The Police Murder of Freddie Gray

April 27, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Freddie Gray, 25 years old, was widely known and liked in his west Baltimore neighborhood as a generous person and a jokester. On the morning of April 12, he was at an intersection near the Gilmor Homes projects chatting with a friend when three cops on bicycles approached. What happened in the following minutes was a crime—a crime of murder by the police.

Even according to the police story, Freddie was doing nothing wrong. They started toward him when Freddie made “eye contact” with them. Eye contact! Just like in slave and old Jim Crow days when simply looking a symbol of white supremacist authority in the eye could get you killed.

Someone on the opposite corner yelled out “Ai yo, here comes Time Out,” and Freddie began to run.

Why would Freddie run? The police later claimed they found a switchblade knife on him—of course that was after they grabbed him. Freddie had no gun on him. The police have not yet claimed to have found anything illegal on him. It’s clear why someone like Freddie might run in that situation—the experience of everybody in that ’hood, from grade school kids to old folks, is that the pigs harass, brutalize, arrest, and do worse to people for nothing. Freddie was Black, and in a poor neighborhood—and “running while Black” in a neighborhood like Freddie’s is deemed by the armed enforcers of this oppressive system to be a cause for “reasonable suspicion.”

The police claim they arrested Freddie Gray “without force or incident.” Eyewitness accounts and videos expose that as a flat-out lie. One person at the scene recalled, “They were taking out their black batons, whatever they are, and hitting him.”

Kevin Moore, who lives in Gilmor Homes, told the Baltimore Sun that he was sleeping when his uncle woke him up shouting, “They’re tazing Freddie!” When he ran out to the street, he saw the cops had handcuffed his friend and had his face down on the ground, with one cop putting his knee on Freddie’s neck and the other bending Freddie’s legs back so that his heels touched his back. “They had him folded up like he was a crab or a piece of origami. He was all bent up.” According to Moore, Freddie was “screaming for his life” and was saying, “I can’t breathe. I need a pump.” Freddie suffered from asthma. But the cops ignored him. (A video narrated by Moore is at the Sun website.)

Another Gilmor Homes witness described what she saw from her window: “They lifted him up by his pants, and he wasn’t responding, and they threw him in that paddy wagon. It wasn’t like they took him out to see what was going on with him... I said, ‘Call the paramedics!’”

The cellphone videos taken by Kevin Moore and another witness show the cops dragging Freddie, who is screaming in pain and clearly has trouble with his legs.

The police claim they arrested Freddie Gray “without force or incident.” As this witness said, “I could see everything. They’re lying. The police are lying.”

According to the official timeline, from about 8:42 am, when Freddie Gray was thrown into the police van and 9:26 am, when the paramedics were called, the van drove around the streets and made several stops. At one stop, the cops put leg shackles on an already-cuffed Freddie, and at another stop they picked up another arrested man. The police say they did not put seat belts on Freddie. The Baltimore police are infamous for their practice of “rough rides”—a method of torture where they place cuffed prisoners in back of police vans and then drive around wildly so that the prisoners are knocked around and hurt. And remember, Freddie’s hands and legs were in shackles.

When the paramedics arrived at the Western District police station, not far from where Freddie was arrested, they found Freddie unconscious. It turns out that he had sustained an extreme injury to his spine—80 percent severed, according to the family attorney. In addition, he had suffered a crushed voice box. The paramedics took Freddie Gray to the Maryland Shock and Trauma Center, where he went into and remained in a coma until he died a week later, on April 19.

The police stalked, chased, brutalized, arrested, and killed Freddie Gray without any justification—other than that he was walking while Black and poor. But then the city officials, police, and the Department of Justice say they’ve got to “investigate” to see what happened, and who is “responsible” for Freddie’s death. That’s bullshit. Whatever happened in those minutes before he was thrown in the van and during that ride, it’s absolutely clear that Freddie Gray died because of the actions of the police and in their hands. Freddie was murdered by the police, no doubt about it.

It’s been two weeks since all this happened and over a week since Freddie’s death—and the city is still “investigating.” (And still almost no information or autopsy report has been released.) We’ve seen where “investigations” of police murder take us—cover-ups like the Department of Justice report on Michael Brown, which exonerated the killer cop Darren Wilson and basically blamed Mike Brown for his own death. (See “DOJ Report: Coverup for the Police Murder of Michael Brown.”) We don’t need investigations—what we need is justice for Freddie Gray.

Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!

 

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