by robertdreed » Mon Aug 22, 2005 10:46 pm
The story I linked has more details than most on the Dorismond killing, so I'm excerpting it. <br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>PATRICK DORISMOND: <br>ANOTHER VICTIM OF GIULIANI'S NYPD <br><br>"Our best organizers in the South," the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "are the police themselves." <br><br>One could not but remember those words in witnessing the brutal killing by plainclothes policemen of yet another unarmed young black man - this time Haitian-American - in the streets of New York on Mar. 17, the third such killing in the past 13 months. More shocking still was the response of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police commissioner Howard Safir ("a trained seal" in the words of New York Times columnist Bob Herbert). Rather than expressing remorse or repentance, they have launched a vicious offensive, trying to portray the victim as a criminal. <br><br>Nothing could be further from the truth. Patrick Dorismond, who had just turned 26 on Feb. 28, was a security guard with the 34th St. Partnership, a commercial association in midtown Manhattan. After working his shift from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., he had gone with fellow guard Kevin Kaiser to the Wakamba Cocktail Lounge, at the corner 37th Street and 8th Avenue, to have a few beers. Patrick was very happy, and when another guard asked him why, he replied: "Tomorrow is payday." <br><br>When Dorismond and Kaiser emerged from the bar around 12:30 a.m., they were approached by a man who asked them if they had any marijuana for sale. "Get out of my face," Patrick told the man, according to Kaiser. <br><br>But the man persisted, witnesses say, and, within seconds, a brawl was taking place. It turns out that the would-be drug buyer was, in fact, Detective Anderson Moran of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Moran summoned his two back-up cops, called "ghosts." One of them, Detective Anthony Vasquez, shot Patrick Dorismond in the chest. <br><br>"The last memory I have of this man is him rolling on the ground, gasping for air, with blood coming out of his mouth," Kaiser told the Times. <br><br>The police version of the incident, not surprisingly, differs from that of all the other witnesses. The NYPD says that Patrick Dorismond attacked Det. Moran and that Det. Vasquez's gun went off accidentally when the victim "lunged for it." <br><br>"I don't have to ask the police what happened. I know what happened. They murdered him," declared a life-long friend of Dorismond at a Mar. 18 demonstration of about 700 people held in front of the shooting site. "Patrick was the kind of individual who, unless you put your hands on him, wouldn't touch you. So all this nonsense that you are hearing that he lunged at the police and they said 'he's going to get my gun,' that's a damn lie."... </em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br> <p></p><i></i>