Ghastly crime gives perps $41 million payoff from taxpayers

This is a story of a corrupt judicial and governing system that allowed five men--who confessed to raping and then nearly killing a woman--to win $41 million from NYC taxpayers.  It's relevant because it shows how a handful of white elites intentionally wreck our system due to their own "white guilt."

On the night of April 19, 1989, a group of more than 30 black and Hispanic teenagers assaulted numerous victims in NYC's Central Park.  All but one of the victims was white.  Then they attacked and raped a white 28-year-old jogger, Trisha Meili.

As the victim screamed, one or more of her attackers smashed her head with a lead pipe, fracturing her skull.  Another smashed her face with a brick.  Meili lost three-quarters of her blood in the assault, and her brain activity could barely be detected in the hospital emergency room to which she was later transported. So badly was Meili's face mangled that one of her eyes popped out of its socket.

None of her doctors expected the woman would survive. But astonishingly, after nearly two weeks in a coma, she did.

Police arrested five black males.  They would later be known as the Central Park five.

Questioned by detectives, all five confessed.  Four of the confessions were videotaped.

The five had already burnished their credentials as demons in their respective neighborhoods. Kharey Wise, who supplied the metal pipe that was used to smash the woman's skull, was a crack cocaine user and a gang member who routinely terrorized the tenants of a local housing complex. Antron McCray was well known for his menacing behavior and violent attacks directed against teachers at his school. And Yusef Salaam, who was allegedly the first to pummel the woman's head with Kharey Wise's lead pipe, was fond of robbing people in Central Park.  Salaam was described by police as the “most vicious” of the five.

When the five stood trial the following year for the rape and near-fatal battery on Trisha Meili, black newspapers quickly denounced the trial as racist.  Harlem pastor Calvin Butts, for his part, complained that “the first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped, is round up a bunch of black youths.” When the victim, still disfigured and unsteady, went to the courthouse to testify, groups of black demonstrators — led by Al Sharpton — taunted her, calling her a “white slut” and a “filthy white whore,” and claiming that her boyfriend was the real rapist.

Racially diverse juries unanimously convicted all five of the defendants, sentencing them to prison terms ranging from 5 to 12 years. The convictions were based on the confessions from the suspects themselves--in which each also implicated the others in specific actions.

Attorneys for the five claimed their clients were frightened little lambs who were intimidated and coerced by law-enforcement authorities into making false confessions. But in the precinct house after their apprehension, the suspects were loudly singing the rap song “Wild Thing” for an extended period of time while they laughed uproariously about what they had just done. When a police officer suggested to Raymond Santana that he should have been out with a girlfriend rather than attacking strangers in Central Park, the boy laughed and replied, “I already got mines.” These are not the words or actions of suspects who are in fear.

The coercion theory is further discredited by the fact that the interrogations of McCray, Richardson, and Santana were videotaped and, in compliance with legal requirements for cases involving suspects under age 16, were conducted in the presence of a parent or guardian. Wise was already 16, so was unaccompanied by an adult during his videotaped interrogation. Salaam was 15 but had a fake ID listing his age as 16, so his questioning began without a parent or guardian present. But before long, his mother arrived at the precinct and requested that her son be given a public defender; his confession was not videotaped.

The video footage of McCray, Richardson, Santana, and Wise was damning indeed. Examples:

Antron McCray: “We charged her. We got her on the ground. Everybody started hitting her and stuff. She was on the ground. Everybody stomping and everything. Then we got, each — I grabbed one arm, some other kid grabbed one arm, and we grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we all took turns getting on her....”

Kevin Richardson: “Raymond [Santana] had her arms, and Steve [Lopez, who accepted a plea bargain rather than face trial] had her legs. He spread it out. And Antron [McCray] got on top

Kharey Wise: “This was my first rape.”

When  investigators at one point asked the fifth suspect, Yusef Salaam, why he had smashed the victim's skull he replied, “It was fun.”

Some additional pieces of evidence also demonstrate that the Central Park Five were very much involved in the attack against their victim:

• While being driven to the police precinct shortly after his apprehension, Raymond Santana blurted out: “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman's t***.”
• Yusef Salaam told a detective who interviewed him: “I was there, but I didn't rape her.”
• Kevin Richardson — whose underwear was stained with semen, grass, and dirt – told an acquaintance shortly after the attack: “We just raped somebody.”
• On April 20th, both Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana independently brought investigators to the precise location where the previous night's attack had occurred. Richardson, for his part, told the detective: “This is where we got her ... where the raping occurred.”
• In the company of his father, Richardson told investigators that the source of several scratches on his neck had been the fingernails of a desperate Trisha Meili.
• When Kharey Wise on April 20th went with a detective and an Assistant District Attorney to the scene of the previous night's attack, he said: “Damn, damn that’s a lot of blood. Damn, this is really bad, that’s a lot of blood.... I knew she was bleeding, but I didn’t know how bad she was. It was really dark. I couldn’t see how much blood there was at night.”
• Wise also told a detective that someone named  “Rudy” had fondled the jogger’s breasts and stolen her Walkman. His knowledge about the existence of the Walkman was highly significant, for at that time, not even the police were yet aware that the jogger had been carrying such a device.
• Two of Wise's friends testified that the day after the attack on Miss Meili, Wise had told them: “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night? That was us!”
• One of the numerous young people who were arrested for their participation in the various Central Park attacks of April 19th stated, on videotape, that he had heard Raymond Santana and another boy laughing about “how they 'made a woman bleed.'”

In short, there wasn't just a mountain of evidence indicating that the five had participated in the brutalization of Miss Meili. There was an Everest of evidence.

Defenders of the five note--correctly--that DNA recovered from the victim did not match that of any of the five — a fact they claim supposedly proving the boys' innocence. But in fact it proves only that none of those five had actually penetrated the victim's vagina. It does not negate the fact that all five provided vivid testimony proving that they were part of the vicious horde that had committed one of the most brutal, barbaric attacks in living memory. Nor does it alter the fact that their mere presence in that horde made them legally complicit in Miss Meili's rape. The fact that their semen was not inside the victim's body is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Authorities always knew that there were other assailants, besides the Five, who had brutalized the victim and gotten away.

Defenders of the Central Park Five likewise point out that no traces of DNA from the boys' hair, sweat, saliva, or skin had been found on the victim either. But as Ann Coulter wrote in 2018: “Today, these kids' DNA would have been found all over the crime scene. But in 1989, DNA was a primitive science. Most cops wouldn't have even bothered collecting samples for DNA tests back then.” Indeed, the development of a national DNA database enabling investigators to identify perpetrators by matching their genetic materials to those collected from other crime scenes, would not even begin until several years later.

In 2002 a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes — who was already serving 33-years-to-life for other felonies but who had never been investigated as a suspect in the Central Park jogger case — suddenly confessed to having perpetrated Trisha Meili's April 19, 1989 rape. Authorities quickly confirmed this by matching his DNA with the DNA from the victim which had been collected thirteen years earlier. Reyes's confession came at no risk, as the statute of limitations regarding the Trisha Meili case had expired.

Reyes was a violent psychopath with a long history of forcing his way into women's apartments and attacking them. In one of those cases, he had raped a then-pregnant woman named Lourdes Gonzalez before stabbing her nine times while her young children were in the next room, listening to their mother suffer and die. And yet now, not only was Reyes confessing to a crime for which he had never even been charged, but he was claiming (falsely) to have acted alone in attacking Trisha Meili in Central Park. Why?

Reyes said he felt guilty that five innocent men had been punished for a crime that he committed. But those punishments were basically over by the time Reyes made his confession. Four members of the Central Park Five were already out of prison, and the fifth, Kharey Wise, was scheduled to be released very soon. It is simply not believable that a lifelong remorseless monster like Matias Reyes would suddenly have been motivated by a pang of guilt. A much more plausible explanation rests with the well-substantiated fact that Reyes, who had recently been moved to Kharey Wise's prison cellblock, feared Wise's gang and desperately wanted to be transferred to a more secure and hospitable prison location. And sure enough, after he confessed to the rape of Miss Meili, he quickly received the transfer that he wanted.

Reyes's confession prompted New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to vacate the convictions against the Central Park Five.  Smelling money, in 2003 attorneys for the five sued the city for $250 million lawsuit for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress.

For the next eleven years the city's attorneys refused to settle the suit, vowing to fight it out in court.  But when Bill de Blasio took over as mayor in 2014, his administration quickly agreed to pay the five $41 million to settle the case.

Eric Reynolds, a black NYPD officer who arrested a number of the suspects in the Central Park jogger case in April 1989, was disgusted by the mayor's order to pay $41 million to the five confessed assailants. “If we had gone to trial in their suit … all the facts would have come out,” said Reynolds. “It would have been clear they [the Five] participated, and [Matias] Reyes didn’t act alone. The evidence supported it. They did not want to go to trial. They just wanted to get paid.”

The left is now celebrating a murderous lynch mob that raped and nearly killed their female victim:  A new TV series on Netflix--produced by a black female filmmaker--uses Morgenthau's outrageous decision to "vacate" the convictions as proving the innocence of the five attackers. 

H/T frontpagemag