The Washington Post - 03.03.2020

B2 EZ m2 THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAy, MARCH 3 , 2020

remember most was her son’s intelligence. She said he scored near the top of his class on a recent test. Walls said she does what she can do “to provide opportunity for young people.” But she said her son was no different from many of the children she coun- sels. “He was just a normal teenage boy,” his mother said. “He lived, and he had the same struggles, the same issues, as all the other children growing up around here.” “A lot of children look to me for answers,” Walls said of her job. But at this moment, she did not know what she would tell the other children about malachi’s death. “I haven’t gotten that far yet.” [email protected] [email protected]

Fenit nirappil, Perry stein and Alice Crites contributed to this report

after a new resident complained of loud music, prompting angry protests from longtime residents about threats to heritage in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Sudi West, the executive director of the Shaw Community Center, based at the historic Lincoln Congressional Te mple United Church of Christ, had known malachi since he was a toddler. He said the lion part symbolized the boy’s “courage to speak out and address injus- tice.” West said that while malachi may have withdrawn at school and in some social circles, he did not shirk from defending his friends or from speaking out on behalf of young teenagers. He described malachi as “joyous and bright” and a “voice for his peers” born out of the realiza- tion that as a child he could be “publicly humiliated” without any recourse. Walls said what she would

at his charter school, and he recently transferred to the Car- dozo Education Campus. “His perception changed about who he wanted to be,” Walls said monday. She noted her son had cried while standing cuffed on the metro platform and then became embarrassed. “He was a very proud boy,” she said. “It was hard to get him to open up. He didn’t want anyone to see him as weak. The incident kind of broke him.... It made him really closed. He lost all respect for authority, to the point where you really couldn’t touch him.” But even through his personal struggles, malachi channeled his anger to try to make change. He gave an interview to WUSA- TV news about his run-in with police and talked to lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union. This past summer, he appeared as a lion in a produc- tion called the “Wizard of Shaw,” a play discussing go-go music

University, questioned the officers about their tactics, and a metro officer shot him with a stun gun. The incident was captured on video and spread on social media, prompting complaints and a lawsuit over police conduct. musonza became the focus of the story. But Walls said it had a lasting impact on malachi, something she testified about at a D.C. Council hearing last year on metro’s “policing practices and their impact on people of color.” malachi had been handcuffed by police before and after the metro incident, his mother said. But she said his dealings with police at the metro caused him to become withdrawn and lose sleep. He had behavioral issues

Walls, 40, is the program director at t he Shaw Community Center, where she helps many at-risk children. She talked about the challenges her son was trying to overcome, with both the violence that seems to permeate their neighborhood and his interactions with police. “I think he had the normal neighborhood encounters, like all these children do,” Walls said, noting challenges raising a young black male in the city. “There are just so many barriers that they are up against.” one encounter stands out. It was June, and malachi was with other youths in the U Street metro station. Police said they responded to a call for youths making threats with sticks. Walls said she believes her son was not among those making trouble. A metro transit officer handcuffed malachi and another boy. Ta piwa musonza, a 28-year- old graduate student at Howard

and in almost a whisper, Walls
said she wanted her son’s death
“to be a wake-up call.”
She paused, adding, “I want-
ed him to make a difference in
this world.”
The shooting of malachi and
his friend, who was wounded,
was one of six shootings across
the District in a few hours. one
claimed the life of miguel rome-
ro, 75, in Deanwood in North-
east Washington. malik Brown,
24, of Northwest, was fatally
shot monday afternoon near
Petworth in Northwest.
The loss of the young teen
stood out.
“We think about a 13-year-old,
it’s the type of violence that is
gut-wrenching, it’s unaccept-
able, and I know all of o ur hearts
go out to the boy’s family,” said
D.C. Council member Charles
Allen (D-Ward 6), who chairs
the council’s public safety com-
mittee.

sHootIng from B1

‘I wanted him to make a difference,’ says mother of D.C. shooting victim, 13

Malachi lukes

tion and was criticized by Trump; Virginia House of Dele- gates majority Leader Charniele L. Herring (D-Alexandria); Del. Alfonso H. Lopez (D-Arlington); and a few staff members. The group had been meeting at state Democratic Party head- quarters, on the 20th floor of the Sun Trust building. They piled into the elevator, planning to walk the short distance to the Bell To wer outside the state Capitol, where a crowd was wait- ing. mcAuliffe noted — for the record — that the group was nowhere near the elevator's 3,500-pound weight limit. The elevator went down, but stopped between floors, said Adam Zuckerman, the direct- mail director for the Biden cam-

paign. When the small space started to heat up, they pried open the inner doors to let in some air. Stoney used his cellphone to call the fire chief. one of the occupants started to feel claus- trophobic. mcAuliffe snapped the photo. “It’s definitely something I’ll be telling my kids and my grand- kids about someday,” Zuckerman said. The firefighters — whose national union has endorsed Biden — arrived quickly and helped the group to safety. “We do it all the time, all day,” fire department spokesman Christopher Armstrong said. “It just happened to be a former governor this time.” [email protected]

BY JENNA PORTNOY

Politicians aren’t known for
their punctuality, b ut former Vir-
ginia governor Terry mcAuliffe
had a good excuse monday
morning.
He and 10 others — including
his wife, Dorothy mcAuliffe, and
richmond mayor Levar Stoney
— got trapped in an elevator on
their way to a news conference
for former vice president Joe
Biden, who is hoping for a big
win in the Democratic presiden-
tial primary in Virginia on Super
Tuesday.

After the group was stuck between the first floor and the lower level for about 30 minutes, richmond firefighters came to their rescue. “I was laughing,” Terry mcAu- liffe said in a brief phone call later. “I was trying to keep a jovial mood. Nothing you could do about it.” “We knew we’d be rescued!” the former first lady added. The misadventure followed a whirlwind few days f or t he Biden campaign and the former vice president’s growing band of sup- porters in Virginia that started

friday, when he won the en- dorsement of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). mcAuliffe endorsed Biden on Saturday shortly after Biden’s decisive win in the South Caroli- na primary and appeared by his side Sunday night at a rally in Norfolk. There, Biden fueled specula- tion that mcAuliffe might seek to recapture his old office in 2021, calling him “the once and future governor of Virginia.” Asked about the possibility on monday, mcAuliffe joked that he would return to richmond only

“if they get the elevators working.” Then he added: “I’m all fo- cused on making sure we beat [President] Trump. Let’s get through that, and then we may hear something in November or right after that. We gotta get him out of the White House — ’21 is a long way off. We as Democrats got to prioritize.” mcAuliffe immortalized the elevator moment in a tweet and selfie featuring himself; his wife; Stoney; Khizr Khan, a Gold Star father who spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Conven-

VIRGINIA

Elevator holds up McAuliffe before Biden event

edly shared the news with Nelson, who immediately noted that this Wayne Cook shared her father’s middle name, Demetra. It m ust be him, she knew then, and began to weep. on friday evening as they shared news of their lives, Nelson handed Cook a book she had made. “You Are my Sunshine,” it read on the cover. Inside were the few photos she possessed of the siblings as children, and of ringo and Lady. “That monkey bit me,” Cook exclaimed, and they laughed at the memory. They talked about the abuse and hunger they sur- vived together and that terrible night in 1968 in the Euclid Street attic before the National Guard came to the r escue. As Nelson walked down the corridor to leave the rehab facility about 10 p.m., she turned around to see her brother again. Cook’s chest was heaving, his face caught in a tearful grimace, she said. “You’re coming back again to- morrow, right?” h e asked. [email protected]

Fr om retropolis, a blog about the past, rediscovered, at washingtonpost.com/retropolis.

out. The Strombergs had called the Guard to tell them about the siblings living on Euclid Street, Nelson later learned. The couple brought Nelson to live with them in their Chevy Chase home, while her brother was taken to another home. The siblings who had been each other’s mainstays immediately lost track of each other. Nelson married at 2 0, abandon- ing her maiden name to take her first husband’s name before set- tling into a life as a stay-at-home mother of five and later a model. meanwhile, Cook drifted into homelessness for many years, working odd jobs, before marry- ing and fathering four children, divorcing and meeting his current partner. Their parents now gone and with fewer years ahead of them than behind, sister and brother despaired of ever finding each other again. Then about a year ago, Nelson’s daughter, Ashley Witkamp, made a facebook page for her mother, hoping it would connect Nelson with her brother. Not long after, Cook’s stepdaughter contacted Ashley on the social media platform to see whether Cook and her mother were related. Ashley excit-

inviting her to stay with them sometimes on the weekends. Nelson and Cook were playing toy soldiers in the floor of the house o n Euclid Street as dusk fell on that late April afternoon in 1968 when they heard their m other drop a cast iron skillet in the sink. She rushed over and herded them into t he bathroom. “A mob with burning torches made from clothes wrapped around wooden boards had just set fire to a store. They were coming to our building yelling, ‘Burn, baby, Burn,’” Nelson wrote in an account of what she witnessed published in “The History of the Washington, D.C. LDS Ward,” by Lee H. Burke. Inside, the family’s telephone line had gone dead. As they hud- dled on the f loor, Nelson turned to her brother and taught him how to pray, she r ecounted in the book. Just then they heard footsteps in the hall, she wrote, and then a loud pounding on the door at the top of the attic’s l inoleum stairs. The children froze while their mother went to answer the door. There in full riot gear, gas masks obscuring their faces, were sever- al members of the National Guard urging the family to follow them

as her mother sobbed uncontrol- lably i n the passenger seat. When they arrived at Junior Village, an employee brought the children t o a big, empty room with a desk and chair and instructed Nelson to remove her clothing. They handed her a frayed cotton shift to wear and kept her dress. “Someone less fortunate than you is going to get that,” she recalled being told. She had been holding her brother’s hand tightly when a worker came to take him to the boys’ dorm and she was then shown her spot among the crowded rows of steel bunk beds. Warmth and affection were non- existent. “I cried myself to sleep every night,” Nelson said. After about six months, Nelson and Cook were returned to their mother in the attic apartment. one day, Nelson wandered into the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat- ter-day Saints on nearby 16th Street, where she was approached by an immaculately dressed woman who reminded her of Cinderel- la. The kind woman, Sharon Stromberg, and her husband, Kirk, took an interest in Nelson,

was whisked off to her first stay i n Junior V illage, leaving her mother and brother behind. She remembers trying to touch Jacqueline Kennedy i n 1962 as the first lady handed out lollipops to a throng of children at the over- crowded facility in Southwest Washington. Kennedy’s was among a stream of celebrity visits that masked the reality of Junior Village, where children were routinely raped and drugged before the 13-cottage compound closed in 1973. After a couple of months, social services quickly found Nelson a foster parent, an elderly woman who put soft, clean sheets on Nel- son’s b ed and s oothed h er by playing Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of man’s De- siring” o n the record player. But before long, the woman was carted away on a stretcher, and a social worker showed up to take Nelson to meet her new foster parents. Cook joined his sister after their mother succumbed to her alcoholism again, and it was in that home that the siblings endured their first episodes of abuse. Nelson recalled eagerly stuffing her mouth with too much ice cream, her first experience of the frosty t reat, when her f oster mother knocked her hard on the head. Another time, the woman pulled Nelson into the bathroom by the hair and banged her head on the sink pipes, Nelson recalled, taunt- ing the girl as she tried to escape through the fenced backyard. Her father, who was allowed to talk to her on the p hone but not to visit, sensed his daughter’s trau- ma and soon a worker arrived from social services to return them t o their m other. By then, the family had moved from the basement into the cramped attic room at 1425 Eu- clid, where brother and sister slept with their heads at opposite ends of a twin-size bed. The siblings played indoors after school, communing with their landlord’s menagerie of pets, among them a spider monkey in diapers named ringo and a German shepherd named L ady. one morning, their mother asked Nelson to wear her loveliest dress, a dark frock with a flounce at the bottom, and then piled her and Cook into the landlord’s car while he drove. She did not answer her children’s questions about where they were going. “It’s for the best, Dorothy,” Nel- son recalled the landlord saying

vandalized and looted. And amid
it all — after clinging together
through their mother’s alcohol-
ism and stretches in abusive fos-
ter homes and the notorious city
facility for destitute children
known as Junior Village — Geor-
gette Nelson and Wayne Cook lost
each other.
on friday, after decades apart,
the two siblings — now 62 and 60
— were reunited in monrovia,
C alif., at a rehabilitation facility
where Cook has been recuperat-
ing from sepsis after a staph i nfec-
tion. Nelson, in a soft pink dress
and sweater, spotted her brother
in a wheelchair at the end of the
linoleum corridor, quickening her
pace and beginning to wave as
nurses and residents gathered to
watch their reunion. Cook, a thin
man with soft blue eyes and gray-
ing light-brown hair, held out a
bouquet of daisies and mums for
his sister.
“I love you, Wayne,” Nelson
said, e yes shiny with t ears.
“I love you, too, Georgette,”
Cook said.
He asked her to lean in and
then grabbed her f ace, tilting i t up
to inspect her chin. He nodded
with satisfaction; the old scar was
still there from her childhood fall
down the stairs.
“Yep, you’re my sister,” Cook
teased her, and they hugged each
other tight before beginning an
hours-long session of reminiscing
and catching up.
The siblings’ parents had sepa-
rated when Nelson was 4 and
Cook was 2, Nelson said. Their
father went to live in a men’s
boardinghouse while their moth-
er struggled to hold on to her
children in the sprawling three-
story brick and clapboard home
on Euclid Street. The family first
rented the basement, sleeping to-
gether in one double bed and
bathing in a rusty p ink bathtub.
They were among just a few
white children in their largely Af-
rican American neighborhood,
and Nelson’s c lassmates affection-
ately nicknamed her “Snow
White” because of her dark
bobbed hair and red lips. But the
children thought little of racial
differences, Nelson recalled: “The
only thing we knew is that we
were all poor.”
So poor that Nelson and Cook
frequently resorted to begging a
neighbor for food, Nelson re-
called, u ntil one day that neighbor
contacted social services and she

retropolIs from B1

They lost each other in D.C.’s 1968 riots. Five decades later, they are reunited.

FAmIly PHoto WAsHIngton stAr

leFt: georgette nelson and her brother, Wayne Cook, a t 1 425 euclid st. nW i n the mid-1960s. they lived there with their mother, whose alcoholism led to the children periodically being put in foster care or in Junior Village, a 13-cottage compound where children were routinely raped and drugged. rIgHt: A store at the corner of 14 th and U streets after the 1968 riots, when nelson and Cook’s home was threatened.

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The Washington Post - 03.03.2020

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