High School had maintained a student burial fund because so many poor families wound up needing the service. The school had also set aside special grieving rooms where students who had lost friends or relatives could discuss their feelings and receive counseling. According to varying reports, somewhere between thirty and seventy-five Jefferson students had been killed over a five-year period, and a good fifty percent of the surviving students had been wounded in some way.
As more of the story revealed itself through media coverage, the city had to hear what most people probably didn’t care to know: For so many of New York’s children, violence was a part of everyday life, something to be endured with little hope of escaping.
The mayor had responded to previous calls for tighter security with the rotating use of handheld metal detectors; in practice, the detectors traveled to Jefferson once a week. Like many administrators and teachers, the principal, Carol Beck, had mixed feelings about the message metal detectors sent to the students. But in three months’ time, both she and the mayor would come to rue the rotating detector policy when two more Jefferson students were shot and killed at school.
This time, the killing was intentional, a grudge that one youth, fifteen-year-old Khalil Sumpter, held against two others—Tyrone Sinkler, sixteen, and Ian Moore, seventeen. The grudge resulted in Khalil gunning down Tyrone and Ian at point-blank range.
To the boys’ classmates, the shooting didn’t come as much of a surprise. Everyone who knew the boys knew trouble had been brewing among them. And although all three had had skirmishes with the law, no one really thought of them as “bad” kids, just regular guys with a beef.
Only in East New York, beef kills.
In East New York, a kid with a beef acted on it or faced the humiliation of his peers, which could mean he, himself, could be made a victim. Minor disputes, in that way, became matters of life and death.
Thomas Jefferson High School, though a beacon of hope early in the twentieth century for ambitious neighborhood immigrants, was clearly on the skids in the 1990s.
Early in 1992, on the very day of the murders of Ian Moore and Tyrone Sinkler, Mayor Dinkins came to Thomas Jefferson High to speak to the students, urging them to resist drugs and violence.
The mayor’s testimony addressed the day’s tragedy and touched upon his own personal history. David Norman Dinkins, the city’s first African American mayor, was raised by a mother separated from her husband, along with his grandmother. Both women were domestic workers. Young David refused to allow poverty and disadvantage to curb his determination to succeed.
The mayor’s visit and poignant memoir were meant to inspire hope in the desolate little strip of Brooklyn called East New York.
At least he tried.
Darryl Sharpe’s funeral was notable for who did not attend— neither the mayor nor anyone from his office; likewise, nobody from the police department or any other department of the city. During the service, the reverend called out for representatives of these institutions. He was answered each time with silence.
But Ian Moore’s funeral made up for the neglect. More than a thousand mourners, including Mayor Dinkins and a flock of other city officials, attended. The service was as much about mourning Ian Moore as it was a community that allowed such tragedy to occur.
When the mayor rose to say that Ian had “gone home to God,” the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood angrily responded, “What’s he going to tell God about us when he gets there?”
It was a service of soul-searching, anger, and sadness over the resigned acceptance of tragedy by the people of East New York.
The ensuing months saw antiviolence campaigns that included the mayor, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and even Bill Cosby—all of them invoking Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message of nonviolence. At great expense, permanent metal detectors were installed by a side entrance of Jeff, complementing the one by the main lobby where stood the polished statue of the third president of the United States.
A number of students responded with something rare in East New York, something approaching optimism. But in the habit of people who have been ignored too long, most shook their heads and said,
Nothin’s really gonna change
. It was too much to believe that a few marches and visits from celebrities could alter poverty, drugs, and violence.
Maria Newman’s career as a journalist had taken her to several landmarks of poverty and violence—Los Angeles, Nicaragua, Cuba. But what she encountered in New York was more chilling, for the indifference with which it was met.
“Where was the outrage? That’s what I wondered over and over again when stories took me to places like Thomas Jefferson High School, where kids were killing other kids,” she said. “Where was the outrage?”
In 1993, Newman became a mother, at which point, she said, “I couldn’t look at stories like this.”
That was the year that the crime rate in New York hit an all-time high, with East New York at the top of the chart.
Then, suddenly and inexplicably, crime fell. The number of homicides in East New York dropped from 126 in ’93 to 44 by ’95. In an article for the
New Yorker
, Malcolm Gladwell, author of
The Tipping Point
, identified an “epidemic theory” behind the statistical turnabout.
Criminal justice players, including the lawyer Michael Shapiro, credited Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s crackdown on quality-of-life crimes and, in particular, “community policing,” in which police officers go out of their way to learn the particular needs of civilians on their beats.
Perhaps it had simply happened because the shootings were able to shine a spotlight on the culture of violence among the teens in East New York. Reverend Youngblood told researchers, “Maybe God allowed the violence to get out of hand so that we would finally pay attention to violence and young people.”
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, attention was indeed paid. In addition to metal detectors, the school established student retreats and antiviolence programs, which included posters that carried the images of a gun next to a coffin. But the change that would have the most widespread, lasting impact would be the decision by the schools chancellor to cut up large, impersonal high schools into smaller minischools focused on a theme, such as legal studies, civil rights, or fire safety.
And so it came to pass that in 2004, Thomas Jefferson High School, which had been placed on a list of seven lowperforming schools in Brooklyn, announced that it would accept no more freshmen, and instead opened its doors to four new schools that would be housed within its campus. The last of the “Jeffheads” graduated in June 2007, after a school year marked by little fanfare and no incident.
The public attention on Jeff died down along with the plunging neighborhood crime rate, and the area has shown some signs of revitalization, such as new apartment complexes and a shopping center. But a reduction in crime statistics doesn’t necessarily change the reality of poverty for those who continue to live it. For the kids who are too young to remember Jason Bentley, Khalil Sumpter, and the day the mayor came to speak, hope still seems illusive.
There are stories, less dramatic but nonetheless poignant, that don’t make the news.
Theresa Reel, a high school teacher who’d moved up to the city from Mississippi, recalled how one of her students, a quiet sixteen-year-old boy who’d never caused trouble, stood up one morning and began a noisy tirade on the hopelessness of school and life. After the boy was removed from her classroom, she learned that he was upset because his baby cousin had died only the night before of SIDS—Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. When the new teacher expressed her shock and sorrow at what had happened to the boy, the other kids in the class shrugged and told her,
This is East New York,
didn’t you know?
If anybody anywhere else in New York City noticed, they might surely have stopped for a moment and shaken their heads. Then, just as surely, they would have gone about their day.
S
o, where else would Peter Braunstein head for cover but Brooklyn? He was a writer, after all.
According to his indictment, freelance journalist Peter Braunstein entered the Chelsea apartment building of a former coworker on Halloween evening, 2005, wearing a New York City Fire Department uniform purchased on eBay.