Teenage boy accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life w/o trial. Boy then commits Suicide.
A young man named Kalief Browder, 22, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime, has just committed suicide.
He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. There was no proof to suggest he did and when the police searched him they found nothing, but he was arrested anyways. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times.
After several attempts at taking his own life, Kalief Browder was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home in the Bronx.
Browder told several stories of being beaten and abused by other inmates or officers, and a disturbing
surveillance footage was released of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him that it Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.
As his father explained, he’d apparently decided that these torn strips of sheet were not strong enough. That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise upstairs, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself.
R.I.P. #Kalief Browder. I’m sorry they took your childhood and your future away like that.
I went to high school with a kid who would only drink out of a baby bottle. He brought a large baby bottle to school every day. At first, we thought that he was using it to sneak alcohol or something, but he wasn’t. He would bring it filled with chocolate milk and then fill it up with Coca-Cola and Sprite during lunch. He’d buy a can of each and mix them together. Like I said, it was a large bottle.
I didn’t know the kid that well and I didn’t have any classes with him so I never really talked to him that much. I knew his name. His name was Kevin. Sometimes I’d see him at parties on the weekends. He still had his baby bottle. He would fill it with beer and rum.
He dated my sister’s friend, Emily, for a little while. I had known Emily for a long time. She had been a friend of my sister’s since they were five or six. They were really good friends. She spent a lot of time at our house for sleepovers and stuff. Sometimes she would pee the bed, but I never made fun of her for it. I think most older brothers would have loved the opportunity to make fun of their sister’s friend for peeing the bed and I think she really appreciated that I never mentioned it even though I definitely knew about it because after the sixth or seventh time, my parents started paying me to clean everything up instead of having to do it themselves.
I asked Emily why Kevin only ever drank out of a baby bottle and she said that she didn’t know. They had only been dating for a very short time at that point and she didn’t want to bring it up and offend him or anything. I asked her to tell me if she ever found out. They broke up right after that and I kind of forgot about it because Kevin stopped going to school. I don’t know if he transferred or dropped out, but I never saw him at lunch or any parties after that.
I hadn’t thought about him in a long time, but Emily happened to mention him while she was over at our house recently and I immediately remembered the baby bottle thing.
“Did you ever find out why he drank out of that bottle?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, he told me why,” Emily said. “He used it because he heard that babies that drink out of bottles for too long or drink sweet drinks out of them get really bad teeth problems. He wanted all of his teeth to go bad so that they would fall out and he would be able to fit a softball in his mouth. He said that he wanted to have the world record for being the first person to be able to put a whole softball in his mouth and he wouldn’t be able to do that with all of those teeth in the way.”
