Method Man – The Heart Gently Weeps:
What’s up with Officer Brown? The other day he tried to shackle me up
He killed Kase and now he hassling us
This motherfucker got balls, even the gaul to try and patten me up
Shyheim – Jiggy Comin’:
One love y’all stay safe
And fuck you, Officer Brown, peace to that nigga Case
Cappadonna – Run:
peep Marcel and Brown comin around, dippin the loco
run, if you ever got somethin on you, son
…
Me and the god back to back 1-85 with the 4-5, survive that chase,
you took case, even though I remember ya face
Intouch’ posted an article over at ChamberMusik that is worth reading for the Wu heads. It’s an old one an dates back to 1994. Point in question here is the story of Officer Brown and Kase, as mnetioned often in Wu’s lyrics. So here it is for the slow saturday reading.
Kudos to Intouch’ for digging this up.
One Neighborhood, Two Lives — A special report.; A Death on Staten Island: 2 Paths Cross on Familiar Ground
Published: May 15, 1994 / NYTimes
On the evening of April 29, when Ernest Sayon died in the hands of the police, it was a case of two men who came from the same place and circumstance, but then chose opposing lives, meeting, with tragic consequences.
One was Mr. Sayon himself, the 22-year-old son of Liberian immigrants, who grew up on the ground floor of one of the six-story brick buildings that make up the federally subsidized Park Hill apartment complex.
Though described as a gentle and loving person by members of his bereaved family, Mr. Sayon, a husky, bearded young man, had already compiled a criminal record and seemed, by all the evidence, to be a small-time drug dealer in a neighborhood with many small-time drug dealers.
The other man was Donald Brown, at 31 nearly a decade older than Mr. Sayon, a police officer who grew up in the same apartment complex in the Clifton section of the island, and in a sense, was back trying to clean up the place he had come from.
Officer Brown and Mr. Sayon knew each other, at least in the way that a suspected drug dealer and a police officer in a special anti-drug unit in the neighorhood would know each other: as antagonists. But perhaps, they were also aware of the similarity of their backgrounds.
Mr. Brown is one of three police officers from the 120th Precinct assigned to desk duty pending a grand jury investigation of Mr. Sayon’s death, a consequence of a struggle that took place while Officer Brown was taking part in a drug sweep of the Park Hill area.
The story of the fatal encounter of Donald Brown and Ernest Sayon on the territory that spawned them involved a complicated mixture of ingredients. There was a community, made up mostly of African immigrants and American-born blacks, where some residents were demanding better police protection and a more aggressive effort to drive drug dealers out of the neighborhood. There was a continuing police campaign that during three weeks in April had resulted in the arrests of 36 people, producing both new tensions but also, local officials said, a dramatic improvement in the lives of the people who live in Park Hill.
And there were the two men from the same neighborhood, the police officer and the drug dealer, whose clash has city officials fearing a renewed cycle of suspicion and protest.
The Neighborhood Afraid of Crime, And of the Police
Nobody would call Park Hill an elegant neighborhood. Its main gathering point, called the Strip, is an unremarkable blocklong stretch of sidewalk, balding earth and litter just down the street from an equally unremarkable brick apartment building where cars from other places pull up from time to time, their drivers looking to buy drugs.
Just down Vanderbilt Avenue and behind the Strip is a series of six-story brick buildings, the Park Hill Apartments. In a neighborhood devoid of parks or plazas, the Strip, many neighborhood residents say, serves by default as the village commons for the area’s youth, despite the no-loitering signs.
A few blocks from the project is a very different world of single-family houses and sycamore trees, which give way to smaller detached houses and little yards. But Park Hill is a district of gardenless buildings and graffiti, where the wooden slats of the benches have been ripped off, leaving forlorn pairs of concrete supports.
In the last couple of years, as in many poor city neighborhoods, guns and drugs proliferated in Park Hill, leading to demands from community leaders, including members of the tenants’ association and local clergymen, for more police protection.
An Infant Is Shot
“On March 13, a 2-year-old baby named Dante Hawkins was shot in a drug dispute at Stapleton Homes,” recalled Tom Cocola, Mayor Giuliani’s Staten Island coordinator, speaking of a housing project nearby. “On March 14, there was a shooting at the Mariners’ Harbor Homes, and the next night at Park Hill.”
Earlier than that, during the winter, said Guy V. Molinari, the Staten Island Borough President, there was a drug-related arson that took the lives of four young people. But in April, when the local police precinct commander set up a special drug-prevention team, the move was greeted with mixed reactions.
“The drug problem is a serious one and so is prostitution,” said the Rev. Roy Bailey of the Revelation Church of Jesus Christ, situated in a basement at the Park Hill Apartments. “We need the police to come and have sweeps, but with added precautions so we don’t have a recurrence of someone being beaten. How can you take away the police from an area that is bombarded with crime continually?”
By contrast, Natalie Kamau, president of the 185-225 Park Hill Tenants’ Association, said that the police sweeps only caused tensions to rise. “The minute Giuliani stepped in, the climate changed,” she said.
It is a view shared by many of the area’s youths, who complained that the police harassed them frequently, picked them up on trumped-up charges of loitering, and commonly pulled down their pants in their overzealous searches for drugs.
Ernest Sayon A Helper of Youth, But With a Record
Ernest Sayon, known locally as Kase, was well known in Park Hill, friendly and warm to those who knew him well, a potentially dangerous troublemaker to the police. For many who only knew his face as another among many who dealt crack and cocaine from the shadows he was not an angel, not a devil.
“He never bothered nobody,” said Corey Washington, 17, who said he was a close friend of Mr. Sayon. “It wasn’t like he was a menace to society.”
Mr. Sayon came from a family of immigrants from Liberia, and some in the neighborhood described him as a bridge between the two communities of the area, the immigrants from Africa and native blacks.
“Back home, he’s got his own beach,” said Ali Kadi, a cousin of Mr. Sayon. Mr. Kadi, known as Stagga Lee, said that when he moved to Park Hill as a teen-ager in 1989, there were few Africans living in the neighborhood. “They called us African booty-scratchers,” he said.
Mr. Sayon and his family were the first Africans to move into the neighborhood, and as an old hand, he helped more recent arrivals like Mr. Kadi learn how to fit in.
Close friends of Mr. Sayon say that he liked to talk for hours about the global struggles of black people. Nelson Mandela was his hero and he waited impatiently for the day when Mr. Mandela would become president of South Africa, a day he did not live to see. He was a father of two young children, neither of whom lived with him, and some people in the neighborhood said, he used to advise teen-agers who hung out in the streets to stay in school.
Arrested as John Adams
But then there was Mr. Sayon’s police record, beginning with a minor conviction in 1992 for turnstile jumping. Later that year, he was arrested again, using the name John Adams, for drug possession and resisting arrest. The police report of that arrest indicates that he “flailed his arms and rolled on the ground,” causing a minor injury to an officer’s thumb. He was sentenced to probation for three years.
A few weeks before his death, the police say, Mr. Sayon, armed with a Tech-9 automatic pistol, was involved in a shootout with some youths vying for control of the drug trade at 350 Vanderbilt Avenue, a brick apartment building just down from the Strip and only a stone’s throw from the Park Hill Apartments. Coincidentally or not, it was from the roof of that building that the brick that went through the police car windshield was thrown.
Perhaps coincidentally also, just down the brightly lighted, white corridor outside Mr. Sayon’s mother’s apartment, where Mr. Sayon lived, is a single word written graffiti style into the rippled plaster wall. “Tech-9,” it says.
Mr. Sayon was charged with attempted murder, criminal possession of a weapon and assault. Compared to others who turned up again and again in the criminal justice system, Mr. Sayon was not seen as a major player, a court clerk said. He was released on bail.
Donald Brown Feared ‘Robocop’ And a Role Model
There is an oft-heard characterization of Donald Brown’s upbringing in the housing complex: “He stayed in the house a lot,” said Robert Cruz, a 36-year-old Customs agent who lives in the neighborhood.
The young Donald Brown was a favorite target of the Park Hill toughs who bullied him when he did venture out, Mr. Cruz said. Perhaps, he suggested, Officer Brown’s return to the neighborhood had an element of revenge for his youthful tribulations.
Certainly, in the wake of Mr. Sayon’s death, many people are ready to speak ill of Officer Brown, whom they hold responsible.
“Officer Brown didn’t have a good relationship with quite a bit of the young community,” said Victoria Shuford, a member of the Park Hill Tenants’ Association. “There were complaints about harassment.
“I used to stop him on his scooter and say, ‘Hey, Brown, you’re not Robocop. You’re treating people too aggressively.’ ”
But Officer Brown was much admired by many in Park Hill, who saw him as a model for other youth, a man from the neighborhood who avoided the pathologies of inner-city life and was doing good.
He was especially credited by community leaders for his participation in the African-American role-model program at the local elementary school, Public School 19. Earlier this year, in fact, he was honored at a special luncheon of the Silver Lake Masonic Lodge for the guidance he had provided the area’s children.
Ralph Bronzo, the school’s principal, said that many children reacted to the events of April 29 by writing letters to Officer Brown at the 120th Precinct, saying things like “We love you, Officer Brown,” and “The things we’re reading in the newspaper, we know they can’t be true.”
“This was a young man who established an award that he gave out every final assembly to the two youngsters who made the most progress,” Mr. Bronzo said. “He purchased the awards himself, plaques and certificates.”
‘Did Good Things Here’
Only a week or so before Mr. Sayon’s death, one community leader, Crisida Howard, a member of the Tenants’ Association, wrote a letter to the Police Commissioner, William J. Bratton, commending Officer Brown for his good work. Similarly, the Rev. Calvin Rice of the First Central Baptist Church near Park Hill said, “I can’t say he was a good guy or a bad guy, but he did good things here.”
Darrell Holcomb, a Staten Island social worker and childhood friend of Mr. Brown called him “mild-mannered, easy to get along with, the kind of person who tried to make people around him feel included.”
Mr. Holcomb provided a kind of thumbnail biography sketching Officer Brown’s trajectory from Park Hill to the police force and back to Park Hill as a police officer. He went to Tottenville High School, where, Mr. Holcomb said, his ambition was to become a dentist. He attended Baruch College for a short time, then went into the army and worked for the City Corrections Department for several years. In 1990, he became a police officer, and when the special drug task force was created for Park Hill, he became a part of it.
“We played in the Staten Island boys football league together,” Mr. Holcomb said. “Once, he received the outstanding defensive player of the year award. His knickname was Smiley. He smiles at everybody.”
April 29 Two Antagonists Meet on the Street
It is common knowledge on the streets of Park Hill that Mr. Sayon had a kind of acquaintanceship with Officer Brown. The two men seemed to have known each other for some time, by name, and their relationship was antagonistic.
According to Okema Washington, a former resident of Park Hill who now lives in Brooklyn, Mr. Sayon was well aware that his drug-dealing had put him under police scrutiny, especially that of Officer Brown, who, she said, was frustrated by his inability to catch “Kase” in the act of selling drugs.
One witness to Mr. Sayon’s death, Adreala Ames, told investigators: “A lot of people say Kase used to be like teasing Officer Brown. You know, like walk by and laugh.”
But it wasn’t until the drug sweep late on a Friday, April 29, that the paths of Officer Brown and Ernest Sayon crossed violently.
It will be up to a grand jury to decide exactly what happened on that day, and in particular whether Officer Brown or other police officers are criminally responsible for Mr. Sayon’s death. Two other officers, John Mahoney and Gregg Gerson, as well as Officer Brown, have been assigned desk duty pending the investigation, and other officers were at the scene of Mr. Sayon’s death. But it is Officer Brown who, according to most of the testimony, emerges as the main protagonist.
There is no debate over the fact that officers from the 120th Precinct, organized into a Special Narcotics Emergency Unit, were continuing the drug sweeps that had, up to that point, resulted in 36 arrests. Officers Brown and Gerson and Sergeant Mahoney were among them, working just outside 225 Park Hill Avenue, near where Mr. Sayon lived.
There also seems to be no disagreement about other aspects of that day. The police were making some arrests when, suddenly, there was a loud bang from what turned out to be an M-80 firecracker, thrown from an undisclosed place. It was after that when Officer Brown saw Mr. Sayon walking on the opposite side of Park Hill Avenue, and he and other officers moved to arrest him. Death by Suffocation
There is also no doubt that Mr. Sayon died not long after that arrest. A coroner’s report says that the cause of death was suffocation because of pressure on his chest and neck while he lay in a prone position with his hands handcuffed behind his back. The report adds that he had bruises and a three-quarter-inch gash on the back of his head.
The question for the grand jury to decide is whether or not, in subduing Mr. Sayon, the police committed a crime, or whether their use of force was justified. According to some who have spoken to witnesses, accounts on this matter vary and are not consistent. For example, Mr. Cocola, Mr. Giuliani’s representative, who was at Park Hill for five hours on the night of April 29, said “the accounts are very mixed.”
Moreover, not every witness is necessarily speaking from complete neutrality. Mr. Molinari, the Borough President, avers that some people have been threatened by drug dealers and thus remain silent.
The drug dealers and their friends have been bothered by the increased police presence in Park Hill and they have an incentive to exaggerate police wrongdoing in the hopes that the drug sweeps will be called off. Some of the witnesses who have recounted their stories to investigators are friends of Mr. Sayon’s and have criminal records of their own.
“I would not jump to conclusions and I would ask others not to jump to conclusions either,” Mr. Molinari said. “We hope that drug dealers don’t benefit from this tragic incident.”
Testimony of a Beating
Some witnesses, whose interviews with investigators have been made available by the Sayon family lawyer, have claimed that Mr. Sayon put up no struggle when he was arrested.
Some have said that he lay prone and still as Officer Brown struck him several times on the head with the butt of his revolver while pressing his knee into his back. Other officers, these witnesses said, either held Mr. Sayon down or hit him with their fists or their walkie-talkies.
“I seen them striking this person,” a witness, Edward Nurse, told investigators, referring to Mr. Sayon. “I didn’t see his face because they had him kneel down, face down. I seen his behind, because his pants was half way down. And I can’t say exactly how long, but they was beating him with the guns.”
The investigators asked Mr. Nurse whether he saw Mr. Sayon kicking or moving.
“I never seen him move,” Mr. Nurse replied.
Eventually, the police carried Mr. Sayon into a van and drove him to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The following article is based on reporting by Richard Bernstein, Clifford Krauss and Michel Marriott, and was written by Mr. Bernstein.