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“That’s How We Survive": When Police

Brutality Turns Mothers Into Activists
Before the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner
took to the streets in protest, there was Iris Baez, a homemaker who
became an activist after an NYPD officer killed her son Anthony in 1994.

By Esther Wang
Posted on July 24, 2016, at 10:01 a.m. ET

On a Saturday in July, a day before the second anniversary of her son

Eric Garner’s death, Gwen Carr was sweating under the heat of the
noonday sun as she led a march that wound its way through
Downtown Brooklyn before ending at Prospect Park. Two years after
her son was held down in a chokehold by NYPD Officer Daniel
Pantaleo on a sidewalk
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breathe” 11 times before he died, she’s still searching for some
measure of justice.

Surrounding her was a group of women who had traveled from as far
as Baltimore, Cleveland, and Oakland to be there with her, all mothers
whose own sons had been killed by police officers — Wanda Johnson,
the mother of Oscar Grant, who had his life cut short on New Year’s
Day in 2009 by a bullet to his back; Constance Malcolm, whose 18-
year-old son Ramarley Graham was shot and killed in the bathroom of
their Bronx apartment in 2012; Kadiatou Diallo, the mother of
Amadou Diallo, who in 1999 had 41 bullets fired at him as he reached
for his wallet; Samaria Rice, whose 12-year-old son Tamir was gunned
down as he played with a toy gun in a Cleveland park; and Iris Baez,
the mother of Anthony Baez, who, like Garner, died as he was choked
by an NYPD officer, asphyxiating to death on the street outside his
childhood home in the Bronx on a winter night in 1994.

Against the backdrop of the recent killings of Alton Sterling in Baton

Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul,
Minnesota, which have rekindled calls for reform and compelled tens
of thousands around the country to pour into the streets demanding
justice, these women came together to ask that their dead loved ones
not be forgotten.

Decked out in buttons listing the dates of their sons’ births and deaths
as their “sunrise” and “sunset,” the sons who have become the suns
around which their lives now revolve, the mothers chanted as they
marched, using “I can’t breathe!” as their rallying cry.

“We’re not going to go away,” said Constance Malcolm, the lilt of her
native Jamaica in her voice. Four years after Ramarley’s death, Richard
Haste, the officer who killed her son, remains on the force, as does
Daniel Pantaleo. “There’s no accountability. Until we have
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
accountability, we’re going to keep having marches and going to
funerals.”

Next to Constance, 70-year-old Iris Baez walked slowly, the solidity of

her body reminiscent of a prizefighter past their prime, and held an
umbrella high to shield herself from the sun. Despite her arthritis and
a bad knee, she felt she had to come out on this day.

“That’s how we survive, by giving

support and being there.” 
“That’s how we survive, by giving support and being there,” said Iris.
Time has carved lines from her nose down to her chin, twin canyons
that frame a mouth that’s often pursed, as if she’s just swallowed
something unappetizing. “I have the same pain that they have. I have
the same anger they have.”

In the 1990s, Iris was one of the most well-known faces of that
decade’s anti–police brutality movement. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who
has known and worked with Iris for decades, still describes her as the
“ultimate activist mother.”

After her son Anthony’s death, Iris founded Parents Against Police
Brutality with Margarita Rosario, another Puerto Rican woman from
the Bronx whose son and nephew were gunned down by NYPD officers
three weeks after Iris’s son was killed. Parents Against Police Brutality
would become an important leader of the city’s dynamic grassroots
police reform movement, and a group that, in the words of Andrew
Hsiao, a journalist who wrote for the Village Voice in the late 1990s,
kept “direct-action politics alive while helping to make police brutality
one of the defining political issues of [the] time.”

More than 20 years later, the work she spearheaded has been largely
forgotten by the public
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but Iris Baez is continuing to organize with a group of women she
simply calls “the mothers,” a group that includes Gwen Carr,
Constance Malcolm, Kadiatou Diallo, and numerous others she’s
searched out over the years at funerals and rallies, in courtrooms, and
at their homes. Part recruiter, part therapist, part prophet, Iris tells
them is that justice is possible, or at the very least, a simulacrum of
justice. What they really want — for their children to be returned to
them — is an impossibility, but killer cops, she tells them, can go to
prison.

In New York, against huge odds, Iris and these women are leveraging
their power as grieving mothers to demand political reform. Together,
working closely with the city’s police reform advocates, they’ve won
important victories, just last year leading a campaign that compelled
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to appoint the state’s attorney general
as an independent prosecutor in cases where police officers use deadly
force, the first of its kind in the nation.

Now, in the days and weeks following the deaths of Alton Sterling and
Philando Castile, they’re mobilizing again, campaigning for the
passage of the Right to Know Act — a package of bills that would
require officers to, among other things, identify themselves during
police encounters — and attending the wake of Delrawn Small, a
Brooklyn man who was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer in
a road rage incident on the 4th of July, a death that has flown under
the national radar.

“Something’s going to happen,” Iris predicted after attending Small’s

wake and meeting with his girlfriend and his brother. “It’s a boiling
pot that’s happening right now.”

Yet they’ve learned that these moments pass all too quickly. After the
initial furor over yet another death calms down, after the stories of
their sons’ deaths at the hands of the police become a footnote in our
shared history, after “That’s
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trickle away — these women, welded together by circumstance, are the
ones who remain, compelling us, as the poet Claudia Rankine has
written, to continue not only to mourn with them, but to resist the
impulse to forget the names of their children.

“In the beginning, you have a lot of people around you,” Iris said. “But
after a while, it calms down, everybody goes back to usual. And that’s
when you’re alone.”

Iris Baez in her Bronx home, April 26, 2016.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

A few weeks earlier, I had gone to see Iris at her home in the Bronx,
the same three-story brick building where she raised Anthony and her
other children, on a side street nestled next to the bustle of Jerome
Avenue.

Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Iris moved to New York City with her
mother when she was“That’s
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glamorous career as a flight attendant, but her mother took her out of
school in the sixth grade to help care for her two younger sisters, and
she never went back. Instead, she married Ramon Baez and worked as
a teacher’s assistant and home care aide before eventually devoting
her life to her family and her church, and, after Anthony’s death, to
seeking justice for her son.

In a way, he wasn’t even supposed to be there that evening in 1994 —

two years earlier, the Baez family had moved to Orlando, Florida,
leaving the neighborhood that Iris had witnessed with increasing
alarm turn into, in her words, “a crack haven.”

But Anthony and his three brothers had decided to road-trip back to
the neighborhood where they grew up, and on that night, they were
tossing a football through the cold December air, the street quiet but
for the gleeful shouts of the four brothers, empty of life except for
Iris’s sons and a couple of police cruisers idling on the curb.

“I don’t know what happened. I just

know that I wanted to find out who
killed him, and whoever killed him
was going to go to jail. That’s it.”
When an errant pass collided with the police car of Francis X. Livoti, an
officer known to have a quick temper and a history of violence (he’d
already racked up almost a dozen brutality complaints), he emerged,
enraged. Livoti arrested the youngest Baez brother, 16-year-old David,
slamming him against a parked car. When Anthony tried to intervene,
Livoti and another officer moved to arrest him too, with Livoti’s arm
wrapped in a chokehold around Anthony’s neck, squeezing his throat
like a vise. By the time more officers arrived on the scene, Anthony
was handcuffed on the ground, his face pressed to the concrete and his
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
neck ringed with bruises. He was pronounced dead an hour later.
Thousands of miles away, Iris Baez was at her new home in Orlando,
cooking a feast and preparing for her large family to gather for
Christmas, when she got a phone call from her former church pastor
telling her that something had happened to her son, and that she
needed to come back to New York immediately.

“I don’t know what happened. I just know that I wanted to find out
who killed him, and whoever killed him was going to go to jail. That’s
it,” Iris said, reflecting on the days after Anthony died. We’re sitting in
her battered blue minivan, parked in front of her house, and her eyes
are fixed straight ahead, her mouth a grim line. “Somebody had to pay
for the murder of my son.”

Anthony is everywhere on the block. His face, a small smile dancing

around his lips, stares down at me from a time- and weather-worn
mural that spans one side of the Baez home, visible through the rusted
chain-link fence that separates it from the car repair lot next door.

The street itself, renamed Anthony Baez Place in 2000, is a monument

to him, and I wonder if it’s painful for her to be surrounded by
reminders of her dead son. “To me, it’s more ‘I’m proud of you. You’re
there,’” Iris says of the street signs that bear his name. “My son was
going to be big. He could’ve been the president! So it’s fitting for him,
a street named after him.”

Her house, which the family bought in 1968, is falling apart. The roof
needs to be patched up, she’s behind on her property taxes and her
water bill, and the entire building has an air of neglect. She lives with
her son David as well as her 13-year-old son Erwin, whom she adopted
in 2006 and who’s been recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder. To
help take care of the bills and to supplement her monthly Social
Security checks, she’s resorted to raffling off copies of Every Mother’s
Son, a 2004 documentary by Tami Gold and Kelly Anderson that she
was featured in. “Everything needs fixing!” she says as she labors up
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A mural painted in honor of Anthony Baez on the side of his mother's home in the Bronx.
Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

Yet lately, she’s put her personal life on the back burner. In May, she
and a group of activists went to Cuba, on the invitation of the
country’s federation of women. She then went to Miami for a retreat
for mothers of gun violence victims led by Sybrina Fulton, the mother
of Trayvon Martin, and then it was off to Martha’s Vineyard for a
weekend to take part in a series of events with an artist who has
painted larger-than-life portraits of her and other mothers.

In the beginning, years ago, going to places like Martha’s Vineyard,

with their wealth and privilege, unnerved her, but now she sees these
trips as yet another opportunity to evangelize. “Maybe they haven’t
heard the story. The main thing is to get the word out,” she said.

Iris tells me she’s tired, but she’s found the time on this day to meet
with Hawa Bah, the mother of Mohamed Bah, a Guinean immigrant
who was shot and killed in his Harlem apartment in 2012 after officers
responded to a 911 call
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She’s come to Iris this morning for advice on how to pressure the
Department of Justice to file charges against the officers involved in
Mohamed’s death, and they’re talking strategy amid the din of the
elevated subway that rumbles by every few minutes and the shrieking
of two of Iris’s grandchildren, who are running from room to room
playing a game of cops and robbers, one of them clasping a neon green
fake gun in his hands.

Iris ignores all of this; her focus is on Hawa, who’s sitting on the worn
black leather sofa in the living room. “You have to get on the DOJ, send
faxes to him,” Iris counsels her, referring to Preet Bharara, the US
attorney for the Southern District of New York.

For Hawa, it’s reassuring to have Iris as a guide. “She knows more than
I know. She’s been in this for 21 years,” Hawa says of Iris. “I’m just in
this for four years.”

After hearing the news of Bah’s

death, Iris showed up at Hawa's door,
looking to bring another grieving
mother into the fold. 
Iris met Hawa shortly after her son Mohamed was killed. After hearing
the news of Bah’s death, Iris showed up at Hawa's door, looking to
bring another grieving mother into the fold. In the years since, Iris has
become her second family, almost closer than her blood relatives,
Hawa says. Pain is a thread that unites them.

Hawa is not the only woman Iris is counseling — the previous day, she
traveled to New Jersey to meet with Cecilia Diaz, whose son Elvin was
shot and killed by Hackensack police officers last May. And the day
before that, she made sure to attend a vigil held by Constance
Malcolm.
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
For many of these women, Iris is an inspiration. “This is my support.
This is who I stand with. This is who stands with me,” said Gwen Carr
of Iris. “Even though her case has been settled, she knows how
important this fight is.” Constance, who met Iris in the courthouse on
May 15, 2013, the day that Richard Haste walked away a free man, has
described her in the past as the woman who keeps her moving.

Hawa has started to cry softly after looking at photos of a friend’s

grandchildren on her phone. “When I see a young baby, I remember
when I had Mohamed,” she says.

Iris has become used to the tears of grieving mothers over the years.
She sits silently and then, after a moment, slowly pushes herself up,
grabs a tissue, and wordlessly hands it to Hawa.

Iris still watches the local news every day at 4 p.m. on the television in
her bedroom, keeping an eye out for stories about new victims of
police shootings. That’s how she heard about Richard Gonzalez, who
died while in police custody in March of this year. She went to his
family's apartment in the Bronx and slipped a note under Gonzalez’s
door with her phone number, and recently, his wife, Hafiza, called her
to meet.

She describes her work as her calling, but it can be just as easily read
as a form of therapy. “It keeps my sanity, to hear what they go
through,” she said of the other women.

BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I

Sinking to her knees, Mamie Till weeps as the body of her slain son, Emmett Louis Till, arrives at
Chicago Rail Station. The young man was found dead in a Mississippi creek with a bullet hole behind
his ear.
Bettmann Archive

The mother in pain has long been a prophetic voice — in other words,
a political figure whose jeremiads help shame a nation into action.

In Argentina, the mothers of the disappeared — men and women who

were kidnapped by the military dictatorship by the thousands during
the period of the dirty wars in the late ’70s and early ’80s — became a
powerful political force, using the tools they had at their disposal:
their bodies and their outrage.

Known as “las Madres de Plaza de Mayo,” these women gathered

weekly at the public square for which they were named to demand
answers about the disappearance of their loved ones, their heads
draped with white scarves and their hands clutching photographs of
their sons and daughters. “Motherhood,” as Rebecca Solnit has written
of these women, “was an emotional and biological tie that the generals
then in charge of the country could not portray as merely left-wing or
as criminal.”

In the United States, Mothers Against Drunk Driving once made

drunk driving one of the leading issues of its time, by relying heavily
on the storytelling of the women who made up its core — Candy
Lightner repeating how her 13-year-old daughter’s body was thrown
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
125 feet after being hit by an inebriated man's car; Cindi Lamb sharing
how her 5-month-old baby girl was paralyzed from the neck down, her
spine crushed, after their vehicle collided with a swerving car.

“We’ve had a history in this country

of family members and mothers
being able to help Americans
understand issues better.”
And decades before, there was Mamie Till-Mobley, the spiritual
foremother to Iris and all of these women today, who declared of her
son’s mutilated 14-year-old body, destroyed by the fury of two white
men on a Mississippi summer night in 1955, “Let the world see what
I’ve seen.”

All of these women were transformed by their grief, and their

willingness to plumb their pain under the glare of the public spotlight
made them symbols, yes, but also political figures, with a moral
stature that few could match.

“Having family members, having mothers that can talk about what
their loved ones have meant to them” moves the issue of police
brutality beyond statistics, said Rashad Robinson, the executive
director of Color of Change, a national online civil rights organization
that has worked with Constance Malcolm as well as Samaria Rice.
“We’ve had a history in this country of family members and mothers
being able to help Americans understand issues better,” Robinson said.
“I think about the role that Judy Shepard [the mother of Matthew
Shepard] played in helping to pass hate-crimes protections for gays
and lesbians. These mothers can tell stories and give us a perspective
that makes people, even oftentimes some of the most cynical of
political folks, sit up and listen.”

BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I

How can you turn away from a mother in pain? In her autobiography,
Till-Mobley wrote that she recognized the power of becoming a
symbol: “I was a grieving mother. That was a universal theme that the
media could present, and the public could understand during the trial
of my son’s murderers. Motherhood, children, would come to
symbolize so many aspects of the movement that was growing out of
our suffering. Children and the mothers of children would be there.
They would be there on the line, marching.”

It’s an uncomfortable truth that we have treated these mothers (black,

Latino, immigrant, working-class) as peripheral until tragedy elevates
them to the center of our national conversation on policing and puts a
spotlight on their private pain. In a sign of the mothers' growing
prominence, Hillary Clinton and Beyoncé Knowles have deployed the
images and voices of these grieving women and lifted up their stories,
the Clinton campaign relying on them to shore up support among
black voters, and Knowles featuring three of them — Sybrina Fulton,
Lezley McSpadden, and Gwen Carr — as an emotional gut-punch in
her visual album Lemonade.

Many of these women have made the choice, much like Till-Mobley, to
demand that we join them in their public mourning, starting
foundations in their children’s honor and using their platform to call
for legislative change.

They are, even if they don’t know it, continuing the work that Iris and
others began in the 1990s, building off the groundwork laid by Parents
Against Police Brutality. Coupled with the propulsive force of the Black
Lives Matter movement, they have created an opening for reform. Not
content to merely be symbols, they’re determined, as Gwen Carr often
puts it, to turn their sorrow into strategy. If no concrete policy change
occurs, then the deaths of their children have been in vain. And that is
a reality none of them can accept.

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Iris and Ramon Baez carry a banner as they march to City Hall with at least 3,000 protesters against
police brutality, Oct. 22, 1998.
Christopher Griffith / AP Photo

It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Francis X. Livoti would face any

repercussions, let alone face prison time, over the death of Anthony
Baez. According to Lou Matarazzo, the head of the Patrolmen’s
Benevolent Association, the city’s influential police union, Livoti was
just “doing his job”; Matarazzo described Anthony dismissively as a “5-
foot-6, woefully out of shape, 270-pound asthmatic who happened to
die when [Livoti] wrestled him to the ground.” The last time a police
officer had been convicted of homicide while on the job was in 1977,
when Officer Thomas Ryan was found guilty in the beating death of
25-year-old Israel Rodriguez.

To put Livoti in prison, Iris had to transform herself from a woman

who had never even been to a rally to an activist willing to occupy
office buildings and lead raucous protests.

Susan Karten, an attorney for the Baez family, remembers the first
time she met Iris, a few days after Anthony was killed. She was “a
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“I represent a lot of people who’ve lost children, and it can go a lot of
different ways,” Karten says. “But with Iris, she just went full-fledged
into this.”

“I grew up watching Martin Luther

King on TV, so I knew that I was
going to have to take that kind of
action.” 
It was at a rally on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1995 that Iris met
Margarita Rosario. Margarita was just wailing and wailing — a
“screaming woman,” according to Iris. They didn’t know each other,
but they recognized each other’s grief.

“That’s when it hit me, like, oh my god, this is really happening,” Iris
said of meeting Margarita. The problem, she realized, was bigger than
just her son, and a few months later, the two would birth Parents
Against Police Brutality. “I grew up watching Martin Luther King on
TV, so I knew that I was going to have to take that kind of action,”
Margarita recalled. She asked a longtime organizer what she needed to
do to get justice for her son, and he told her that she had to make her
son’s name a household name. “And I said, 'How do you do that?' And
he said, 'Speak everywhere, wherever you get invited, you go and talk
about your son.'”

Iris took those words to heart. She started a foundation in her son’s
name and turned the basement of her home into a command center.
She ordered thousands of business cards and began pounding the
pavement, passing out fliers and meeting with anyone who could help
her, from the city’s established black and Latino leaders to street
gangs like the Latin Kings and organizers and activists from far-left
groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party, always with a large
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
button — the size of a small dinner plate — of her son’s face pinned to
her chest. As she met more women and more families whose loved
ones had been killed by police, her mission broadened, to get justice
not only for her son, but for the children of other women like her.

By the time Livoti went on trial in the summer of 1998 (he had been
acquitted in a criminal trial in 1996, and the DOJ had filed civil rights
charges against Livoti shortly after), Iris and Margarita had built not
only a local movement of families, but a national one, launching the
Stolen Lives Project in 1996 and traveling the country teaching
families how to push for accountability. In an interview from 1997, Iris
described her work in this way: “Maybe me going out in the street, me
hollering and carrying on is to help other people to the light, to bring
them to the light that we have a big problem in this city.” Dozens had
joined Parents Against Police Brutality, and families from all corners
of the United States had begun mailing her photos of their dead
children and the stories of how they died, and asking for her help.

BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I

Officer Francis Livoti arrives at police headquarters for a departmental hearing on the death of
Anthony Baez, Jan. 7, 1997.
New York Daily News Archive / Getty Images

In June 1998, federal Judge Shira A. Scheindlin found that Francis X.

Livoti had violated the civil rights of Anthony Baez; Livoti would go on
to serve his full seven-and-a-half-year sentence in federal prison.

Getting to that day had taken almost four years of rallies and protests
(at one point, Iris, Margarita, and a handful of others had even
occupied the Office of the Bronx District Attorney, refusing to leave
until he met their demands) and had required the will to confront the
NYPD, whose commissioner, William Bratton, had, at one particularly
heated town hall meeting, called Parents Against Police Brutality “a
bunch of fools.”

It should have felt like a victory, and a rare one. A recent Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review analysis found that in the 21-year period between 1995
and 2016, the DOJ rejected 96% of all complaints brought against law
enforcement officials, and since Livoti, no other NYPD officer has had
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
federal civil rights charges filed against them for the killing of a
civilian.

But for Iris, it was a bitter, partial one, and still is today. “We never got
justice. Because he went to jail for violating [Anthony’s] rights, but he
didn’t go to jail for murdering my son. So I can’t stop. Because he
never went to jail for murdering my son!” Iris said emphatically.
“That’s why I have to keep it alive. I have to keep it in the newspaper.”

What would justice feel like? “When they get justice, I get justice,” Iris
said, referring to the mothers, women like Gwen Carr, Hawa Bah, and
Constance Malcolm.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

I met up with Constance Malcolm on the fourth anniversary of

Ramarley’s death, on a February day earlier this year. Her son was
killed by NYPD Officer Richard Haste three weeks before George
Zimmerman gunned“That’s
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birth of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and six months before
Michael Brown would be killed in Ferguson, Missouri.

Constance still lived in the apartment where her son was killed, as do
her youngest son Chinnor and her mother, Patricia Hartley. Her home
was cluttered with markers of her new life — in her bedroom, there
was a bullhorn stacked on top of neat towers of her shoes, as well as
the large speakers she uses for rallies. Protest signs were propped
against the wall of her living room. There’s little trace of Ramarley,
beyond a framed photo of him with Chinnor and a stack of his clothes,
still neatly folded in his grandmother Patricia’s bedroom, where
Constance has left them untouched for the past four years. She’s also
kept, for reasons she can’t explain, the blood-stained bath mat from
her son’s deadly encounter with Richard Haste.

The previous month, Constance and advocates from the citywide

coalition Communities United for Police Reform had kicked off a
series of weekly actions, which would culminate on the day of the
anniversary with a press conference on the steps of City Hall, and then
a vigil later that evening in front of the DOJ’s lower Manhattan
headquarters, where she and a handful of activists planned to sleep
overnight in an effort to pressure the DOJ to file charges against Haste.
The gray sky promised the rain that the weather forecast had
predicted, but that didn’t shift her plans.

In her apartment, she got ready for the day ahead, putting on her
makeup with the precision of a soldier preparing for battle and pulling
together everything she needed into a Zara bag, including the scrubs
she would wear to work the next morning. Despite how packed her
schedule is, Constance had recently taken on another job in addition
to her work as a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in
Ossining, New York. “I need to stay busy,” she said.

BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I

Her phone rang constantly — a reporter from News 12 Bronx, wanting
to confirm the details of the morning press conference, a call from
Frank Graham, Ramarley’s father, about the overnight vigil taking
place later that evening, followed by an organizer who called to check
in and see when she was going to be down at City Hall. “Right now, it's
very stressful for me, dealing with what I'm dealing with, still
fighting,” she said. She hadn’t been sleeping well, either.

Constance Malcolm and her son Chinnor, April 24, 2016.

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

In her SUV, driving downtown to City Hall, Constance began talking

about the work she and the other mothers are engaged in.

“It’s amazing to see so many family members become leaders,”

Constance said. She rattled off a list of others who had been killed by
police officers in different cities and states around country, the names
rolling off her tongue. “They want you to just lay back and just forget
about what happened. And they don’t understand, people are rising
up, BuzzFeed.com
people are getting together,
“That’s Howand they wantWhen
We Survive": to see changes.”
Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
Accountability was on her mind. Four years later, not only had Richard
Haste escaped a criminal trial, he was still on the force.

How to hold police officers accountable when they kill the people
they’re charged with protecting? This question was at the heart of the
campaign — led by families of victims, including Constance, Iris, and
Gwen Carr — that forced New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign
an executive order in July 2015 authorizing the state’s attorney general
to investigate cases in which police officers use deadly force, and, if
warranted, bring officers to trial. On that day, New York became the
first state in the country with a special prosecutor charged with
prosecuting police killings independently of local district attorneys.
While outcry over the lack of indictments of the officers who killed
Laquan McDonald in Chicago and Tamir Rice in Cleveland played a
large role in the ousters of the district attorneys who prosecuted those
cases, and while special prosecutors are often appointed to look into
individual instances of police brutality, no other state since has
created a similar position.

Nationally, the vast majority of officers involved in police killings are

rarely indicted, and convictions of any kind are even rarer; this holds
true in New York City, where a 2014 Daily News study found that out of
179 deaths involving on-duty NYPD officers since 1999, only three of
the officers were brought up on criminal charges, resulting in only one
conviction.

After the announcement on Dec. 3, 2014, that a Staten Island grand

jury had declined to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death
of Eric Garner, New York was engulfed in what seemed like rolling,
continuous protests throughout the city — sparked by the non-
indictment of Pantaleo but also by the news that Darren Wilson
wouldn’t go to trial for the death of Michael Brown, as well as the
killing of Akai Gurley, who was shot in the stairwell of a public
housing complex in East New York by Officer Peter Liang at the end of
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
November — its streets flooded with a seemingly endless stream of
bodies chanting “This stops today” as well as “I can’t breathe.”

Sharply criticizing the Staten Island district attorney, a range of

elected officials including New York State Attorney General Eric
Schneiderman began clamoring for a special prosecutor, and the New
York Times editorial board jumped into the fray, writing that
“[p]reserving the status quo is no longer an option.”

Nationally, the vast majority of

officers involved in police killings are
rarely indicted, and convictions of
any kind are even rarer.
Iris was watching all of this activity closely, as were many of the city’s
police reform advocates. In 2000, Iris and Kadiatou Diallo had worked
together to champion a package of police reforms that included a
special prosecutor provision, but it went nowhere after 9/11 generated
intense sympathy and support for the NYPD, and similar bills in later
years died each time in the state Senate. “Most people thought [the
special prosecutor] wasn’t going to happen, but if it was going to
happen, it was going to happen now,” said Yul-san Liem of the Justice
Committee, a group that works with families of victims. Liem called
Iris one evening and asked her if she wanted to revive the campaign
that she and Kadiatou had led more than a decade ago. She said yes, as
did Gwen Carr, Hawa Bah, Constance Malcolm, and 14 other families
whose loved ones had been killed by police officers.

If the protests that were roiling New York City created the
opportunity, it was these mothers who pushed it through, leading a
campaign that relied on their stories of being let down by district
attorneys who they felt had only halfheartedly called for the
indictment of the officers who killed their sons. They told the stories
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
of how their children had died over and over again, to news outlets, to
elected officials, and to Gov. Cuomo himself, holding rallies and press
conferences at the state capitol and in front of his office. “They were
the ones that made the compelling argument that the government
couldn’t turn down,” said Rev. Al Sharpton — a truth seemingly echoed
by the fact that in Cuomo’s speech on the day he signed the order,
flanked by Constance Malcolm to his left and with Iris and the
mothers who had held his feet to the fire watching from the audience,
he repeatedly referenced the women and their organizing as critical to
his decision, calling Constance in particular a “spirited,” “opinionated,”
and “informed" woman.

As we drove downtown to mark the fourth anniversary of Ramarley’s

death, I asked Constance why, despite the fact that the executive order
would do little for her, she had pursued it with a zeal that suggested
otherwise. Their goal, she said, was to spare other families the pain
they have experienced in seeing their sons' killers walk free.

“What people don’t understand, or what I want people to understand,

is that we’re doing this work, it’s not for our kids anymore. My son is
dead. We do it for changes so another mother won’t have to feel the
pain that we’re going through,” Constance told me. “It wasn't for our
sons. It was for the future.”

Her thoughts then turned to the upcoming day and the vigil for her
son. “I hope a thousand people show up,” she said.

The turnout would be much less than that. One month later,
Constance and Frank, Ramarley’s father, were told the news: The DOJ
would not be pursuing federal charges against the man who killed
their son. Richard Haste would never face prison time for killing
Ramarley. This news wasn’t greeted with the rioting in the streets that
some local elected officials had predicted. Beyond a core of dedicated
activists and anti–police violence organizations, the general public
had moved on.
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
Yet Constance, just a few weeks later, threw herself back into the work,
speaking at events and going to rallies held by other families. Much
like Iris two decades before her, Constance has embraced her role.

“This is how I give back to other new mothers. I call it this boat that no
one wants to be in,” said Constance. “A lot of times, mothers get thrust
in this. We didn't ask for this. [But] we become this tiger, we come out
swinging.”

Constance Malcolm, left, comforts Valerie Bell, whose son was also killed by police, during a
remembrance rally for Malcolm's son Ramarley Graham on April 24, 2016.
Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

We are drawn to grieving mothers. (Perhaps it’s something innate, a

sort of biological imperative.) For many of them, their ability to
channel their grief and their anger into public protest feels like a form
of survival.

What often goes unacknowledged is the toll that the death of their
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
loved ones and the organizing work has had on these women and their
families. The Baez family fractured after Anthony’s death, a fissure
that has only widened over time. Iris blames herself, and the fact that
for years, she spent more time pursuing justice for her dead son than
with the living. “When they kill somebody in your family, they kill the
whole family,” Iris said. Anthony, she recalls, was the one who made
holidays special, the son who would dress up as Santa Claus every
Christmas. With him gone, she said, “there’s no Christmas, there’s no
Thanksgiving.”

Constance’s mother refuses to talk about that night or Ramarley’s

death, traumatized by the events of four years ago. Gwen Carr and her
granddaughter Erica Garner are no longer speaking, riven by
ideological differences (Erica was a Bernie Sanders supporter, while
Gwen has campaigned for Hillary Clinton). And Margarita Rosario and
her husband are separated, their son’s death the wedge that forced
them farther apart, and while she visits her son’s grave regularly, her
other sons refuse to join her. The monetary settlements they have all
won from the city — which range from the $1.1 million awarded to
Margarita’s family up to $5.9 million for Eric Garner’s family, the bulk
of which went to his wife, Esaw — have also led to internal tensions,
and some, like Iris, are still struggling financially. Today, Gwen Carr
and Hawa Bah are both still waiting to hear whether the Department
of Justice will file federal charges against the officers who killed their
sons, and Constance’s options for any sort of accountability have
become increasingly limited, her only recourse now to demand that
Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD fire Richard Haste.

According to Iris, many families make the choice to fade away from
the spotlight. “It’s the repeat, repeat, repeat,” she said. “You get tired
after a while.”

“A lot of people feel that we're not

gonna get nothing.
BuzzFeed.com Nothing's
“That’s How We Survive": gonna
When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
change. But I've seen the change.”
Iris, for one, could have stopped when Livoti went to federal prison.
She could have gone back to her previous life, comforted by the
knowledge that the man who killed her son was paying for his actions.
But she didn’t, or, perhaps more accurately, couldn’t.

The filmmaker Tami Gold, who grew close to Iris after including her in
the documentary Every Mother’s Son, has a theory of what compels
her. “I think that being in the struggle for so long, that she gets a lot
from it,” Gold said. “I think she receives an enormous amount of
validation.”

Despite the victories Iris has been part of — the special prosecutor
campaign, sending Livoti to prison — she’s not planning on stopping,
frustrated by the ebb and flow of outrage. “When they killed Diallo,
people rised up. When they molested [Abner] Louima, the people rised
up. But then they go back to their normal selves. And that’s what I
don’t understand,” she said. Her voice got indignant, rising to a new
register. “I say no. I can’t live like that,” she said. “I don’t know why. I
can’t accept it. I want to accept it, but I can’t.”

“People are tired, that's what I think. A lot of people feel that we're not
gonna get nothing. Nothing's gonna change,” she continued. “But I've
seen the change.”

We were in the basement of her house, and her son Erwin was
sprawled on a couch playing a video game. The only decoration in the
room, other than tacked-up photos of her family, was her mantel,
which dominated a wall and was crowded with framed photographs
not only of her son Anthony, but of the sons of the mothers and
parents of the movement: Amadou Diallo, Kimani Gray, Trayvon
Martin, Mohamed Bah, Nicholas Heyward Jr., Oscar Grant, Ramarley
Graham.
BuzzFeed.com “That’s How We Survive": When Police Brutality Turns Mothers I
I asked her about them, and she told me that she had taken the photos
from a rally last year, where they had been displayed on the ground as
a makeshift altar. Once the rally ended, everyone left, leaving them on
the ground. It was raining, she remembered, and she felt she couldn’t
just leave them there. “I grabbed my son, I grabbed Diallo. Then I said,
I know this one. And this one and this one and this one,” she said of
the portraits. “There were a lot more, but I couldn’t carry them.” •

Kate Bubacz / BuzzFeed News

Esther Wang is a freelance writer based in New York City. In 2016, she
was a BuzzFeed Emerging Writers Fellow, and in 2013, she was an Open
City Fellow at the Asian American Writers' Workshop.

Esther Wang is an emerging writers fellow for BuzzFeed and is based in New York.

Contact Esther Wang at esther.wang@buzzfeed.com.

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