Anti Police Brutality Activist Under Siege

By Donna Lamb

Before her son, Malcolm Ferguson, was shot by a police officer in a Bronx hallway in March 2000, Juanita Young was living a quiet life, raising her family and trying to get by. Due to a brain abscess, she had been legally blind for close to 20 years - though that hadn't stopped her from becoming a teaching assistant, working with severely mentally retarded children. With the birth of her third child, however, she decided it was time to stay home and raise her own.

Then came that fateful evening of March 2000 when Malcolm was killed and her whole life changed.

From the beginning, Young felt there were all kinds of unexplained details to the story of her son's death that made her keep questioning what had actually occurred.

"After I got, I'm not going to say 'over the shock' because I'll never get over the shock of what they did, I felt I had to go out there and tell the truth about how my son was killed for no reason," Young says. "I have four other kids. I wouldn't want to go through this again, or for any other mother to have to. When they kill your child, there's a kind of pain you can never get relief from. You take that with you to the day you die."

She explains that from the beginning, to deal with her grief and anger she had to become an activist, that's what gave her strength. Now, as a member of October 22^nd Coalition's "Families of Police Brutality" and also "Parents Seeking Justice," Juanita Young goes to churches, schools and rallies to speak out against police brutality. "We need to change this police force," she states. "When they killed Malcolm, they killed five people that month." And she warns, "When you call the police for help, when they leave your house, you'd better hope they're not carrying you out in a body bag."

Young has been in the public eye quite a bit lately. Carrying the Stolen Lives banner which lists nearly all of the 2000 people killed by law enforcement nationwide in the 1990's, she helped lead the first protest march of Alberta Spruill's neighbors to the 25th Precinct in Harlem. She spoke, and Newsday quoted her in its article. She was also one of two-dozen people at New Jersey's Essex County courthouse who faced off against 200 off-duty police officers at the arraignment of Santiago Villanueva's killers. This was covered extensively by New Jersey news.

For these reasons and many more, Young and her supporters believe that her outspoken activism makes her a target in a continuing campaign to intimidate parents who dare to stand up against police crime. This showed itself, they allege, in how she was treated by the New York Police Department (NYPD) when she and her children were recently evicted from their apartment due to an ongoing disagreement between Young and her landlord.

Before this action, Young never received an eviction notice or 30-day warning. Two weeks before her arrest, a city marshal had even come to her apartment and told her that he couldn't evict her without first providing another place for her to stay because she is legally blind. However, on June 7^th, officers from the 40th Precinct were sent to arrest her for trespassing and to evict the rest of the family from the premises.

Juanita Young states that it was clear from the beginning that the officers knew she was a leader in the fight against police brutality. During her arrest, one officer pushed and shoved her while she was handcuffed, causing her to fall down the stairs twice and injure her hand. As they put her into the police car, another officer sneered, "No rallies for you today."

Young believes that in retaliation for her insistence on receiving immediate medical attention, the police decided to up the charge from trespass to criminal trespass so she would have to "go through the system," as one officer said. She was denied medical care for her hand for four hours, and even though she had just been released from the hospital for treatment of asthma, when she realized that she'd dropped her asthma pump in the back of the police car, they refused to let her have it back.

Young was kept in custody for thirty-five hours and shuffled back and forth to five different precincts, fingerprinted at each. At the 40^th Precinct she says officers referred to her as "that troublemaker" or "the one at all those rallies," and remarked that she "goes around the neighborhood talking about the NYPD, out here making trouble, and now she'll see what trouble is."

Juanita Young also charges that when she was being moved from the 40th Precinct with another arrestee, one of the police yelled, "Anyone who runs, we shoot you in the head." She then had to endure the painfully long ride to the 49th Precinct with the memory that her son had been killed by a street crimes unit officer with a bullet to his head at point-blank range.

Attempts to reach Detective Walter Burnes, who is in charge of NYPD Public Information, for comment proved unsuccessful.

Young believes that she's been subjected to much harassment over the years for her activism, but that this was a major attempt to break her spirit. When she was finally released from jail, she had no home to go to, didn’t know where her children were, and had no money since the 40th Precinct had inventoried all of it when they booked her. On top of all this, she later learned that they had killed her children's dog and cat, and that the Administration for Children's Services is now trying to take her children away from her. "I'm not going to have that," she says with determination. "They'll have to put me six feet under the ground. They're not getting those kids. My children have already been through too much in this short time."

And Juanita Young is not backing off in her criticism of police brutality, either. In fact, on the following Saturday, she was already speaking at a rally, stating, "I don’t plan on stopping what I’m doing, and I’m not gonna change my approach. I know that what I’m doing is right. I’m seeing this situation getting worse and worse. And people just don’t seem to understand they need to get out here and try to stop these killings of innocent people."

Please come and help pack the courthouse at Juanita Young's court appearance on Monday, July 8^th at 9:00 AM at the Bronx County Criminal Court, located at 215 East 161^st Street - one block east of the Grand Concourse. Take the 4 or D train to 161^st Street. Please arrive early since there's often a long line outside the court.

For further information, contact the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation at (866) 235-7814 (toll free) or oct22ny@yahoo.com.