Kevin Richardson

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Kevin Richardson
A Different Drummer

Race Hustlers Re-Run
Central Park Jogger Case

By
Nicholas Stix


A Different Drummer [November, 2002]




In an increasingly multicultural, urban environment, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve justice, as racial and ethnic activist groups seek not only to impede the prosecution of the apparently guilty, but to undo successful prosecutions, after the fact. The most striking example of this development, is the attempt underway to undo the convictions of five of the attackers in what came to be known as the Central Park Jogger Case. And so, five cold-blooded thugs: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Kharey Wise, Yusuf Salaam and Raymond Santana, have now been nominated for urban sainthood.

Central Park was -- and still is -- an urban preserve favored by well-to-do, liberal, white New Yorkers. On April 19, 1989, dozens of black teenagers took the subway to Central Park, for a night of "wilding." The term, never previously heard by whites, had been coined by young blacks to describe group attacks by (often armed) blacks on lone, unarmed whites. A night of wilding promised an orgy of racial violence.

The teenagers swarmed over the park that night, committing assaults. "The Jogger," a petite, 28-year-old, 105-pound investment banker, tried to outrun the boys, and fought valiantly, but never had a chance. Her worst injury came from a steel pipe, which Yusuf Salaam hit her in the head with. The 14-16-year-old boys dragged the woman 200 yards from the jogging path, ripped her clothes off, and variously fondled, raped, and beat her.

By the time a passerby found her, The Jogger had lost seventy percent of her blood. As is typical of massive, blunt trauma wounds, the victim lost all memory of her ordeal. Notwithstanding problems with taste and balance, her survival and recovery have been nothing short of miraculous.

The detailed report of the attack was provided by the boys themselves, who incriminated each other, and who knew things (e.g., the exact articles of the victim's clothing) that only the attackers would know. Kevin Richardson's underwear was soiled with grass stains. Save for Yusuf Salaam, all of the boys videotaped or signed detailed confessions in their parents' presence.

Investigators also got statements from over forty other people incriminating the five, who were ultimately convicted variously of assault and sexual abuse. However, police were always aware that they had not caught all of the attackers. Semen found on one of the victim's socks did not genetically match any of the five arrested attackers.

Enter Matias Reyes. Reyes, now 31, is serving a thirty-three-year-to-life sentence for murder and rape. Once the statute of limitations ran out on the Central Park attack, he "found God," a common jailhouse occurrence. In January, Reyes confessed that he alone had attacked The Jogger. DNA tests showed that it was Reyes' semen on The Jogger's socks.

Police had never suspected Reyes in the attack, because he had not been mentioned by the other attackers in their confessions; the attack came almost two months before Reyes' rape, robbery, and murder spree began; and the attack on The Jogger did not fit his modus operandi. Reyes worked alone, and in seeking, unsuccessfully, to blind his victims, always stabbed them in the eyes. And in 1989, DNA testing was much more primitive than it is today. Reyes most likely came upon the unconscious jogger after her initial attackers had fled, and raped her or masturbated over her.

Although the convicted attackers have all served their sentences, and except for Raymond Santana, who was later convicted of other crimes, been released from jail, they seek -- with their lawyers' help -- to clear their names, rewrite history, and pave the way for a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the City of New York.

The attackers' leading spokesmen are city Councilman Bill Perkins and NYPD Lt. Eric Adams. In 1989, Perkins, then a Harlem tenant organizer, worked with the attackers' black supremacist supporters, while insisting that the attack was not racially motivated.

On September 12, Eric Adams called for a federal investigation: "We believe that because of the demand to bring someone to justice from this crime, we believe that there is a strong possibility that there may have been overzealous policing and overzealous prosecuting."

Eric Adams is the founder of the segregated, counter-police organization of black NYPD officers, 100 Black Men in Law Enforcement Who Care. An open racist, Adams is obsessed with racial purity. According to a former colleague, when Adams discovered that the father of the child of a subordinate, black female officer was white, Adams suddenly forbade the woman from bringing her child to work. And in 1998, ten years after Tawana Brawley had been exposed as having engineered one of the most outrageous race hoaxes in American history, Adams called for a federal investigation on behalf of Brawley, whom Adams still insisted had been raped by white law enforcement officers!

Eric Adams has devoted his life to undermining law enforcement, and supporting black criminals. And for that, he receives fawning treatment from the mainstream media.

Presently, the attackers' biggest supporters are New York's mainstream media.

New York's white-owned, mainstream media did a creditable job of reporting, in 1989, on the criminal investigation of the attack. However, the media ignored the virulent hate campaign that was unleashed by the attackers' supporters, and by the black media, who presented them as the victims of a racist criminal justice system, and who unleashed an orgy of hatred against the victim.

New York's black newspapers, Brooklyn's now-defunct City Sun, and Manhattan's Amsterdam News, depicted the attackers as contemporary versions of the "Scottsboro Boys," the black, 1930s victims of racist lawmen who were eventually cleared of false rape charges. City Sun propagandist Peter Noel (now a star of the popular, far-left weekly, The Village Voice, where he has threatened to kill police officers) concocted a story, according to which "wilding" referred to innocent horseplay.

Although the media -- black and white -- usually follow the unofficial rule prohibiting ever naming a rape victim, every City Sun or Amsterdam News article on the case constantly repeated The Jogger's name. As a result, while white New Yorkers were unaware of her identity, virtually all black, and many Hispanic New Yorkers, knew her name.

At the attackers' 1990 trial, their supporters showed up every day at the courthouse, screaming "The [jogger's] boyfriend did it!," "She did it herself!," and calling the victim "Slut!," when she limped to court to testify.

Since seizing upon Matias Reyes, the mainstream media has so grossly misrepresented the case, as to all but erase the difference between them and their racist, black counterparts. A September 11 story by New York Daily News reporter Alice McQuillan, could have been written by the attackers' lawyers. McQuillan omitted all of the evidence that convicted the attackers, and quoted black supremacist attorney Roger Wareham (December 12th Movement), who represents attackers Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Kevin Richardson as saying, "They had made up their mind, they had somebody else, they didn't want anything to spoil their neatly tied package of convictions and they used these children as scapegoats." "Children," indeed. Meanwhile, Wareham's co-counsel, Michael Warren, insists that the confessions were gotten "through the most abhorrent form of psychological duress." With few exceptions, the New York media have followed McQuillan's example. But Alice McQuillan is a fearless truth-teller, compared to the Village Voice's Dasun Allah, who fabricated a new history, whereby whites had invented the term "wilding," in order to "brand black youth." The movement to clear the five Central Park attackers must be seen in the context of movements to free other blacks convicted of heinous crimes. One such movement supported former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), convicted last year, and sentenced to life, for his 2000 assassination of Fulton County, Georgia Sheriff's Deputy Ricky Kinchen, and for seriously wounding Deputy Aldranon English. The king of such movements seeks the release of former Black Panther Mumia abu Jamal (Wesley Cook), on death row for the 1981 assassination of Philadelphia police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal/Cook and Al-Amin/Brown's supporters insist that their heroes, too, were railroaded. Note too that Al-Amin's victims were both black. According to black supremacist belief, black law enforcement officers who arrest, rather than aid black criminals, are traitors to the race. Such beliefs owe their influence to their enthusiastic support by white elites in the media, education, and even law enforcement.


Originally published in
Middle American