92 new york | march 16–29, 2020warfare between two local gangs, but as the
neighborhood has gentrified, P.S. 180 has
changed, too; it is now that precious com-
modity, a “hot” public school. In 2015, it
introduced a Spanish-language-immersion
program, attracting the fashion designers,
educators, salespeople, and genomics
experts who had recently moved to Harlem.
By last year, even families zoned for the
school were put on waiting lists; annual
PTA fund-raising soared to $100,000 from
$40,000 in four years.
But in part because of the rate of neigh-
borhood change, the middle school at P.S.
180 remained a more challenging place. The
savvy, ambitious parents who are transform-
ing the school in its lower grades are also
ambitious for their kids. By the third and
fourth grade, the high-achieving kids at P.S.
180 are testing out to gifted-and- talented
programs. By sixth, all the best students
have left for the screened schools in the
zone: Booker T., Columbia Secondary, or
Westside Collaborative. So while the ele-
mentary school at P.S. 180 is overflowing,
the middle school is moribund, “an add-on,”
says Genisha Metcalf, who is the head of the
PTA. It has a lot of empty seats, making it a
convenient place for the Department of
Education to dump troubled kids with
nowhere to go.
The killing, and the coverage of the kill-
ing, were so awful that parents immediately
began talking about transferring their kids
out. Metcalf was furious that a police car
was suddenly parked outside the school
every day and at the implication that some-
how the school culture was to blame. “You
didn’t put the bake-sale table up, so it’s on
you,” is how she puts it. The problem wasn’t
the school; it was the whole inequitable sys-
tem that sorts and ranks kids and fails to
support, or even sometimes to notice, the
kids who need the most help, those who are
homeless, or live in foster care, who have
behavioral or learning or psychological
problems. (In the upcoming trials, we will
see all this, she promised.) Why aren’t pro-
grams in the neighborhood talking to one
another—the Police Athletic League, and
the library, and the churches, and the uni-
versity—creating an easy-access network of
places where kids feel welcome? On the
night of December 11, Metcalf says, “things
were open! It wasn’t 11 p.m. We’re like,
‘School’s out at 2:30, good luck, we’ll see you
at 8 a.m., maybe.’ ”
After the arrests, she says, “there wasn’t
a groundswell. No one was saying, ‘This is
our community. These are our kids. We’ve
got this.’ ” Instead, the response was self-
protective and fragmented. In the weeks
before Christmas, the DOE held a meeting
for concerned parents at the school, but it
didn’t include the NYPD, Columbia, orBarnard, and the DOE point person turned
out to be David Hay, who shortly thereafter
was arrested on federal child-pornography
charges. Columbia and Barnard hold pro-
grams in the school, but they are piecemeal.
There’s so little unity or visionary leader-
ship in Harlem, Metcalf says. “But if we
don’t get past this awkward silence and talk
about the elephant in the room, which is
gentrification, and keep on saying, ‘I’m
just over here eating my avocado toast on
Frederick Douglass Boulevard,’ we’ll never
get anywhere.”
Metcalf keeps a picture on her phone. It’s
a f lyer, produced by the Guardian Angels,
the vigilante law-enforcement group, that
was plastered all over the signposts in Har-
lem in the weeks before Christmas, includ-
ing right outside the school. It shows a
photo of one of the 14-year-old boys, the
result of an unusual decision by the NYPD
to publicize the face of a juvenile when its
search for him stalled. “Teen suspect on the
loose,” it said, using words like “hunt” and
“vicious.” “The lens when you’re a black
mother with a black child in your commu-
nity, you’re enraged,” Metcalf told me. “I
can tell you I know ten young men who
look like this young man.” Fathers, she
added, took the poster campaign especially
hard. “I saw them taking the posters down
and ripping them up,” she says, an emo-
tional response to this face that might have
been their own 20 years ago. And then
there were the parents of older children
who were friends with these kids, who
might have invited them home. What con-
versation were they supposed to have?
Their kids hear the word killer and wonder,
“What does that say about me?”Up at barnard, grief settled on the
campus like a fog. Every student
was told she could go home for
break early, or request extensions
on papers or exams, no questions asked.
The college kept the counseling center open
and added extra staff.
Some privately wondered why this grief
was so different, larger than that following
other tragic deaths of young people. “While
any murder is shocking,” one professor
reflected, “I was a little bit surprised at how
shocking people found this one. I mean, this
is a big city. These things happen.” Around
the time of Tessa’s murder, two other Colum-
bia students died, and these were met with
the usual administration condolences and
list of campus resources: a hotline, a chap-
lain, the open hours of psych services. “It’s
pretty desensitizing. It’s terrible,” says one
Columbia junior, who reflects on the inad-
equate job the university does of dealing
with depression and suicide, which (unlike
park murders) are widespread. When hegets one of these emails, “I look to see if I
knew the person. It’s very strange, but on
some level it’s like, Shit, another one of those.
Another one bites the dust.”
But the murder of Tessa Majors was dif-
ferent. Parents urged their daughters to
come home as soon as they could—“They
needed that, too,” Paulette Arnold
observes—but the daughters were torn,
because out in the regular world, no one
could possibly understand what they were
going through, the sense (which in some
weird way was amazing) that everyone
knew everyone else’s thoughts, that you
could spy another Barnard student cross-
ing the street, lock eyes, and understand.
One first-year described looking around
her dorm room where Tess had very
recently been and resting her gaze on all
the objects her living body had so recently
physically touched—a bed, a bookshelf—
and nearly having a panic attack. Lots of
young women were having nightmares: “I
was walking down Broadway in broad day-
light and feeling threatened by everything
and scared.”
At sunset on December 15, Barnard and
Columbia students flowed eastward to the
steps in Morningside Park, some holding
candles, for a vigil in Tess’s memory. Emo-
tions were running high, though some stu-
dents dared to complain in low voices about
the study time they were sacrificing to
attend the event while friends shushed
them angrily. It was creepy and morbid to
be on the steps after dark, not soothing or
uplifting. And upon arriving at the park, the
grieving students found the gathering of
hundreds had the tone more of a political
rally than of a commemoration: The whole
thing felt off. Neither Bollinger nor Beilock
was present but sent surrogates instead.
Students stood around as one local politi-
cian after another took hold of the mic and
harped on a pet cause of or solution to the
horrifying violence that had occurred
where they stood. There were calls for more
police, better police, different police, espe-
cially police who patrol on foot and know
the neighborhood; for more sophisticated
surveillance cameras; for after-school pro-
grams for youth and social workers in
schools and good summer jobs. City Coun-
cilmember Ydanis Rodríguez, who repre-
sents a district far to the north of where
everyone stood, called out elite institutions
for not doing enough to support the neigh-
borhoods they inhabit. Reporters were hov-
ering everywhere, remembers Paulette
Arnold, badgering students, “seeking out
the ones who looked more distraught. My
friends and I were crying, we were pulling
tissues out of our bag, and I heard someone
say, ‘Ooh, that’s a good shot!’ ” Hecklers
interrupted at every point.TRANSMITTED________ COPY ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EICTRANSMITTED0620FEA_Majors_lay [Print]_36890197.indd 92 3/13/20 9:09 PM92 new york | march 16–29, 2020
warfare between two local gangs, but as the
neighborhood has gentrified, P.S. 180 has
changed, too; it is now that precious com-
modity, a “hot” public school. In 2015, it
introduced a Spanish-language-immersion
program, attracting the fashion designers,
educators, salespeople, and genomics
experts who had recently moved to Harlem.
By last year, even families zoned for the
school were put on waiting lists; annual
PTA fund-raising soared to $100,000 from
$40,000 in four years.
But in part because of the rate of neigh-
borhood change, the middle school at P.S.
180 remained a more challenging place. The
savvy, ambitious parents who are transform-
ing the school in its lower gradesare also
ambitious for their kids. By the third and
fourth grade, the high-achieving kids at P.S.
180 are testing out to gifted-and-talented
programs. By sixth, all the best students
have left for the screened schools in the
zone: Booker T., Columbia Secondary, or
Westside Collaborative. So whilethe ele-
mentary school at P.S. 180 is overflowing,
the middle school is moribund, “an add-on,”
says Genisha Metcalf, who is the head of the
PTA. It has a lot of empty seats, making it a
convenient place for the Department of
Education to dump troubled kids with
nowhere to go.
The killing, and the coverage ofthe kill-
ing, were so awful that parents immediately
began talking about transferring their kids
out. Metcalf was furious that a police car
was suddenly parked outside the school
every day and at the implication that some-
how the school culture was to blame. “You
didn’t put the bake-sale table up, so it’s on
you,” is how she puts it. The problem wasn’t
the school; it was the whole inequitable sys-
tem that sorts and ranks kids and fails to
support, or even sometimes to notice, the
kids who need the most help, thosewho are
homeless, or live in foster care, who have
behavioral or learning or psychological
problems. (In the upcoming trials, we will
see all this, she promised.) Why aren’t pro-
grams in the neighborhood talking to one
another—the Police Athletic League, and
the library, and the churches, andthe uni-
versity—creating an easy-access network of
places where kids feel welcome?On the
night of December 11, Metcalf says, “things
were open! It wasn’t 11 p.m. We’re like,
‘School’s out at 2:30, good luck, we’ll see you
at 8 a.m., maybe.’ ”
After the arrests, she says, “there wasn’t
a groundswell. No one was saying, ‘This is
our community. These are our kids. We’ve
got this.’ ” Instead, the response was self-
protective and fragmented. In the weeks
before Christmas, the DOE held a meeting
for concerned parents at the school, but it
didn’t include the NYPD, Columbia, or
Barnard, and the DOE point person turned
out to be David Hay, who shortly thereafter
was arrested on federal child-pornography
charges. Columbia and Barnard hold pro-
grams in the school, but they are piecemeal.
There’s so little unity or visionary leader-
ship in Harlem, Metcalf says. “But if we
don’t get past this awkward silence and talk
about the elephant in the room, which is
gentrification, and keep on saying, ‘I’m
just over here eating my avocado toast on
Frederick Douglass Boulevard,’ we’ll never
get anywhere.”
Metcalf keeps a picture on her phone. It’s
a f lyer, produced by the GuardianAngels,
the vigilante law-enforcement group, that
was plastered all over the signposts in Har-
lem in the weeks before Christmas, includ-
ing right outside the school. It shows a
photo of one of the 14-year-old boys, the
result of an unusual decision by the NYPD
to publicize the face of a juvenile when its
search for him stalled. “Teen suspect on the
loose,” it said, using words like “hunt” and
“vicious.” “The lens when you’rea black
mother with a black child in your commu-
nity, you’re enraged,” Metcalf told me. “I
can tell you I know ten young men who
look like this young man.” Fathers, she
added, took the poster campaign especially
hard. “I saw them taking the posters down
and ripping them up,” she says, an emo-
tional response to this face that might have
been their own 20 years ago. And then
there were the parents of older children
who were friends with these kids, who
might have invited them home. What con-
versation were they supposed to have?
Their kids hear the word killer andwonder,
“What does that say about me?”Up at barnard, grief settled on the
campus like a fog. Everystudent
was told she could go home for
break early, or request extensions
on papers or exams, no questions asked.
The college kept the counseling center open
and added extra staff.
Some privately wondered why this grief
was so different, larger than that following
other tragic deaths of young people. “While
any murder is shocking,” one professor
reflected, “I was a little bit surprised at how
shocking people found this one. I mean, this
is a big city. These things happen.”Around
the time of Tessa’s murder, two other Colum-
bia students died, and these were met with
the usual administration condolences and
list of campus resources: a hotline,a chap-
lain, the open hours of psych services. “It’s
pretty desensitizing. It’s terrible,” says one
Columbia junior, who reflects on the inad-
equate job the university does ofdealing
with depression and suicide, which (unlike
park murders) are widespread. When hegets one of these emails, “I look to see if I
knew the person. It’s very strange, but on
some level it’s like, Shit, another one of those.
Another one bites the dust.”
But the murder of Tessa Majors was dif-
ferent. Parents urged their daughters to
come home as soon as they could—“They
needed that, too,” Paulette Arnold
observes—but the daughters were torn,
because out in the regular world, no one
could possibly understand what they were
going through, the sense (which in some
weird way was amazing) that everyone
knew everyone else’s thoughts, that you
could spy another Barnard student cross-
ing the street, lock eyes, and understand.
One first-year described lookingaround
her dorm room where Tess had very
recently been and resting her gaze on all
the objects her living body had so recently
physically touched—a bed, a bookshelf—
and nearly having a panic attack.Lots of
young women were having nightmares: “I
was walking down Broadway in broad day-
light and feeling threatened by everything
and scared.”
At sunset on December 15, Barnard and
Columbia students flowed eastward to the
steps in Morningside Park, someholding
candles, for a vigil in Tess’s memory. Emo-
tions were running high, though some stu-
dents dared to complain in low voices about
the study time they were sacrificing to
attend the event while friends shushed
them angrily. It was creepy and morbid to
be on the steps after dark, not soothing or
uplifting. And upon arriving at the park, the
grieving students found the gathering of
hundreds had the tone more of a political
rally than of a commemoration: The whole
thing felt off. Neither Bollinger norBeilock
was present but sent surrogates instead.
Students stood around as one local politi-
cian after another took hold of the mic and
harped on a pet cause of or solution to the
horrifying violence that had occurred
where they stood. There were calls for more
police, better police, different police, espe-
cially police who patrol on foot and know
the neighborhood; for more sophisticated
surveillance cameras; for after-school pro-
grams for youth and social workers in
schools and good summer jobs. City Coun-
cilmember Ydanis Rodríguez, who repre-
sents a district far to the north of where
everyone stood, called out elite institutions
for not doing enough to support the neigh-
borhoods they inhabit. Reporters were hov-
ering everywhere, remembers Paulette
Arnold, badgering students, “seeking out
the ones who looked more distraught. My
friends and I were crying, we were pulling
tissues out of our bag, and I heard someone
say, ‘Ooh, that’s a good shot!’ ” Hecklers
interrupted at every point.