hate crimes

When a car full of young men pulled up to Ali Kamara near his Staten Island home shortly after Barack Obama’s historic election victory, the teen didn’t run – he said he thought he was about to be stopped by cops.

Moments later, the 17-year-old high school student said he found himself instinctively covering his face as he had been taught in boxing class while his attackers pounded him with pipes and a baton, and yelled, “Obama!”

As he recovers from his injuries, Kamara, a Black Muslim, described the racially charged beating – and vowed he isn’t going to let the suspected hate attack shake him from his goal of becoming a pediatrician.

“I try to wake up early in the morning, go to school, make the best out of it, like, just to learn so that I can make my mom happy,” said the Curtis High School student, who has been taking extra classes to make up the time lost to his injuries.

“That can’t stop me from doing anything,” said Kamara, who suffered a head wound and was left with a limp by the early Nov. 5 beating.

“They could’ve killed me, though, and not make me try to be who I wanted to be when I grew up… I want to meet them to ask them why it had to be me,” Kamara said.

‘Cowards in The Night’

Two white teenagers, described as “cowards in the night” by a prosecutor, have been charged in the early Nov. 5 beating near the intersection of Pine and Broad streets in predominantly black Park Hill.

Ralph Nicoletti and Bryan Garaventa, both 18, face counts of assault as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon. The teens, who pleaded not guilty, could get up to 15 years in prison, if convicted.

Cops are looking for two other suspects in the attack, which prosecutors said came shortly after members of the quartet shouted racial slurs outside a local nail salon.

Kamara said he had spent most of election night playing video games at a friend’s house. Around midnight, after watching the election results, he walked home. He was a few houses away from his home when a car pulled up just before a stop sign.

“That is when the two kids hopped out and I thought it was the cops,” said Kamara.

“So, I stood there. I’m waiting for them to search me, because if I run, [they’re] going to chase me,” said Kamara, adding that cops had stopped him once in the past, and let him go after finding nothing amiss. “They’re going to say, I had drugs on me or ‘Why you running?’ or ‘We got to take you to the precinct to see if you’ve got any criminal (record).’

Next thing he knew, Kamara said, he was being beaten. He said he put his hands over his face as the attackers clubbed him and called him “Obama.”

Another car soon drove by and the four men fled. “That car saved my life,” Kamara said.

Kamara said he got up, ran and jumped over a fence of a nearby house, and called his mom – and 911.

“If I wasn’t going to get up, they was going to kill me,” said Kamara, “because they kept hitting me hard.”

A Mother’s Nightmare

Kamara’s mother thought she had left senseless violence behind eight years ago when she fled war-torn Liberia with her son and settled on Staten Island. Now, she said, her life has been turned upside down.

“Every day, I have to give him medication for his head,” said Janeba Ladepo, 36, a resident assistant at the United Cerebral Palsy facility near her son’s school. “I go to work and I cry. I think about my son everyday.”

“We don’t deserve this. We are a poor people coming to this country for our daily bread.”

Ladepo said she wanted to see the other two suspects brought to justice soon.

“I’m not going to say that all white people are bad,” she said. “Four people did this to my son. I consider them to be bad people.”

Demands for Justice

The incident has shaken Staten Island and spurred demands for justice. Elected officials have put up a $6,600 reward. Some residents have proposed a borough-wide conversation on race, and have called on schools to use Obama’s upcoming inauguration as a “teaching moment” about racial relations.

“There is hate because of fear. There is fear because of ignorance,” Hesham El-Meligy, a New Springville resident and Muslim community representative, said at a recent public meeting of the Staten Island African-American Political Association. “We have a problem of not acknowledging the problem.”

Dora Berksteiner, president of the Staten Island African-American Political Association, said she received about 10 phone calls from Staten Island residents about children taunting other children after Obama’s victory.

“We have a black president and for some people, it’s like the world has come to an end,” Berksteiner said. “When he is inaugurated, I expect we’ll have more problems.”

Three young men followed 18-year-old Jesus Charriez and 21-year-old Luis Bermudez for several blocks, as they walked through Longwood on an October afternoon, the pair told police. The attackers yelled “faggot” and spit on the pair. Then, at 5 p.m. in front of a hair salon on the crowded corner of E. 163rd St. and Intervale Ave., they beat their victims, uninterrupted, for several minutes and stole a gold necklace and a cell phone.

Both Charriez and Bermudez ended up in the hospital with minor injuries. The police on the scene classified the crime as a robbery, with no mention of the anti-gay slurs that marked the incident.

The attack highlighted anti-gay feelings in the Bronx, where many gays hide their orientation out of fear. Although Bronx Borough President Aldolfo Carrion and U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano have condemned the incident, gay leaders called on more Bronx politicians to speak out against intolerance.

The attack changed the way Charriez views the neighborhood where he and Bermudez volunteer as a peer counselors at the Hispanic AIDS Forum, just a few blocks from where the assault took place.

“I call it my safe zone,” Charriez said. Since the attack, though, he has a hard time sleeping, and says it will be “a little bit difficult” to go out in the area.

Violent attacks are just one symptom of widespread anti-gay attitudes in the borough, Bronx gays say.

Alberto Antomnarchi, a 43-year-old Bronxite, has lived in all of New York’s boroughs except Staten Island, and he identified the Bronx as being particularly homophobic and closeted.

In the black or Puerto Rican community, being gay means “you lose your family; you lose respect in the community,” said Antomnarchi, who is Puerto Rican.

Family support is an issue for Mosey Diaz as well. “Even in my family, they make fun of the LGBT,” Diaz said, using the term for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Diaz, who is 18 and a lifelong Bronx resident, worked for the Bronx Community Pride Center at a gay pride rally in Barretto Point Park.

“Oh, I like what you’re doing here,” a man said to her, reading her “Bronx Pride” sign. “When he found out that it was LGBT,” Diaz said, “he was like, ‘That’s disgusting. I didn’t come here for that.’”

Still, Diaz said progress is being made in the Bronx: “It’s hostile, but the times have changed. It’s getting better.”

Diaz, who describes herself as “out” but not “open,” said that younger LGBT Bronx residents are increasingly willing to stop hiding their sexual orientation.

Reverend James Dusenbury is the pastor of In the Life Ministries, an interdenominational church on Commerce Avenue near Westchester Square that caters to LGBT parishioners. He agreed that coming out in the Bronx can be dangerous.

“Most people feel their safety is at risk, so they’ve got to live a closeted lifestyle,” Dusenbury said. “The only reason why I’m so openly gay is I want people to see I’m a regular person.”

The last time he reached out to another Bronx church, Dusenbury said, “They were not happy to hear from me.” Members of a neighboring church have called his church “the faggot church.”

As more gays live more openly in the Bronx, they’ll face increased aggression from straights, gay leaders believe.

“You will probably see an increase in homophobic language, in aggressive and sometimes violent behavior towards gay people,” said Heriberto Sanchez Soto, the executive director of the Hispanic AIDS Forum in New York.

When violence does occur, it often goes unreported by the victims, Soto said. Convincing victims to come forward is a challenge for gay advocates and leaders.

The Bronx’s rate of reported hate-crimes is almost three times lower than in the rest of the city. According to the NYPD hate crimes unit. Since January 1, 2006, only five anti-gay hate crimes were reported in the Bronx compared with 91 anti-gay hate crimes in the rest of New York.

Soto said that hate crimes go unreported more often in the Bronx because violence is seen as a normal part of life in the borough.

“It’s like New York City in the 70s. We were all accustomed to all the violence, to the garbage in the streets,” Soto said. “‘Hey, this is New York City.’ Well, no, this should not be New York City; it should be better than this.”

Gay leaders also say that some politicians and members of the clergy share responsibility for widespread anti-gay sentiment.

“There is no tolerance in the borough for LGBT people,” said Lisa Winters, executive director of the Bronx Community Pride Center, an advocacy organization and gathering place for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents.

“We’ve begun to change that, but we have lots of work to do,” she continued. “We need our friends in the pulpit and elected and appointed officials to join with us in that effort. It’s embarrassing for the Bronx. The Bronx should be ashamed of itself.”

Winters named state Senator Ruben Diaz as one politician who could do more. Diaz opposes gay marriage, sued in an effort to prevent the city from financing a school for gay students, and tried to prevent the Gay Games from coming to New York, saying they could spread AIDS.

“He’s been very hateful and spiteful towards the LGBT in the Bronx,” Winters said. “He’s whipped people into frenzies.”

Diaz said that he is not anti-gay, and condemned the attack on Charriez and Bermudez, which he said he had not heard of.

“We need to protect people from hate crimes,” Diaz said. “I believe that anyone who does something like that should be subject to the maximum weight of the law. The police should spend any resource to go after them.”

After issuing his statement condemning the attack, Serrano said in an interview, “I don’t do any of this because it’s politically sound. On the contrary, some people think the politically sound thing to do is keep away.”

The congressman said his constituents understand that gays deserve to be able to walk down the street without being “picked on for their sexual orientation,” but added, “The problem is that so many elected officials get nervous about having to explain it, and so they’d rather not get involved. The biggest crime you can commit is the crime of silence.”

For their part, Charriez and Bermudez have refused to be silent.

They convinced police to reclassify their case as a hate crime after the initial police report made no mention of the slurs or the spitting. They also spoke out at a press conference held by the Hispanic AIDS Forum, which led to coverage on the evening news. Their experience has been reported by newspapers in Detroit and Nashville, putting a face on the debate over federal hate crime laws.

They say they spoke out for their own sake, but not just for themselves.

“We want to spread the word and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone,” Charriez said.

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The number of hate crimes in the city this year has reached more than 200 — a 20% increase compared to the same period last year. More than half of hate crimes nationwide are based on the victim’s race, followed by religion and sexual orientation.
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