Six Officers Charged in Death of Freddie Gray
Six Officers Charged in Death of Freddie Gray
Baltimore Sun
May 1
By Pamela Wood and Scott Dance
The six Baltimore police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray - who died after being injured in police custody - have been charged criminally, State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced Friday.
Mosby's announcement on the steps of the War Memorial Building was greeted with cheers and applause. Mosby said she told Gray's family that "no one is above the law and I would pursue justice upon their behalf."
The city was gearing up for another round of demonstrations after the announcement. Baltimore City and Maryland state offices granted workers in the city liberal leave early Friday afternoon.
After the charges were announced, Desmond Taylor, 29, shouted in jubilee in front of the War Memorial Building.
"I did not expect this, but I prayed for it," he said. "This day means that your actions bring consequences in Baltimore City."
Reacting to news of the charges, President Barack Obama called it "absolutely vital that the truth come out."
"What I think the people of Baltimore want more than anything else is the truth," the president said. "That's what people around the country expect."
All six officers were in custody and being processed at Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center as of 2 p.m., said Gerard Shields, a spokesman for the department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.
Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., 45, who was the driver of a police van that carried Gray through the streets of Baltimore, was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter, second-degree assault, two vehicular manslaughter charges and misconduct in office. A man who answered the phone at Goodson's home declined to comment and hung up the phone.
Officer William Porter, 25, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Lt. Brian Rice, 41, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Sgt. Alicia White, 30, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Officer Edward Nero, 29, was charged with second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Officer Garrett Miller, 26, was charged with second-degree assault, misconduct in office and false imprisonment.
If convicted of all charges, Goodson would face up to 63 years in prison, Rice would face up to 30 years and Porter, Nero, Miller and White would face up to 20 years.
Gray, 25, was chased down and arrested by Baltimore officers on April 12 and died a week later.
'Thorough' investigation
In a detailed recounting of the events, Mosby described Gray being repeatedly denied medical attention by police officers, even as he asked for medical help and later was unresponsive in a police van. She also said his arrest was illegal, performed without probable cause. A knife found in his pocket was not an illegal switchblade, as police had previously reported, Mosby said.
Gray suffered a "severe and critical neck injury" as a result of being handcuffed, shackled and not seat-belted in the van, Mosby said.
Mosby said an investigation found officers placed Gray in wrist and ankle restraints and left him stomach-down on the floor of a police van as they drove around West Baltimore. On at least five occasions, officers placed Gray in the van or checked on him and failed to secure him, she said. By the time the van reached the Western District police station, he was not breathing and was in cardiac arrest, she said.
Mosby called the investigation, which she said began the day after Gray's arrest, "comprehensive, thorough and independent." She worked quickly in filing charges, which came the morning after Baltimore police handed over their investigation to her office. The police investigation was turned over a day earlier than promised.
"My team worked around the clock, 12- and 14-hour days," she said.
Police union defends, criticizes
Just before Mosby announced the criminal charges, the Baltimore police union defended the officers involved.
"Not one of the officers involved in this tragic situation left home in the morning with the anticipation that someone with whom they interacted would not go home that night," Gene Ryan, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, wrote in a letter to Mosby. "As tragic as this situation is, none of the officers involved are responsible for the death of Mr. Gray."
The police union asked Mosby to appoint an independent prosecutor in the case, citing her ties to the Gray family's attorney, William Murphy, as well as her lead prosecutor's connections to members of the local media. Murphy donated $5,000 to Mosby's campaign and served on her transition committee.
"While I have the utmost respect for you and your office, I have very deep concerns about the many conflicts of interest presented by your office conducting an investigation in this case," Ryan wrote in his letter.
The police union letter also expresses concerns regarding Mosby's marriage to Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby.
"Most importantly, it is clear that your husband's political future will be directly impacted, for better or worse, by the outcome of your investigation," the letter states. "In order to avoid any appearance of impropriety or a violation of the Professional Rules of Professional Responsibility, I ask that you appoint a Special Prosecutor to determine whether or not any charges should be filed."
Mosby responded to that request by saying: "The people of Baltimore City elected me and there is no accountability with a special prosecutor."
"I will prosecute any case within my jurisdiction," she added.
More protests ahead
Mosby called on the public to remain calm.
"I heard your call for 'no justice, no peace,'" she said. "Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man."
Demonstrations were planned in Baltimore for Friday night and Saturday, well before Mosby made her announcement of criminal charges against the officers.
A group called the Bmore United Coalition planned to meet at the state's attorney's office at 3 p.m. and march to City Hall. The People's Power Assembly plans a protest at the Inner Harbor at 5 p.m.
In a press conference outside of City Hall shortly after the charges were announced, Malik Shabazz, national president of Black Lawyers for Justice, said he was going over to her office to congratulate her and would ask her to speak at the mass rally he has planned Saturday, the second organized by his organization.
"Under the pressure of the world, she has stood up and put the blame squarely where the blame belongs," Shabazz said. "The blame did not belong on Freddie Gray, the blame belongs on the Baltimore City Police Department."
Shabazz said that he believed the mass rally planned for Saturday would be peaceful. The group distributed new fliers advertising the rally on Friday that had a toned down message than the one distributed last week. Of note, the proclamation "Shut Em' Down" was removed from the flier, and a "Youth March" was added. In addition to the rally being against police brutality, the new flier also added "in support of the pain and suffering of Baltimore."
"We can have peace tomorrow because there's some justice as we await trial," he said. "We know that an arrest is just the beginning of it. So we don't want to go to sleep. We know we must stay vigilant, forceful and focused in the fight for justice."
Concern, celebration over charges
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she is "sickened and heartbroken" over the charges against the officers.
"No one in our city is above the law," she said. "Justice must apply to all of us equally."
Gov. Larry Hogan, who has been in Baltimore all week, said he had no immediate reaction to the officers being charged. He said his sole job is to keep the peace.
Hogan said he has faith in the justice system and his primary goal is to urge people to react peacefully.
Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen Holton called the announcement of charges "a defining moment for Baltimore. We should all be proud."
"This is a good day," she said. "I'm excited for my city. This speaks to decades of problems we have faced in this city and we're beginning a new chapter today into real justice. This will allow us to begin to address the systemic problems that make us a tale of two cities."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Mosby deserves to be congratulated but cautioned the criminal charges are only a start to a "lengthy process."
Shouts of "thank you" and "hallelujah" broke out among bystanders who pressed as close as they could to the media scrum around Mosby.
"I got hugged by someone I don't even know," said Kristyn Porter, 23, of East Baltimore.
Porter said she had business to attend to nearby, but when she heard the announcement would be made at War Memorial, she stopped to listen.
"I'm happy justice was served, and things can calm down now," Porter, who works in security, said. "The only other thing people are angry about is the curfew."
She and her friend, Raquel Burke, 23, said they hadn't been able to attend any of the marches so far.
"Now I want to go to this one," said Burke, eyeing a flyer for a rally at City Hall at 2 p.m. Saturday.
Reactions on the streets were a mix of celebration and lingering concern.
In West Baltimore, cars honked their horns. A man hanging out of a truck window pumped his fists and yelled; "Justice! Justice! Justice!"
At the corner where Gray was arrested, 53-year-old Willie Rooks held his hands up in peace signs and screamed, "Justice!"
In Gilmor Homes, the neighborhood where Gray was arrested, things were quiet, with a police helicopter circling overhead. At the intersection of North and Pennsylvania avenues, the scene of rioting Monday and demonstrations all week, traffic moved through with many motorists honking their horns.
Meech Tucker, 23, wearing a T-shirt that read, "I Bleed Baltimore," said: "If it was one of us doing that against a police officer, it would be first-degree murder."
Waiting to catch a bus near the Western District Police Station, Joann El-Amin said her husband called to give her the news about the officers being charged. "Everyone should be punished if they did something wrong," she said.
But she wasn't keen on the protests that turned violent.
"I just wish they'd stop this foolishness; the people tearing up their own neighborhoods. It makes no sense. I told my son, who works downtown, to go home and not get caught up in it. ...You don't know if the crowd is peaceful or full of foolish people. I didn't need to protest. I knew it would come out in the wash," she said.
Dwayne Wright, 44, said: "An indictment is not a conviction. They had to do something. I definitely feel leaders could have done it in other cases."
Michael Hall, 52, said he hoped the charges weren't filed just in an attempt to calm violence in the city.
"I hope she doesn't pin it on one of them when it's time for trial," he said. "Are they gonna stick by these charges?"
At Baltimore City College High School, seniors Desmond Campbell and Briana Carrington hugged as they watched in their classroom the announcement that officers would be charged in Gray's death.
"I was feeling very liberated and vindicated - it literally could have been me," Campbell said. "This is such a powerful movement."
Next steps
The arrested officers will have their bail set by a court commissioner within 24 hours. If they are not released or cannot post bail, they will go before a judge in District Court the next business day.
If they are held, Shields wouldn't say where they would be placed in the jail, citing "security reasons."
More statements on the charges are expected over the course of the afternoon. Gray's family and their lawyer are scheduled to speak at 5 p.m.
Baltimore Sun reporters Yvonne Wenger, Meredith Cohn, Erica L. Green, Jessica Anderson, Kevin Rector, Erin Cox, Justin Fenton, Mark Puente, Doug Donovan, Liz Bowie, John Fritze, Jean Marbella and Alison Knezevich contributed to this report.
By Len Shindel
"A city wakes up in pain amidst the billowing smoke of deceit and dreams incinerated."
How many times have I heard it? "I just love what they have done to Baltimore--the stadium and the inner harbor." No doubt, many of same folks would say they love The Wire, too. But if they were asked to match the devastation of deindustrialization with a single city, Detroit would win hands down.
Baltimoreans share these bifurcated allegiances. Who doesn't love a coliseum that so ably represents a city's history of industry and hard work, even as one wonders how the metropolis will survive its gentrification?
I should have known my Facebook musing on a smoldering city would be touched by our schizophrenia about the cause of Baltimore's troubles.
I listed a chain of legendary industrial workplaces that have long been shuttered, beginning with Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point Plant, where I spent 30 years, most of them as an activist and representative of the United Steelworkers.
The plant, which, after Bethlehem's bankruptcy in 2002, had been traded off in a corporate poker game between several owners, has been shut down for two years, idling more than 2,000 workers.
Just a few weeks ago, the 3,200-acre facility's towering blast furnace -one of the world's largest when it was built, a landmark that carried a star seen for miles each Christmas, one I memorialized in a poem-was imploded, spreading as much pain as finality.
So, I asked my Facebook friends what happens when dozens of legendary plants that employed hundreds of thousands, workplaces like General Motors, Western Electric, Armco Steel and Lever Brothers shut down.
I asked what happens when apologists for the outsourcers and "free" traders and financiers say not to worry. Good, clean jobs will open up. Young people locked out of opportunity will find bright futures. A rusty city will gleam. What happens?
My answer: "A city wakes up in pain amidst the billowing smoke of deceit and dreams incinerated."
The "likes" poured in. In the narcissist vein of Facebook, I felt important and persuasive.
It took a former co-worker only a few seconds to burst my boast. Rob accused me of "making excuses" for rioting groups of inner city residents who "won't take accountability for their own lives."
I responded to him civilly. I said accountability for a polarized, suffering city should be expansive, encompassing the decisions not just of the folks at the bottom, but those of the wealthy and powerful, with a bit of introspection on the part of the rest of us.
"Accountability for their own lives." I thought back on the struggle that had already been raging in the courts over discrimination in the steel industry when I was hired in 1973, one brilliantly preserved in a video, "Struggles in Steel," by Braddock, Pa., steelworker sons Tony Buba and Ray Henderson.
Black workers had always been assigned to the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in the mills. And they would lose their seniority if they transferred out to majority white departments, starting out at the bottom again, at the beck and call of the boom and the bust.
Years of lawsuits, rallies and lobbying had finally resulted in a consent decree that provided for reforming seniority systems and opening up trade and craft jobs to minority workers and women.
The Civil Rights Movement had spread into basic industries.
Black steelworkers from Birmingham, Ala. to Lackawanna, N.Y. and Baltimore took "accountability for their own lives."
They didn't always fight alone. One of my proudest recollections was accompanying 300 coke oven workers, mostly senior black workers from the hell hole of the mill, but accompanied by a notable infusion of more recent hires, many of them white guys who had come home from Vietnam.
Decked out in overalls and safety shoes, they blew through the doors and security of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington where their union leaders were meeting to demand support in winning cleaner conditions and higher incentive pay. And, after a brief wildcat strike when they returned home, they won.
Skilled jobs had been off limits to black workers for decades. For a time, while attending the local community college, I interviewed some of these co-workers as part of a co-op curriculum toward my paralegal degree.
Their stories were heart-rending. A Korean War veteran related how he worked as a plane mechanic in the Air Force, but was flunked when he took the millwright's test at the Point, even while less-qualified whites entered that department.
So he became a laborer, stacking up ungodly hours of overtime on man-killing assignments to equal and surpass the paychecks he could have made had he been able to move into a skilled position.
I'll never forget the words of Francis Brown, one of the leaders of Steel and Shipyard Workers for Equality, a leading organization of black workers at the Point:
"When a white guy needs an electrician or a plumber, he calls his brother or brother-in-law," said Brown. "Black workers call the white contractor."
But the consent decree mandate on integrating the skilled trades came too late for many as the U.S. steel industry went into decline in the 1980s. Overseas competitors targeted this nation's market and our trade and tax policy compromised U.S. workers and producers.
The damage from steel's decline was inequitably apportioned.
At Sparrows Point and the other mills, the legacy of Jim Crow, of white workers threatening to strike if black workers moved into skilled positions, of supervisors and managers who relished and help perpetuate the divisions between the races, persisted.
So the skilled trades remained overwhelmingly white even as the crisis within the industry intensified.
Today, as former steelworkers fan out looking for work--some traveling as far as Texas--the more skilled are recovering upwards of 65 to 75 percent of their former salaries, while their peers in production jobs lag far, far behind, leaving them less able to hang onto their homes or send their children to college. Their family wealth is sinking.
Surely my white co-worker would think it's preposterous to suggest any link between Baltimore's industrial and housing segregation and the fiery streets of 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray. Despite his own bout with unemployment, he would think it equally preposterous to attribute the 37 percent unemployment among black youth to anything other than their parents' bad choices.
The power of a job, not just as a means to a living, but also as a bond between people, a space of solidarity, dialogue and action
But life forever reminds us that inequality has consequences. Its damage survives until it is uprooted by the formidable claws of legal and moral pressure, recognition and activism.
Here, in the home of The Wire, a hollowed out, deindustrialized city that never came to terms with its own legacy of racism in its workplaces, housing and communities has reached its inevitable breaking point.
I remember attending meetings of black steelworkers at a social club off North Avenue in northeast Baltimore, not far from Johns Hopkins Hospital. The club was in a row house in a stable, clean neighborhood full of workers from local industries.
Fast forward 40 years--only a few blocks from the place where tough men and their lawyers plotted a strategy to challenge a Fortune 500 corporation is a corner that lays claim to one of the highest homicide rates in the U.S.
A mayor and a U.S. president denounce the "thugs" and criminals who burn and loot.
I'm appalled when my ears resonate with "thug," but my eyes take in TV images of young high school students, in their khaki uniforms taking to the streets.
I can't blame Mayor Rawlings-Blake or President Obama for their thug talk.
African-Americans only survive in political office when they are perceived by whites as the best carriers of the stern rod of discipline, as the enforcers of accountability.
I think about what the future will hold for the young folks who are taking their passion to the streets of Baltimore. And I recall a poignant conversation years ago between two co-workers in the mill.
One had been in the streets after the assassination of Dr. King in 1968. His white co-worker was out there, too--as a member of the Maryland National Guard.
After 1968, they each started families and found decent-paying union jobs at Bethlehem Steel with benefits and security.
They became active in their communities as coaches and PTA officers. And they became friends.
I think about these two co-workers as I watch proud citizens and courageous leaders like U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings and local pastors working to heal their communities. I wonder how many neighborhood elders who are sweeping up the glass and exhorting the young to protest non-violently have their roots in steel and auto and can manufacturing, shipbuilding, and unions.
And I consider the power of a job, not just as a means to a living, but also as a bond between people, as a space of solidarity, dialogue and action.
Where are the jobs for the young people some so swiftly label "thugs?"
Where is our accountability to the legacy of the men and women who came to Baltimore from North and South Carolina and Virginia and sacrificed to build a future where the economic playing field was level and dreams could be nurtured?
Where is our accountability to the young people, from Baltimore and across America who, today, mourn Freddie Gray and demand our attention and our answers?
About the author Len Shindel
Len Shindel worked at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point Plant in Baltimore for 30 years and for most of that time was an activist and USWA representative.
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