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Grief Follows a Public Script After a Killing by the Police
By MICHAEL BRICK

Published: April 18, 2004


ere are the Stansburys, now. Twelve weeks have passed since their youngest was killed by an officer of the law, 11 weeks since he was buried, 8 since a grand jury declined to indict the policeman and 5 since the family announced a lawsuit against the city. The television cameras are long gone.

Grandmother paces before a precinct station house in Brooklyn, pressing a poster against the glass door and hollering, "Big fat pigs!"

Father is back at his job as a cook, breaking into tears over side orders, envisioning scenes of his 19-year-old son's last moments in gruesome detail.

Mother devotes herself full time to memorializing her son with projects from the legislative to the literary. Her resolve falters at the sight of young men his age.

Sister sits legs akimbo on a black futon, one eye on a television tuned to the Lifetime channel; she has an easy laugh, a bashful smile and a secret plan to solve everything.

Their lives have long been separated by age, divorce and church affiliation. They have different surnames - two are called Stansbury, two are called Clayburne - and dwell in four different apartments. Their mourning, like their living, is singular and isolated.

But the manner of their loss has thrown them together publicly into this new incarnation as The Stansburys, a solid, crusading family, at least in the glare of the camera lights. On the frigid morning of Jan. 24 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, after Timothy Stansbury Jr. was shot in a housing-project stairwell while on an errand to retrieve music discs for a party, they suddenly became the central characters in a drama that everyone has seen before.

This very public sort of passion play has become almost ritualized in New York City. It begins with the killing of a black person, usually a young man, by a police officer. From the first hours, various players set out to present the victim's family in service of their own disparate causes: lawyers, reporters, politicians, ministers, revolutionaries, money lenders, fame seekers, cranks and healers.

With this supporting cast, the Stansbury funeral became a spectacle, followed by a series of rallies, vigils, news conferences and marches, each calling for an appearance and perhaps a few words from the Stansburys. Speakers rattled off a list of those killed or maimed by the police, and the crowds shouted back slogans like "We will not forget." Stansbury, Zongo, Diallo, Dorismond, they called, Spruill, Bumpurs, Stewart and Louima. Each of those cases had its own set of circumstances, but the details got lost in the chanting.

"I know what this family is going through," said Nicholas Heyward Sr. at one rally; his 13-year-old namesake was killed by a police officer in 1994.

The Stansburys found their new associates helpful, and they took to their roles, so determined to win justice or some sort of solace that they came to define themselves as living satellites orbiting the dead. Grandmother began to refer to her granddaughter as "the sister."

But they went home after each protest to changed and still separate lives, filled with new complications and unspoken ambivalences. And as the tumult begins to settle all these weeks later, there is still the matter of reckoning with death, ordinary as skin.

Here are those Stansburys: the grandmother who stays for hours at rallies but cannot find the strength to go to church or cook a meal; the mother who can lash out at people over the smallest matter, then wish them a blessed day; the father who speaks aloud to God as a means of staving off violent impulses; and the sister who quietly plans to ease the family's pain by getting pregnant.

"You read about it happening in the papers, but never in a million years thought it was going to be a part of your family's life," said Judith Tucker, a Stansbury relative. "Before this has quieted down, it's going to happen again. I pray to God it's no one I know."

Divided Kin Unite in the Spotlight

Timetress Stansbury, 22, took the microphone after the preachers, the singers, the council members and the mayor.

"Timothy's sister, everyone," she said by way of introduction, speaking to a crowd of hundreds at the funeral. After reading a poem and saying that her brother was not actually dead, she concluded: "When we leave here today, we only have one life to live. Live it."

It all seemed a bit bright and succinct for a eulogy, and her relatives began to worry. "She can't cry," said her grandmother, Irene Clayburne, 73. "Some people can't cry. They hold it in, but it's worse for them."

Timetress was close to her brother. They were babies of the 1980's, both named after their father, Timothy Stansbury Sr. When a girl came first, she was given a made-up name, pronounced tuh-MEE-truss. They were shy devotees of the television set, children of divorce raised by their mother, Phyllis Clayburne, attached to each other and prone to playful fights.

But now, discussions of Timetress's emotional state took a priority somewhere below the new demands placed on the Stansburys. Less than a week had passed since her brother, Tim-Tim to his kin and Drag to friends in the neighborhood, was shot dead while climbing a flight of stairs toward a rooftop in the Louis Armstrong Houses. The officer who shot him, Richard S. Neri Jr., had been patrolling the rooftop, and later testified that he had been startled by the unarmed young man.

All in a whirl, Timothy Jr.'s closest relations were pulled from their separate apartments and jobs to face one another daily, often in public. They ended up at news conferences with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has placed himself at the center of racially charged police cases for two decades. And they came quickly to depend on City Councilman Charles Barron, a former Black Panther and a recently declared candidate for mayor, who had taken up Mr. Sharpton's mantle.

"I just followed his orders, and he told me what to do," said Timothy Sr., 45.

They were pursued by dozens of lawyers, including one who continued to present himself as their attorney long after they stopped returning his calls. They received visits from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. Phyllis, 43, could barely recall her exchange with the mayor. "What he was saying to me really wasn't even registering," she said.

All in that turbulent first week, Mr. Kelly said publicly that the shooting appeared unjustified, and the family had an audience with Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, who vowed to present evidence against the police officer to a grand jury.

Now there were news conferences and meetings and vigils to attend. Handwritten letters were arriving, like this one, in crayon:

Dear Phyllis,

I am sorry that your son died by a policeman.

There were requests to appear with the Committee to Honor Black Heroes, the Universal Black Families, the Nation of Islam and the December 12th Movement. Timothy Sr. and the others became staples of local television newscasts.

"People stop Timmy on the streets and say, 'Hey, aren't you that guy?' " said his niece, Ms. Tucker.

But Timothy Sr. had his own problems. His weight dropped to 150 from 180. The catering company in Manhattan that employed him was calling him back to work.

"I needed money, and I needed to be around my co-workers," he said. "It was just hurtful to be around my family because they kept giving me sympathy."

The first day back on the job, he broke down over a vat of macaroni. After his shift, he went to his church and knelt. "Nothing's going to bring him back," he said, talking to God. "I don't think I could make another son like my son, and he was taken away."

...

Phyllis's mother, Irene, was out in the streets regularly, sometimes carrying a sign that said, "The charge is murder." Her block of the Louis Armstrong Houses, where Timothy Jr. had kept a bedroom in her apartment, was decorated with posters deriding the police and red spray-painted letters reading R.I.P. Drag.

...

It fell to Mr. Barron, the city councilman, to phone with the news on Feb. 17: the grand jury had decided not to indict Officer Neri. This time, Phyllis declined Mr. Barron's offers of comfort. She dropped the receiver, picked it up again and slammed it back into the cradle.

Her rage found a target the next afternoon at a news conference in front of Borough Hall. "Good morning," she muttered into dozens of microphones. She raised her voice and shouted, "O.K. , Officer Neri, from what I understand is, a little bit after the shooting, you boasted to other officers that you got a shot off."

She surprised herself with her own vitriol. There was no evidence to support her accusation. "I didn't expect it to come out, but it came out," she said later.

At the news conference, Mr. Barron called for a federal investigation, and the United States attorney's office soon issued a statement agreeing to review the evidence.

The next day, they were all back Downtown, across the street in front of the United States attorney's office for a news conference with the same message but different star speakers.

"This family has to bear a burden that they should not bear," proclaimed Mr. Sharpton, who was back in New York after finishing last in the Wisconsin presidential primary. An aide, and then Mr. Sharpton himself, had called Mr. Barron to ask if the Stansburys would come back out for a replay of the previous day's event. "The tears of this mother and this grandmother, the pain of this father, should be as important as any cow in Iowa," Mr. Sharpton said.

...

What I don't understand is how the police and their supervisors could treat the murder of a black boy as casually as the shooting of a dog. Where is the justice? Shouldn't those damm police be shooting to stop (arm / leg or whatever) even if they have to shoot? What the hell is really going on in this country?? Are we still only 3/4 human or less than that?

I find this fairly easy to understand. Black youths getting murdered (either by police or by each other) do not pull at most people's heartstrings as a "poor, missing wealthy/middle class white girl" does. The way the media portrays these incidents at first makes it seem normal for this to happen, everyday. And while people in the communities affected by this violence directly do not like it one bit, they don't have the political power to do something about it nor can they ask the police for assistance, lest they decide to throw every black man in jail for "community safety". (The Charles Stewart response...)

As far as shooting to stop, generally that is what officers go to training school for. They are taught to shoot in areas that will not kill the offender, but stop him. Yet circumstances, emotions, and reactions all play a part in situations such as this (Not to mention the physics of bullets interacting with the human body and the forces involved...) , and the question is why cops have this notion in their head that male black youths are more dangerous than anyone else? And, to be honest, if the NRA has their way and the automatic weapons ban expires with no renewal, it will get worse for black youths, courtesy of the Bush administration, 2004-2008.

The point is, very simply, that this is obviously a greater societal issue that must be addressed. I do not see any indication that the current state of things will change anytime soon as this country's power will still remain in the same old hands, and the value of white will remain higher than the value of black, and we will continue believing that our "fair, free, and wonderful" government will be our savior and one day save us from doom.

Oh, and we are not 3/4 of a human anymore. We are human...of the childlike variety, meant to "insipre" the adults and indoctrinated into their "superior" ways in order to live in their image.