40 new york | march 16–29, 2020

.

MANH AT TAN AVE.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

BLV

D.

ST 110TH S

T.

WEST 114 TH S T.

WEST 120T

H ST.

WEST 121ST

ST.

WEST 119TH

ST.

WEST 116TH

ST.

WEST 118TH

ST.

MORNINGSIDE AVE.

MO

RNI

NGS

IDE

DR

.

At the Two-Six, on December 12, the boy and his uncle sat on one

side of the table, the boy hunched against a wall at the far end with

his winter coat on. Acevedo and his partner, Detective Christopher

French, sat on the other. “You’re not a bad kid,” Acevedo said, at

about 6:35 p.m. “I can see it in you.” A lot of the time, he added, you

can be in big trouble if you’re somewhere with someone who’s

doing something they shouldn’t do—as big as the person doing it.

Acevedo told the boy there were video cameras throughout the

park. He said he already knew what the boy had done and would

be able to tell if he was lying. None of this was true, but in court the

detective testified that bluffing during an interrogation is legal.

The detective asked the boy if his uncle—a diabetic who, in the

videotape, called himself “a very sick man” and had looked after

the boy since 2016, when the boy’s mother died—had taught him

right from wrong. The boy answered yes. He was in the park with

his friends, he said.

What happened next? Acevedo asked. “You have to be honest

with me,” he said, “because this is very serious.”

The friends were a little older, both 14. They approached Tess and

asked for her stuff, the boy said. “She gave it to them. Or, they got

mad. And then ... and then ... She was probably refusing to give it to

them and they got mad and then they probably took it from her.”

“No, no, no,” Acevedo said. “Not ‘probably’ again. I’m asking

questions I already know the

answers to. If you lie, you’re

going to get in serious trouble.”

He mentioned the stabbing.

“I don’t know about stabbing.

I don’t know about stabbing,” the boy said.

“Be honest,” Acevedo insisted.

“I’m being honest. I don’t know about

stabbing.”

Little by little, over about two hours, a

story came out. It was around dinnertime.

The three boys were in the park to rob peo-

ple. They considered and discarded several

targets before settling, finally, on Tess, a small

18-year-old with blue-green hair.

Everything happened very quickly, within

two or three minutes. Tess refused to hand

over her phone. There was a struggle. One of

the older boys held her while the other tried

to grab her belongings, including her phone.

Tess yelled, loudly, “Help me! I’m being

robbed,” and she bit the second boy’s finger, hard, so it bled. This

same boy, the one who was bitten (and who police say robbed

another man at knifepoint that same week), then stabbed Tess with

enough force that the youngest boy, who was standing apart, could

see feathers shooting out of Tess’s down jacket—“I think it was pur-

ple,” he said. After that, the older ones went through her pockets and

then they all ran. At home, the boy walked the dog and watched

videos on YouTube.

The uncle responded with disbelief and something like fury.

This is not like school, where you get suspended for a few days.

“This is your life,” he pointed out. “Do you see what you fucking

got yourself into, ’cause you’re hanging out with the wrong fucking

people instead of bringing your ass home?” And: “I told you about

being a follower! You think I need this shit?” Roosevelt Davis was

47 years old, he said, and for his whole life he had never been in a

police precinct house. “I didn’t raise you to be like this.”

When it was all over, Davis had to explain to his nephew that he

was being taken into custody until the trial. The boy seemed not to

completely understand. Davis, who is a tall man, hugged the boy

hard and long and sobbed with a deep voice. He would come back

when he could, he promised: “As soon as they call me, I’ll be here.”

morningside park, where Tessa Majors allegedly encountered

three 13- and 14-year-old boys and was fatally stabbed in the heart

on the evening of December 11, 2019, has long had a reputation as

a no-man’s-land. It belongs, jurisdictionally, to the City of New

York, but in reality no one cares for it. Thirty skinny, overgrown,

vertical acres, it forms a split-level

boundary between the promonto-

ry where Columbia University and

Barnard College stand, fortress-

like, and the flats of Harlem, its

elegant brownstones mixed with

storefronts and public housing.

Students regard the latitudinal

footpath across 116th Street as the

most expedient way to travel from

the classrooms and dorms behind

the high gates on campus to their

friends and professors living in

Harlem and the booming, fun res-

taurants and bars on Frederick

Douglass Boulevard. (There’s a

shuttle bus, but they say waiting for it is an annoyance.) At 6:43,

Tess had entered the park from the eastern Harlem side; at around

the same time, the boys entered too, by a different entrance. The

wide, tiered, wedding-cake staircase where Tess met the boys

t the 26th precinct, the baby-faced boy had to empty his pockets and hand over his

backpack. He was holding $6 in cash. In the backpack, he had a small collection of school

notebooks, all blank—“You don’t take notes, man?” Officer Randys Ramos-Luna asked him—

and a sheathed knife with a blue handle that he said he was holding for a friend. The boy had

been brought in for trespassing, but Ramos-Luna upgraded the charge to possession of a

weapon. He called the boy’s uncle to come to the station, and Roosevelt Davis said he would

be there when he got off work. ¶ The interrogation took place in a small, windowless room,

large enough for one table and four chairs, and it was conducted by Wilfredo Acevedo, a de-

tective sent from the homicide division of Manhattan North. No one called a lawyer. By the time he appeared in family

court months later, the boy, who is 13 years old, did have a lawyer, from the Legal Aid Society, who kept pointing out

that her client was a child. Repeatedly, she asked Acevedo about a long list of civilian complaints alleged against him:

entering homes without probable cause or a warrant, aggressive language and profanity, withholding evidence, exces-

sive use of force. Acevedo mostly didn’t remember those, he responded coolly. He also saw the child somewhat differ-

ently, as a juvenile charged with felony murder in the stabbing of Barnard student Tessa Majors.

Echoes of the Central Park Five were obvious to e

A

MAP: JASON LEEPHOTOGRAPH, PREVIOUS SPREAD: JEENAH MOON. THIS PAGE: TESSMAJORS.COM

P.S. 180, where

the alleged

attackers went to

school

The vestibule

where the

youngest was

arrested

The steps where

Majors was murdered

Barnard College,

where Tessa Majors

lived

Columbia University

Home of Columbia

president

Lee Bollinger

TRANSMITTED

____ COPY DD AD PD EIC

TRANSMITTED

0620FEA_Majors_lay [Print]_36890197.indd 40 3/13/20 9:09 PM

march 16–29, 2020 | new york 41

everywhere was terrible, the surveillance cameras ancient. Brad

Taylor, an early Harlem gentrifier and architect who is president of

Friends of Morningside Park, has a dream of Shakespeare perfor-

mances on those wedding-cake steps. But he has been frustrated

by a perpetual lack of funds. For years, he says, he had been com-

plaining bitterly about necessary upgrades and fuming about the

park’s status as a poor stepchild to Central and Riverside parks. The

Central Park Conservancy has donations of about $50 million a

year; Friends of Morningside Park, about $30,000.

Around the park, as everywhere in the city, gentrification has

remained a source of tension. (Harlem is “block by block,” gentri-

fiers like to say.) And the new undergraduates who are drawn to

the two schools arrive with the understanding, cultivated in the

long shadow of the Central Park Five and the time of Black Lives

Matter, that references to “muggings,” “thugs,” and “gangs” are

racial stereotyping and not okay. In an email after our conversa-

tion, Quindlen relayed this perspective from her adult son: “In

recent years the message he and his peers had absorbed was that

Morningside Park was on a decided upswing, and that to assume

otherwise was somehow racist.”

But beginning in the spring of 2019, the NYPD noted a surge of

robberies in Morningside Park, 17 compared to seven the year

before, and at the 26th Precinct, police detected a pattern. The

suspects in most instances were young teenagers and children—

just 12, 13, 14 years old—often the same kids over and over. Activists

in Harlem argued with a grim logic that these were the heirs of the

2014 NYPD anti-gang raids on the Grant and Manhattanville

housing projects, in which young men were rousted out of bed by

cops in helmets with nightsticks and more than a hundred indicted;

those young men had younger siblings, the activists said. “Some of

the kids have been arrested 15 or 16 times. They’re not long-term

thinkers. They’re not afraid of consequences. They’ll commit these

crimes in broad daylight,” says Jason Harper, communications

chief at the Two-Six. In April, Bob Lederer, a middle-aged gay-

rights activist, suffered a traumatic brain injury after being beaten

by a group of young teenagers.

The community activists knew what was going on—and, having

watched the neighborhood for decades, understood what kind of

descends steeply from street level into the park at its western-

most edge. In its absence, travelers would have to scale a cliff.

After being stabbed, Tess—bleeding profusely into her

lungs—climbed up these steps, arriving finally at the hushed,

tree-lined corner of Morningside Drive and 116th, diagonally

across the intersection from the Italianate mansion

where Columbia president Lee Bollinger lives. That’s

where she fell, less than half a mile from the dorm

complex she shared with 600 other first-year stu-

dents. If Bollinger, the man who had presided over

the university’s aggressive expansion into Harlem

over the past decade, had looked out his east-facing window at

about seven that night, he would have seen, in the distance,

Long Island and Queens and, just across the park, the butter-

yellow exterior of P.S. 180, where the three young assailants

went to school, its hopeful, hand-painted slogan reading young,

gifted and harlem. He would also have seen Tess’s body just

a few dozen yards from his front door.

Immediately, the murder felt to the community and the city

like a buried memory of an earlier, more violent time. People

growing up in Harlem in the ’60s and ’70s called the neighbor-

hood of the university “up the hill” and their own “down the hill,”

and they rarely if ever traveled the turf in between. Stories were

legion of shootings in the park, corpses discovered, and encamp-

ments of the homeless. The safest course was to bypass it com-

pletely. In the daytime, “you stayed on top of your kids,” says one

longtime Harlem homeowner. “You didn’t want them to pick

up a crack vial or a hypodermic needle. The park was neglected.

People could go do what they wanted to do. That was obvious.”

Anna Quindlen remembers arriving at Barnard in 1970 and

being told, at part of freshman orientation, that should she acci-

dentally miss the subway stop at the front door of campus, she

should stay in the station, turn right around, and take the subway

back downtown and never try to walk home through the park or

Harlem itself. “Honestly, as a Barnard student, I never entered

Morningside Park,” she says, “and I never thought that being

warned against it was in any way notable. From the mists of time,

I can’t completely parse out whether I was naïve or simply stupid,

but the bottom line was: This is not a safe neighborhood. You can’t

walk there. From today’s vantage point, I can see that this was

racial code, but then I thought, Okay.”

Over the decades, the city got safer

and the neighborhood did too. Murder,

robbery, felony assault, and burglary—

all these plummeted between 2000 and

2018. And in 2007 , the gentrification of Harlem began in earnest,
      thanks in part to Columbia’s $6. 3 billion expansion, the Manhat-
      tanville campus—a theater complex, a business school, and a sci-
      ence center with “none of the gates or walls that define traditional
      campuses”—which occupies 17 acres north of Morningside Park.
      The school saw itself, and sold itself, as a coveted entry-point to
      the city—bustling, jostling, diverse, and competitive, with all of
      the conflict pushed out of view. Barnard had already opened
      Cathedral Gardens, a swanky dorm with dishwashers, for 92
      upperclass students on the park’s southeastern corner, and condo
      high-rises sprouted like beanstalks on the periphery. Ninety-nine
      Morningside offers “a final opportunity to own on Morningside
      Park”; 11 Hancock promises terraces and views of “peaceful
      Morningside Park.”
      So a new generation of college students thought the park was
      mostly safe because, mostly, it was. There’s a dog run and a Green-
      market on Saturdays and a new playground near the foot of the
      steps where Tess was stabbed. But the park was not entirely keep-
      ing pace with the gentrification around it. Paths on the upper level
      were narrow and overgrown, their sight lines obscure. Lighting

vious to everyone.

Tessa

Majors

MAP: JASON LEEPHOTOGRAPH, PREVIOUS SPREAD: JEENAH MOON. THIS PAGE: TESSMAJORS.COM

Y ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EIC

TRANSMITTED

________ COPY ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EIC

0620FEA_Majors_lay [Print]_36890197.indd 41 3/13/20 9:09 PM

march16–29, 2020 | newyork 41

everywherewasterrible,thesurveillancecamerasancient.Brad

Taylor,anearlyHarlemgentrifierandarchitect whois presidentof

FriendsofMorningsidePark,hasa dreamofShakespeareperfor-

mancesonthosewedding-cakesteps.Buthehasbeenfrustrated

bya perpetuallackoffunds.Foryears,hesays,hehadbeencom-

plainingbitterlyaboutnecessary upgradesandfumingaboutthe

park’sstatusasa poorstepchildtoCentral andRiversideparks.The

CentralParkConservancyhasdonationsofabout$50milliona

year;FriendsofMorningsidePark,about$30,000.

Aroundthepark,aseverywhereinthecity, gentrificationhas

remaineda sourceoftension.(Harlemis “blockbyblock,” gentri-

fierslike tosay.)Andthenewundergraduateswhoaredrawnto

thetwoschoolsarrivewiththeunderstanding,cultivatedinthe

longshadowoftheCentralParkFiveandthetimeofBlackLives

Matter,that referencesto“muggings,”“thugs,” and“gangs”are

racialstereotypingandnotokay. In anemailafterourconversa-

tion,Quindlenrelayedthisperspectivefromheradultson:“In

recentyearsthemessageheandhispeershadabsorbedwasthat

MorningsideParkwasona decidedupswing,andthat toassume

otherwisewassomehowracist.”

Butbeginninginthespringof2019,theNYPDnoteda surge of

robberiesinMorningsidePark,17 comparedtoseventheyear

before,andat the26thPrecinct,policedetecteda pattern.The

suspectsinmost instanceswereyoungteenagersandchildren—

just12,13,14 yearsold—oftenthesamekidsoverandover. Activists

inHarlemarguedwitha grimlogicthat theseweretheheirsofthe

201 4 NYPDanti-gangraidsontheGrantandManhattanville

housingprojects,inwhichyoungmenwereroustedoutofbedby

copsinhelmetswithnightsticksandmorethana hundredindicted;

thoseyoungmenhadyoungersiblings,theactivistssaid.“Someof

thekidshavebeenarrested 15 or 16 times.They’renotlong-term

thinkers.They’renotafraidofconsequences.They’llcommitthese

crimesinbroaddaylight,” saysJasonHarper,communications

chiefat theTwo-Six.In April,BobLederer,a middle-agedgay-

rightsactivist, suffereda traumaticbraininjury afterbeingbeaten

bya groupofyoungteenagers.

Thecommunity activistsknew what wasgoingon—and,having

watchedtheneighborhoodfordecades,understoodwhat kindof

descends steeply from street level into the park at its western-

most edge. In its absence, travelers would have to scale a cliff.

After being stabbed, Tess—bleeding profusely into her

lungs—climbed up these steps, arriving finally at the hushed,

tree-lined corner of Morningside Drive and 116th, diagonally

across the intersection from the Italianate mansion

whereColumbiapresidentLeeBollingerlives.That

whereshefell,lessthanhalfa milefromthedorm

complexshesharedwith 600 otherfirst-yearstu-

dents.If Bollinger, themanwhohadpresidedover

theuniversity’s aggressiveexpansionintoHarlem

overthepastdecade,hadlookedouthiseast-facingwindowat

aboutseventhat night,hewouldhaveseen,inthedistance,

LongIslandandQueensand,just acrossthepark,thebutter-

yellowexteriorofP.S.180,wherethethreeyoungassailants

wenttoschool,itshopeful,hand-paintedsloganreadingyoung,

giftedandharlem.HewouldalsohaveseenTess’sbodyjust

a fewdozenyardsfromhisfrontdoor.

Immediately,themurderfelttothecommunity andthecity

likea buriedmemory ofanearlier, moreviolenttime.People

growingupinHarleminthe’60sand’70scalledtheneighbor-

hoodof theuniversity“upthehill”andtheirown“downthehill,”

andtheyrarelyif evertraveledtheturf inbetween.Storieswere

legionof shootingsinthepark,corpsesdiscovered,andencamp-

mentsofthehomeless.Thesafest coursewastobypassit com-

pletely.In thedaytime,“youstayedontopofyourkids,” saysone

longtimeHarlemhomeowner. “Youdidn’t wantthemtopick

upa crackvialora hypodermicneedle.Theparkwasneglected.

Peoplecouldgo dowhat they wantedtodo.Thatwasobvious.”

AnnaQuindlenremembersarrivingatBarnardin 1970 and

beingtold,atpart offreshmanorientation,that shouldsheacci-

dentallymissthesubwaystopat thefrontdoorofcampus,she

shouldstay inthestation,turnrightaround,andtake thesubway

backdowntownandnevertry towalkhomethroughtheparkor

Harlemitself. “Honestly,asa Barnardstudent,I neverentered

MorningsidePark,”shesays,“andI neverthoughtthat being

warnedagainstit wasinany way notable.Fromthemists oftime,

I can’t completelyparseoutwhetherI wasnaïveorsimplystupid,

butthebottomlinewas:Thisis nota safeneighborhood.Youcan’t

walkthere.Fromtoday’svantagepoint,I canseethat thiswas

racialcode,butthenI thought,Okay.”

Overthedecades,thecitygotsafer

andtheneighborhooddidtoo.Murder,

robbery, felony assault,andburglary—

alltheseplummetedbetween 2000 and

2018.Andin 2007 , thegentrificationofHarlembeganinearnest,

thanksinparttoColumbia’s $6.3 billionexpansion,theManhat-

tanvillecampus—atheatercomplex, a businessschool,anda sci-

encecenterwith“noneofthegatesorwallsthat definetraditional

campuses”—whichoccupies17 acresnorthofMorningsidePark.

Theschoolsawitself, andsolditself, asa covetedentry-pointto

thecity—bustling,jostling,diverse,andcompetitive,withallof

theconflict pushedoutofview.Barnardhadalreadyopened

CathedralGardens,a swanky dormwithdishwashers,for 92

upperclassstudentsonthepark’s southeasterncorner, andcondo

high-risessproutedlikebeanstalksontheperiphery. Ninety-nine

Morningsideoffers“a finalopportunityto ownon Morningside

Park”;11 Hancockpromisesterracesandviewsof “peaceful

MorningsidePark.”

Soa newgenerationofcollege studentsthoughttheparkwas

mostlysafebecause,mostly,it was.There’sa dogrunanda Green-

marketonSaturdaysanda newplaygroundnearthefootofthe

stepswhereTesswasstabbed.Buttheparkwasnotentirelykeep-

ingpacewiththegentrificationaroundit.Pathsontheupperlevel

werenarrowandovergrown,theirsightlinesobscure.Lighting

toeveryone.

Tessa

Majors

PHOTOGRAPH, PREVIOUS SPREAD: JEENAH MOON. THIS PAGE: TESSMAJORS.COM