When Fernando Bermudez, who was wrongfully convicted of a 1991 Greenwich Village killing, was found guilty of murder in 1992, he couldn’t believe his ears.

“I was wavering between shock and disbelief,” said Bermudez, 48, who spent 18 years in prison before being exonerated in November 2009.

The exoneration set off a years-long legal battle, with two lawsuits, in an attempt to receive compensation for the time Bermudez lost. This month, Bermudez is set to receive a $7 million after he agreed to a settlement with New York City three months ago. The other suit, which was against New York state, was settled in 2014 for $4.75 million.

Bermudez’s exoneration is part of a trend of increasing exonerations. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there was a record 166 exonerations in 2016, compared to 98 in 2013. In 1992, the year Bermudez was convicted, there was a total of just 35 exonerations. Since 1989, there have been more than 2,000 people exonerated – at least 20 of whom were on death row at the time of their exoneration.

Since his release in 2009 after the harrowing experience of spending nearly two decades trying to prove his innocence, Bermudez has become a public speaker who travels the world, giving lectures and advocating for the wrongfully convicted.

Paul Cates, a spokesman for the Innocence Project, said there are a number of factors which result in wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project, which advocates for criminal justice reform and helps with convicts appeal their sentences, worked on Bermudez’s case in the years before his exoneration.

“The leading (factor) is mistaken identification and that occurs in approximately 70 percent of the cases,” Cates said. “That was a factor in Fernando’s case.”

Lawyers for Bermudez contended that police made numerous blunders during the interrogation process that led to five witnesses identifying Bermudez as the killer at trial. One of those blunders in Bermudez’s case was allowing the witness to look at the lineup as a group, which could allow witnesses to influence one another.

“Certainly it was not following best practices for making an identification,” Cates said.

Other factors in wrongful convictions include invalidated or improper science in about 50 percent of the cases and false confessions in roughly 30 percent of the cases, he said.

“The things that we can’t really quantify are prosecutorial misconduct, government misconduct – whether by a police lab or police themselves and inadequate criminal defense lawyers,” Cates said.

Bermudez, the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, grew up near the border between the Inwood and Washington Heights neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan. He could never have predicted how his life would change when he was arrested on suspicion of murdering 16-year-old Raymond Blount near Union Square Park in Greenwich Village in August 1991.

“That was the happiest point in my life at that time because I was set to enroll in college and I had actually taken a placement test the morning of Aug. 3rd, 1991,” Bermudez said. “Unbeknownst to myself when I went out on Aug. 4 that night, there had been a shooting.

Officers in unmarked cars came to arrest him on Aug. 6, 1991, two days after the shooting.

“We were just shocked when the cops came,” Bermudez said. “We didn’t know what I was being arrested for –- I was dumbfounded.”

Prior to Bermudez’s arrest, police spoke with four witnesses. They were shown a lineup of Latino men with criminal records – one of them was Bermudez, who had faced two drug-related charges in the past.

During an hours long interrogation at NYPD’s 6th Precinct in Greenwich Village, Bermudez said he insisted over and over that he did not know any of the people involved and that he was nowhere near Greenwich Village at the time of the murder. As the interrogation wrapped up, police dropped the bombshell: Witnesses identified Bermudez as the shooter out of a lineup and he would be charged with murder.

After his interrogation, Bermudez was sent to Riker’s Island to await trial. In February 1992, with five witnesses testifying that Bermudez was the shooter, he was found guilty of murder in the second degree. He was sentenced to 23 years to life.

That began a nearly two-decade long quest to prove his innocence. From the moment of his arrest until his conviction was thrown out, Bermudez’s story had been consistent: he didn’t know the people involved and he was elsewhere when the shooting occurred.

According to court records, in 1993, the witnesses recanted their testimony. But judges during the appeals process gave little weight to the recantations, arguing that the trial testimony was more reliable.

Bermudez, who got married and became a father, tried to adjust to his new reality in prison.

“When you’re stuck in a situation where you’re stuck in a six by nine cell, and you’re surrounded by horrible things happening, you have to find a way to live and survive,” Bermudez said. “I found it through my family.”

Bermudez’s wife, Crystal, first saw the case on television in 1992. She wrote to him and soon became convinced of his innocence, she said. She began writing to him regularly and they married soon after. For more than a decade, she traveled back and forth from her home, which was at various points in Oklahoma, Connecticut or New York, for conjugal visits with her husband.

In November 2009, after eleven appeals in which lawyers for Bermudez attempted to argue that there were procedural errors, like the group mugshot viewing, that resulted in a misidentification, Justice John Cataldo of Manhattan Supreme Court not only overturned Bermudez’s conviction but also dismissed the charges against him.

“I find no credible evidence connects Fernando Bermudez to the homicide of Mr. Blount,” Cataldo wrote in a 79-page opinion. “All of the people’s trial evidence has been discredited: the false testimony of Efraim Lopez and the recanted identifications of strangers. I find, by clear and convincing evidence, that Fernando Bermudez has demonstrated he is innocent of this crime.”

The ruling felt cathartic, Bermudez said.

“I was able to stand proud in a certain way that I hadn’t been able to before that,” he said. “I just felt relieved.”

Bermudez and his wife recalled with emotion, Bermudez’s joy on his first day of freedom. In the hours after his release from Sing Sing prison in western New York, Bermudez was treated to a hero’s welcome in Washington Heights. Dominican residents near Bermudez’s father’s apartment banged on pots and pans and shouted in support, Crystal Bermudez said.

“It was like a magical time,” she said.

But just a few days later, Bermudez began displaying have the first signs of trauma.

“I was having palpitations, night sweats, I was pacing my room,” Bermudez said. “I was still washing my underwear in the shower, the way I did in prison. I was angry. I was crying unexpectedly.”

Bermudez was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He takes medication and receives counseling to treat his PTSD.

“New York state released me out without any psychological counseling, assistance, address, social services in general,” Bermudez said. “They gave me no help.”

In 2010, Bermudez began his effort to seek compensation for the years he spent in prison. The Innocence project said compensation is important as it acknowledges the mistake that was made and addresses the difficulty of returning to society for many wrongfully convicted people after spending many years in prison. According to the Innocence Project, exonerees serve an average of 14 years in prison before their release.

After winning his $4.75 million settlement from the state, Bermudez purchased a seven-bedroom home which sits on 2.2 acres in a suburban part of North Carolina. Bermudez cited the desire to extend his money as far as he could by moving away from New York to a low-cost area.

These days, Bermudez still struggles with PTSD. He gets claustrophobic in small rooms and can suffer from debilitating panic attacks. But he has found meaning in sharing story. He speaks proudly about past lecture tours in France, Japan and Germany, and he hopes to finish his book soon.

“Every day I wake up and I try to be grateful,” he said. “I’m not going to give up on my hopes and dreams.”

The post Wrongly convicted getting a second chance at life appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

As pedestrians and cyclists traverse the roughly one-mile long pathway of the George Washington Bridge, they look over the breathtaking view of high-rise buildings on either side and the Hudson River down below. But at various points along the guardrail, blue signs with bold white lettering for suicide hotlines draw attention to a disturbing part of the bridge’s recent history: the roughly 100 people who have jumped to their deaths during the past seven years.

Suicides have been a fixture at the George Washington Bridge since the high-profile death of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi in 2010. After 2011, when three people died, the loss of life along the pathway spiked dramatically.

Last year, 12 people jumped to their deaths from the bridge, along with 70 people who were stopped in the middle of an attempted jump. There were 18 people who died at the bridge each year in 2014 and 2015.

The bridge, which connects Washington Heights, Manhattan on one side and Fort Lee, New Jersey on the other, sees a suicide attempt on average every three to four days. The bridge is operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

For years, researchers have argued in favor of installing barriers or other obstructions at high-profile sites. After almost a decade of consideration, construction began this month on a suicide prevention net at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, which has had more than 1,500 deaths since it was built around 80 years ago.

Since many suicides are the result of a temporary period of disordered thinking, restricting access to a means of suicide often results in less loss of life, said suicide prevention expert Lisa Firestone.

“It’s a universal population-based public health approach,” Firestone said. “For instance, when they want to reduce violence one of the things they do is in areas where there’s a lot of violence, they put in speed bumps so people can’t get away quickly. Now, it doesn’t reduce people’s violence potential at all but it does stop the problem.”

Bridge barriers serve a similar function for reducing suicide, Firestone said.

“They don’t make people less suicidal but they do make it so that, in that impulsive moment when someone is thinking of taking their life, it’s not easily accessible,” she said.

Peer-reviewed studies appear to support the efficacy of bridge barriers. According to a 2007 study in The British Journal of Psychology, the installation of barriers at the Clifton suspension bridge did not result in additional suicides at other nearby bridges.

Most suicidal states are temporary and treatable and around 90 percent of people who attempt suicide will go on without any further attempts, Firestone said. Decreasing access to firearms and setting daily purchase limits on the amounts of certain over-the-counter drugs has also been linked to a decrease in suicides.

While Port Authority officials have taken some measures that suicide researchers have urged – like posting signs urging suicidal people to call a crisis hotline and placing phones along the pathway – Firestone insists those actions aren’t enough.

The George Washington Bridge, which connects Washington Heights, Manhattan with Fort Lee, New Jersey has been the site of scores of suicides in recent years. Photo by Razi Syed.

Over the past five months, two claims have been filed against the Port Authority which decry the lack of barriers at the George Washington Bridge.

One claim was filed on Dec. 16 by the Vera Lomtevas, whose 17-year-old son, Daniel, jumped off the George Washington early morning on Oct. 5, 2016.

According to court records, Lomtevas slipped out of his Dyker Heights home around 4 a.m. Minutes later, he hailed an Uber to take him 2111 86th St., Brooklyn and boarded the D train towards Manhattan.

At 7:16 a.m., according to photo metadata, Lomtevas took a picture looking over the Hudson around the start of the southern bridge pathway. By 7:38 a.m. his unconscious body was brought to New York-Presbyterian hospital. He was pronounced dead 57 minutes after his arrival at the hospital.

According to Peter Lomtevas, he was told a Port Authority officer had grabbed a hold of Lomtevas as he attempted to jump and that Lomtevas wriggled himself free and went over the railing. He claims the Port Authority hasn’t made the officer available to speak with him in the six months since his son’s death.

Port Authority spokesman Scott Ladd declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

In her complaint, Vera Lomtevas said that the New York Police Department had been called to the family home and arrived around 6 a.m., more than an hour before Lomtevas jumped. Vera Lomtevas said that using the “Find My iPhone” app, the family was able to trace her son’s movements as he made his way to the George Washington Bridge, and that family members repeatedly urged police to stop Lomtevas. They were allegedly told by officers not to worry and that Lomtevas would be stopped. Despite those assurances, NYPD and the Port Authority allowed Lomtevas to walk on the ascending walkway and halfway across the span of the southern pedestrian pathway without being challenged in any way, the complaint contends.

NYPD failed to respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

According to a copy of his autopsy report, Lomtevas died of blunt force trauma to his torso, head and neck. The lungs were reportedly normal, without much water inside them, suggesting he died on impact before his reflex to inhale kicked in.

Lomtevas had always been a happy, easy-going and charming young man, according to his family. But the summer before his first year of college his demeanor began to change – which they only noticed looking in retrospect. During that summer, Lomtevas attempted suicide once in August, roughly six weeks prior to his death on Oct. 5 at the George Washington Bridge.

Lomtevas grew up in Ozone Park, Queens and Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. He attended Fort Hamilton High School, where he was in the honor society, and had just started his first semester at Brooklyn College at the time of his death.

In a photo that ran in press reports of his death, Lomtevas is wearing black-rimmed glasses and a blue graduation gown, draped with a stole bearing the National Honor Society insignia.

“We knew Daniel to be like this all of his life,” Peter Lomtevas said, motioning to a photograph of Lomtevas with a bright smile. “This is a kid who graduated high school with a 90 percent average. Witty, funny and an incredibly talented writer. And literally, overnight, he became stone-faced. Whatever came over him, came over him incredibly swiftly.”

During his first suicide attempt, Lomtevas arrived at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge early morning on Aug. 22 and climbed over the guardrail onto an engineering walkway. Once there, he called 911 pleading for help. After his rescue, Lomtevas admitted to police that he had attempted suicide and that a note would be found at his home.

In his August suicide note, Lomtevas wrote that he had felt suicidal for years and that he didn’t believe mental health could be treated effectively yet.

“We’ll all be forgotten someday and I prefer it sooner than later,” he wrote.

A second claim, which was filed by Bay Ridge resident Eugena Perlov and her daughter Diana, was filed on Jan. 26 and contends that the suicide of their husband and father, Vladimir Perlov, was foreseeable to the Port Authority, given the large number of suicides in recent years, and that the Port Authority has not taken meaningful steps to address the issue.

On the morning of Jan. 28, 2016, according to the complaint, Perlov drove on to the George Washington Bridge and pulled over, got out of his car and jumped from the north walkway. The impact of the fall caused severe damage to his torso and he died of his injuries at New York-Presbyterian/Allen Hospital.

In the years leading up to Perlov’s death, the Port Authority, the complaint states, “knew of the long history of jumping suicides from the walkways of the George Washington Bridge and the palpable danger the bridge presents to vulnerable individuals invited to use the bridge should the defendant fail to take remedial measures, including the implementation of suicide prevention barriers.”

In 2014, as part of a plan to replace the suspension ropes on the bridge, the Port Authority approved up to $47 million to build a barrier along the walkway.

Vera Lomtevas scoffed at the timeline the Port Authority has set for the construction of its barrier, which isn’t set to be completed until 2024.

“How many more people are going to die in that time?” she asked.

Firestone also believes the timeline is too slow.

“If a study came out that said 18 people were going to die on the bridge next year because of a mechanical issue, they’d shut it down and fix it,” Firestone said, quoting a suicide prevention advocate and documentary filmmaker from a New York Times report on the George Washington Bridge.

And while Firestone acknowledges that there are engineering hurdles that can take time to overcome, she questions why there hasn’t been any temporary fencing in the meantime. A chain-link fence had previously been placed on three bridges around Cornell University as a temporary barrier after several student suicides.

With a national suicide rate that has climbed 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, Firestone said the need for suicide barriers has become urgent.

“When you put up barriers, you say to people, ‘Your life matters,’” she said. “That’s important because one of things that happens with suicidal people is they feel they’re a burden, that people don’t care, would be better off without them.”

Six months after their son’s death, Vera and Peter Lomtevas continue to wonder what led their son to feel he had no other choice. Based on medical research, Peter Lomtevas theorizes that a gene, SKA2, which influences how the brain responds to stress, may have contributed. Or, perhaps, that the antidepressant and antianxiety drugs, duloxetine and clonazepam, Lomtevas was prescribed around a week before his death could have driven him over the edge. But there is no definitive answer.

“We still don’t know what it is,” Peter Lomtevas said. “And without that little barrier, a person’s a goner. Without a net, a gate or a fence – that’s it. Finito.”

The post George Washington Bridge haunted by suicides appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Around 6 p.m. on a breezy overcast Saturday evening, Jose Ramirez was getting ready to pick up the day’s heroin after several hours of panhandling in Washington Heights.

“Sometimes it take five minutes, sometimes it takes 45 minutes,” Ramirez said, explaining how long it takes to get the $30 to $40 for each day’s supply of drugs and food. “Sometimes it takes two hours.”

Ramirez, 36, is one of the several thousand homeless New Yorkers who have ruled out spending nights in the city’s shelters, preferring instead to take their chances on the streets and subways. The unsheltered homeless struggle with substance abuse issues and mental health issues , said Isaac McGinn, spokesman for the Homeless Services department.

McGinn said these issues make street homeless a uniquely challenging group to get off the street.

Beginning in 2016, the government of Mayor Bill de Blasio started Home-Stat, a program intended to provide daily outreach to street homeless and develop individualized plans for their eventual movement to a shelter or housing, said McGinn.

“It can take anywhere from one dozen to more than two hundred contacts to bring street homeless New Yorkers indoors,” he said.

Around 690 New Yorkers were helped off the street from March to October 2016.

Under Home-Stat, McGinn said, the city doubled the number of city outreach workers from 191 to 387. The outreach workers partner with existing homeless shelters and identify individuals for placement into drug rehabs, mental health facilities or explore possible transitional housing opportunities. Any homeless who appear to be a threat to themselves or others would be hospitalized.

But accepting the outreach efforts is voluntary and the homeless can’t be forced to utilize services or stay in a shelter, McGuinn said. Despite the city’s efforts, some of the street homeless are reluctant to move into shelters, citing safety and sanitary conditions, among other issues the facilities sometimes have.

“People get into fights in the shelters,” Ramirez said, “You never know what can happen to you.”

Instead, Ramirez spends each night in a sleeping bag underneath trees and other foliage in a closed-off area beside the Trans-Manhattan Expressway.

According to the New York Department of Homeless Services, the city’s homeless population has continued to rise over the past decade. In January 2017, more than 62,000 people slept in homeless shelters – 24,000 more than the roughly 38,000 people who were housed in shelters at the end of 2010. The numbers of homeless are now at the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In addition to the sheltered population, around 2,800 people, like Ramirez, sleep on the street each night, McGinn said.

Ramirez, who was born in Puerto Rico and settled in the Bronx with his mother when he was 15, has been living on the streets for seven years. During that time, day-to-day life has been a battle for survival and a focused effort to find funds for the day’s heroin to keep withdrawal symptoms at bay.

Symptoms of heroin withdrawal include muscle aches, nausea, sneezing, cold sweats and anxiety.

“Every time I wake up, I’m just thinking about getting $20 to get straight,” said Ramirez, while walking along Highbridge Park in black sweatpants and a navy blue raincoat. “Without the heroin, when you be a junkie, you can’t move. You don’t want to talk to people, you don’t want to do nothing.”

Ramirez said he started selling drugs when he was 17. By 19, he was using regularly.

“I started smoking weed. I started hanging out. Start working, making a little bit of money, and I ended with the wrong people – started selling drugs,” he said. “I was selling cocaine, then I started sniffing it, hanging out. Then I started selling dope, bagging it up – I caught a habit. I couldn’t get straight. Then the dope I was getting was garbage. I couldn’t get high so I started shooting.”

As Ramirez spoke, he stopped often to recall details and at times, struggled to articulate a timeline of events.

According to Ramirez, his mother passed away in 2010. Unable to make the rent payments from the apartment and trying to sustain a heroin addiction, Ramirez reluctantly went out to Washington Heights and found himself a place among the winding expressways to set himself up.

He chose to stay in Washington Heights, rather than the Bronx, where he had been living with his mother for around 14 years.

“This is where I used to come to cop and where I had all my friends,” he said.

Ramirez recalled how he felt the first time he had to panhandle to support himself.

“There was my friend – I was sick so I didn’t have no money – but he only had $10 and he said, ‘Yo, I’m going to go get straight,’” Ramirez said.

“I’d be like, ‘Yo, can you help me out today?’” Ramirez remembered. His friend suggested he grab a sign and panhandle next to the traffic. Ramirez countered that he was “jones,” or in pain from drug withdrawal, and passersby wouldn’t give him money.

Eventually, Ramirez said he was in too much pain and did what he had to do. He grabbed a sign and planted himself along the entrance to the Trans-Manhattan Expressway, near 179th Street. After around 40 minutes, he had collected $20 and purchased two bags of heroin. Since that day in 2009, Ramirez said panhandling has been the primary way of supporting himself.

Homeless panhandlers in Washington Heights is a familiar sight to residents.

Willie Blain, 57, has lived on the Washington Heights streets since 1989. He panhandles there to buy drugs.

Willie Blain, 57, stands alongside the Trans-Manhattan Expressway near his encampment in Washington Heights. Blain is among several thousand of New York’s homeless population that choose to live on the streets instead of entering the shelter system. Photo by Razi Syed.

He spoke quickly and confidently, with a rapid-fire, staccato cadence, but occasionally mumbled and veered fluidly from topic to topic. Blain said he struggled with schizophrenia.

“I always had been in the streets – wintertime, I was in the streets; summertime, I was in the streets,” he said. “Always in Washington Heights – these are like my stomping grounds.”

Alongside the Trans-Manhattan Expressway, Blain has carved out a living place for himself with a black computer chair cardboard boxes and plywood arranged together in a small fenced off area. The road barrier provides a small area of shelter from the rain.

“The thing with other people is –- I know how to hustle so good that they act like they like me, but they don’t like me,” Blain said. “They hate me ‘cause they can’t do like I do. I make money, a lot more money than they do. I panhandle. I help people with their cars, if they have a flat tire. I can do just about anything.”

Blain said he avoids the other homeless in Washington Heights, preferring to spend his time alone.
“I have trouble with people because they like me, want to be like me, but can’t be like me,” he said.

The New York winter, brutal and resolutely unforgiving with nighttime temperatures routinely dropping below freezing, are the most difficult times for the street homeless. During the 2013-2014 winter, the latest year for which statistics are available, six homeless people died of cold-related weather.

Ramirez said he suspects the heroin he uses daily helps him and other street homeless cope with the frigid weather.

“Most of the homeless out here are heroin addicts,” Ramirez said. “People be like, ‘How you survive out here in the wintertime?’ “I’ll be thinking that the heroin keep me warm.“Like as soon as you do the dope, you don’t feel the cold.”

Life on the street is largely a solitary struggle.

“Most of the time I be by myself ‘cause I always ended up getting fucked over,” he said. “I got tired of looking out for people – ‘yo, I’m sick,’ or ‘yo, I need a dollar to get over here.’ Most of these people, they never look out for you,” Ramirez said. “The heroin addicts here aren’t like before – you could be sick and someone would come and get you straight. Now it’s rough.”

The post Homeless and drug addicted appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Standing underneath a parkway off-ramp in Washington Heights, Mike Bailey pointed to a syringe, half-full of blood and lying on a concrete barrier.

“Look at that,” said Bailey, a peer educator with the Washington Heights Corner Project. “The blood hasn’t even turned brown yet; someone just used this today. God knows what’s in there – hepatitis, HIV.”

Underneath the off-ramp near Amsterdam Avenue and 181st Street, Bailey motioned to the ground next to the barrier, which is littered with old syringes, old water packets and occasional junk food wrapper. An empty bottle of Duggan’s London Dry Gin and the bright orange needle caps stand out among the debris.

Used alcohol pads, syringes, needle caps and sterile water packets scattered on the ground beside a concrete street barrier underneath an expressway off-ramp near 181st Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights on Feb. 19, 2017. The area is a popular spot in Washington Heights for homeless drug addicts to inject themselves. Photo by Razi Syed.

“We have hazardous-waste come and clean up here a couple times a week but it gets dirty again in no time,” said Bailey, 53, of the Upper West Side.

On Feb. 19, Bailey was making his regular weekend rounds through the George Washington Bridge Park, Highbridge Park and numerous street corners from 181st to 177th street, passing out clean syringes, alcohol pads, packets of sterile water, tourniquets and cookers, which addicts use in place of spoons to heat up water and dissolve heroin or cocaine for injection.

Bailey, a former cocaine user who once spent years living on the streets of Washington Heights, now walks his old haunts attempting to make sure addicts are able to use their drugs with clean equipment.

As heroin and prescription opioid use soared nationwide, deaths from drug overdoses in New York City have skyrocketed. The city’s most recent report, from August 2016, noted a 66 percent increase in drug overdose deaths from 2010 to 2015. Deaths related to heroin spiked 158 percent during that same period.

In Washington Heights, the Corner Project has seen a marked increase of injection drug users, with around 45 new people who sign up for the organization’s free syringe program each month, said Mark Townsend, a harm reduction activist and Corner Project staff member.

Bailey said his past experiences with drugs help him reach more addicts, pointing to the fact that he doesn’t wait in an office building for addicts to come to the Corner Project. Knowing that addicts aren’t always inclined to come into an unfamiliar space, Bailey said, “I go out and reach them where they are at.”

The Corner Project began informally in 2005 when several social workers and activists began walking around with backpacks to hand out clean needles to the addicts. The organization has grown to occupy a 9,000 square foot office at 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, and has over 2,400 registered participants in its program. Around 70 percent of participants are using heroin and 40 percent are using cocaine, Townsend said.

In addition to the syringe program, the exchange provides hepatitis-C treatment, counsels participants on safer injecting, holds regular health clinics with volunteer physicians and gives training on Narcan, a drug which can reverse the effects of an overdose.

Bailey has seen first-hand what a syringe program can do to improve the lives of drug users, having started his involvement in the Corner Project in 2006 as a homeless IV cocaine user.

“This is where my beginning started before Washington Heights Corner Project,” he said on a recent Sunday night outreach shift, waving his hand in the direction of the George Washington Bridge Park and the surrounding streets. “I came up middle class in Jersey. But I started using; I came over to the city to cop because it was cheaper.”

Bailey first used crack cocaine when he was 22, after a friend introduced him to it.

“It was a three-minute high and then you do another (hit),” Bailey said. “I guess he figured, ‘If I get Mike on it, he can help support my habit.’ That’s the way it goes.”

For the next decade of his life, Bailey used crack cocaine, eventually switching to injecting powder cocaine. He spent his weekends driving over the George Washington Bridge into New York City to get cheaper drugs. By the time he was 35, in 1999, Bailey said he was in Washington Heights daily, on the streets or in jail.

Around two years ago, Bailey got off the street and into a housing program on the Upper West Side and became a peer educator for the exchange. He credits the program with helping him get the resources needed to leave homelessness behind.

In the years before the project, Bailey said addicts took extreme risks out of desperation. “We were all using the same stems (crack pipes), the same needles, the same cookers,” he said. “Without harm reduction, you’ll have widespread hep-C cases.”

Inside the Corner Project office, one Washington Heights heroin user, who declined to give his name, said he shared needles prior to becoming a participant. He counted himself lucky not to have contracted any diseases.

The exchange also helps operate a kiosk, near 177th Street and Haven Avenue, where needles can be safely disposed. Opened in May 2016, the kiosk is operated in collaboration with the city’s parks department.

The kiosk hasn’t gotten the amount of use the Corner Project hoped. Bailey said only several dozen syringes get collected in the kiosk each month, and that the location wasn’t ideal for drug users who use in more secluded parts of the park. Preliminary plans exist to expand these boxes into other parts of city.

Programs like the Corner Project operate on the philosophy that attempting to reduce harm is the best way to deal with addiction. The need for harm reduction programs has grown over the past decade, as opioid addiction has skyrocketed and deaths in New York City due to drug overdoses rose from 541 in 2010 to 937 in 2015.

Though critics contend needle exchanges enable drug users, the medical establishment has largely come out in support of the harm reduction model. A 2004 study by the World Health Organization, which studied needle exchange programs in the United States and Europe concluded that there is compelling evidence that the programs reduce the rates of hepatitis-C and HIV in drug-using populations, the programs are cost-effective and that the programs result in no major unintended negative consequences. The American Medical Association has also backed needle exchange programs as means of limiting disease spread.

However, needle exchanges retain a stigma in the eyes of many people and 16 states still lack syringe programs.

In early 2015, a rural Indiana county saw a spike in HIV, due to addicts sharing needles to inject prescription painkillers. Around 20 new cases of the virus were being reported each week at the height of the crisis. Local and state health officials encouraged the immediate opening of syringe exchange services.

Vice President Mike Pence, then-governor of Indiana, initially said he was morally opposed to needle exchanges on the grounds they supported drug abuse. Two months after the outbreak was detected, Pence shifted his position. Needles were distributed and dramatically slowed the rate of new HIV cases.

Commenting on the positions of politicians like Pence, Townsend said it’s “outrageous” that people oppose syringe programs in the 21st century.

“All we’re doing is making it so drug addiction isn’t a death sentence,” Townsend said.

Lately, the Corner Project has seen a trouble trend of younger drug users, said Samantha Olivares, an outreach worker.

“Lots of people come from Jersey that are 30 and under,” she said, noting that she has seen IV drug users as young as 14. The project has also stepped up online outreach in an attempt to reach younger people.

Harm reduction, at its heart, is about treating people with dignity, Olivares said.

“If I can help one person, or make one person smile each day, I feel like I’ve done something,” Olivares said. “I get high off of helping people and making them realize, ‘Even though you are a drug user, you’re somebody too. Your life’s worth living, you’re worth loving, you’re worth being here.’”

The post On the front line of the heroin epidemic in Washington Heights appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Nestled between a brick-lined apartment building and pale grey office suites, an ever-changing group of teenagers and young adults softly chanted “He will not divide us” over and over again in the side lot of an Astoria, Queens museum yesterday..

“I’m here for my parents, who came here from Mexico,” said Tamara Morejon, 14, of Long Island City, standing beside the Museum of the Moving Image, where “HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US” is painted on the wall. “They’re undocumented; they don’t have the same benefits that immigrants have.”

Morejon said she was there for the third day in a row, usually staying for several hours on each visit, and that she intended to come back for as long as her parents lacked the rights of citizenship.

Since Trump was inaugurated, 11 days ago, performance artists Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner have asked members of the public to stand in front of the text and chant, ‘he will not divide us,’ for as long as they wish. A mounted camera, located just below the text, livestreams the activity at hewillnotdivide.us

“Open to all, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the participatory performance will be live-streamed continuously for four years, or the duration of the presidency,” reads a statement from the trio explaining their work. “In this way, the mantra ‘HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US’ acts as a show of resistance or insistence, opposition or optimism, guided by the spirit of each individual participant and the community.”

During an hour-long period beginning at 3 p.m.,around 20 people braved wind chill and temperatures in the 30s to participate in the exhibit. The number of people at any one time varied from four to 10.

The soft, trance-like chants in front of the text were periodically stopped as the chanters broke off into conversations with one another while standing on the sandy side lot where the words “one people, one love” and the shape of a heart were carved into the ground.

Harry Maria, 32, of Castle Hill, Bronx, was there for his second time, after a brief visit the previous week.

“It hasn’t been as busy as I hoped but the energy is amazing,” Maria said. “The main thing is, this gives us a platform to voice our opinions and make sure we’re heard.”

Maria said the view Trump and his supporters have on immigration to the United States were hypocritical.

“No disrespect to anyone,” Maria said, “but I feel that a lot of us when you look at yourself in the mirror — whether it’s first generation, second generation, third generation — no matter how far you want to go back: someone in your family was given the opportunity to come to this land, and work hard to better their life.”

Christian Mansfield, 33, of Sunnyside, Queens, stands in front of “He Will Not Divide Us” in Astoria, Queens. Photo by Razi Syed.

Christian Mansfield, 33, of Sunnyside, Queens, said executive order freezing the processing of refugees and barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the United States was the action he felt he had to oppose most strongly. Mansfield said he was inspired, however, after watching a week-long string of demonstrations against the new administration, from the women’s march on the day following the inauguration to the spontaneous airport protests on Sunday.

“I’m only 33-years-old but this is the first time I’ve seeing anything like this,” he said. “So often people say, ‘Why protest? It doesn’t make any difference.’

“But I remember the fight for gay marriage — I protested for equal rights, I marched after Prop 8,” Mansfield continued. “Now gay men and women can get married and I have a husband, so I’ll always love seeing people fight for what they believe in.”

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In the wake of the election, hate crimes against numerous religious, racial and gender groups have surged — with Muslim-Americans often facing the biggest brunt of the rise.

“Hate crimes have been steadily increasing as the political rhetoric has turned to divisive speech in the election,” said Afaf Nasher, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights group which monitors hate against Muslims.

In the first 10 days following the election, nearly 900 incidents of hate were reported to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit.

In November, the FBI released its annual hate crimes report — the most thorough and widespread compilation of hate crimes nationwide — which noted a 6 percent increase in hate crimes in 2015.

While attacks on Jews made up the largest number of crimes based on religion, attacks on Muslims surged 67 percent, the largest increase over the one-year period.

The report gives context, but provides an incomplete picture as local agencies are not always reporting their hate crimes to the FBI, said Madihha Ahussain, a staff attorney at Oakland-based Muslim Advocates, which assists victims of anti-Muslim acts in understanding their legal rights.

“Law enforcement at the local level are actually not mandated to report — it’s all volunteer reporting,” Ahussain said. “And there’s a number of cities that choose not to report, or they will report zero. It’s hard to believe that as many cities that report zero actually had zero hate crimes.”

New York City may be a multicultural melting pot with residents coming from all corners of the world, but it hasn’t been immune from attacks on Muslims.

One day after the election, New York University had the Muslim prayer room in the engineering building vandalized with the words “Trump.”

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn resident Zainab Ismail believes her appearance as a hijab-wearing Muslim resulted in harassment on the part of NYPD officers in her neighborhood on Nov. 11.

Ismail claims she was parked in her car when she got out to walk to the gym and noticed that two police cars were double-parked two spaces behind her car.

“Then I saw a police officer, talking into his walkie talkie, stare right at me,” Ismail said. Two officers approached Ismail and asked if they could speak with her.

Ismail was informed that someone had called 911 and reported her as a “suspicious person” getting in-and-out of her car. Ismail was incredulous — she had gotten out of her car just once to make sure her vehicle wasn’t blocking a driveway, she told them.

Over the following several minutes, Ismail said she was asked to provide multiple forms of identification, asked for old utility bills to prove she lived where she said she lived and was informed by the officers that they had doubts about parts of her story before they let her go.

After reaching out to Council on American-Islamic Relations-NY, Ismail chose to file a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is tasked with investigating complaints about the New York City police.

“I did not record audio or video of my incident, so it’s really going to come down to my word against theirs’,” Ismail said. “However, with a full investigation, it will still leave a statistic.”

Though national data on hate crimes indicates an upward trend in recent months, Nasher believes the statistics represent only a small fraction of what actually occurs.

“When I go to do educational workshops,” she said, “almost always, I’ll will have a line of people who will talk to me after the workshop is done. And one-by-one, I’ll start hearing stories: ‘Do you know what happened to me? Do you know what happened to my kid?’

“And every single time, I’ll ask, ‘Did you report it?” Nasher said. “And the answer is, probably, 80 percent ‘no.’

“It’s really a two-way battle,” Nasher said. “There’s this severe underreporting within the community, which is something we are pushing to change; and then, there’s also the other side of it, and that is, in order to be categorized as a hate crime, it has to meet a certain criteria.”

Because of the high legal bar to clear for a successful prosecution under the federal hate crime law, Ahussain said the most typical successful prosecution generally involves vandalism, for instance, anti-semitic graffiti on a synagogue.

Muslim-Americans will have to be proactive in trying to break stereotypes about their community, Nasher said.

“I think it’s time for Muslim parents to wake up and understand what is going on around them and how it affects an entire generation of young people who were born after 9/11,”she said. “For a long time, African-American parents always had discussions — especially with their young, black, male youth — about walking down the wrong street while being black. I don’t want to make a parallel, because the African-American experience and what shaped it, is very unique.”

Nashar has a message for all children, be careful and be proud.

“Don’t let outside belittle you in a way that’s going to make you less observant in your faith, less true to who you are,” she said.”

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Standing along the sidewalk at 62nd Avenue and 1st Avenue, Luiz Morales was waiting restlessly among the throngs of supporters and well-wishers who cheered on New York City Marathon runners.

Around noon today, the 20-year-old Morales lifted his head every 10 seconds or so, and scanned over the throngs of people who lined 1st Avenue in an attempt to make sure Morales would see his father, Alex, pass what was a little bit beyond the 16-mile mark.

“I need to be focused because at any moment he could pass,” Morales said of his 52-year-old father, who flew in from Puebla, Mexico — a major metropolis located southeast of Mexico City. “He’s running New York for the ninth time.

“He’s ran Berlin, Chicago, Boston, Paris and, I think, Dallas and Tokyo,” Morales said, over the loud cheers for the steady stream of runners passing by.

The marathon, which is in its 46th year, is the largest marathon in the world, with roughly 50,000 people completing the 26.2-mile course for recent years. Since 1970, when there were just 127 entrants and 55 finishers, over 1,000,000 people have partaken in the marathon.

Morales has traveled with his father around the world to run in marathons. He said standing among the crowd and encouraging his father as he ran was the most enjoyable part of the race.

“It’s fantastic for my dad and all the runners for the support from me and all the other people,” Morales said. “I think it’s great.”

The atmosphere along 1st Avenue was jovial, as people supported their friends and relatives on with signs and cheers, with the constant sound of rock and pop music in the background.

While the first six years of the marathon consisted of just laps around Central Park, for the past 40 years the route has snaked its way through all five of the city’s boroughs.

Runners start the race in Staten Island, cross the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and through a variety of Brooklyn neighborhoods, over the Pulaski Bridge into Queens and across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. Runners then make their way uptown, crossing into The Bronx briefly and before coming back to Manhattan, where the race finishes at Central Park South.

Over the next couple hours, Morales will move on to Harlem and Central Park to cheer on his dad as he came up to the final miles of the race and crossed the finish line.

“The sound, all the people that are cheering for their own people are fantastic,” Morales said, explaining why the New York marathon is the favorite of him and his father. “The weather is fantastic, the city is fantastic.”

This is the ninth time that Morales has accompanied his father to New York City Marathon, which will end with their traditional post-run celebratory meal of hot dogs.

With runners from over 100 countries represented, the city’s marathon is a true international affair. With two blocks near the course’s 16-mile mark, flags for Sweden, Germany, Mexico and Spain were visible, among the handmade signs and enlarged photos held aloft by spectators.

A committed athlete who focused his energy on playing soccer before he pivoted to long-distance running, Morales said his father’s motivation to run came to him in spiritual terms.

“His inspiration is the uncles and cousins who’ve passed away,” Morales said. “He sees it, like, ‘This marathon is for all the people that pass away.’”

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Hundreds of people participated yesterday in a roughly 1.6-mile march in Queens ending at the entrance of Rikers Island Bridge and rallied for the closure of the island prison complex.

JustLeadershipUSA founder Glenn E. Martin, who organized the march, said he experienced first-hand the abuses at Rikers Island when he was arrested on a shoplifting charge as a 16-year-old.

“I was there for two days,” he said. “On the second day, on my way back to court, I got stabbed four times in the cell – once in the neck.”

Martin organized the march in support of a months-long effort to close down the prison, which Martin alleges has been rife with gang violence and the inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Martin urged those in attendance to tweet their support of the campaign at Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The Katal Center, Vocal New York, the Arab-American Association of New York, Legal Aid, the Women’s Prison Association and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice were some of the organizations that voiced their support of the campaign, which has adopted the Twitter tag #CLOSErikers.

March to Close Rikers Island on Sept. 24, 2016 from Razi Syed on Vimeo.

Marchers began their three hour march at 30th Avenue and Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens and ended at 19th Avenue and Hazen Street. At 4 p.m., march organizers held a rally with over a half-dozen speakers, including actress Emily Althaus and State Sen. Gustavo Rivera.

Rivera, whose district covers the northwest part of the Bronx, said that the prison should be closed on both moral and fiscal grounds.

“We all have heard, we all have seen, we all have read and many of you have experienced yourself, the culture of violence that exists on this island,” Rivera said. “The moral argument is that 80 percent of the people that are in there have not even been convicted of a crime, yet we treat them as though we were just punishing them.”

Rivera said the amount of money that funds the prison complex could be used to improve the local community.

“As a matter of fact – $208,500 per individual – do you think that we could use those in our communities?” he asked. “Could we use that to make our school better? Could we use that for economic opportunities in our districts?”

The prison currently houses roughly 8,000 people, the majority of whom are Black or Latino.

Hip hop artist and Def Jam records founder Russell Simmons spoke out at Saturday’s rally.

“I don’t think that if the American people knew the details and statistics that we know, that they would support the mass incarceration of our people,” Simmons said. “This horrific treatment of our people has to change.”

Marcher and Brooklyn resident Sadia Zaman, 33, was among several hundred people who marched Saturday.

“I think (Rikers Island) has gotten to the point where the only reform, is to shut it down,” Zaman said.

State Assemblywoman Latrice Walker, who represents District 55, said it’s an economic injustice for the government to invest more in criminal justice than in educating children.

The prison has been a source of controversy for years.

In August 2014, then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said a multi-year civil rights investigation into the treatment of adolescent prisoners found that there was rampant abuse of minors, both by corrections staff and other inmates.

Councilman Antonio Reynoso, whose district includes portions of Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick, said Rikers Island culture destroys those who are detained there.

“This is like a cancer,” Reynoso said, of the effect the prison has on those detained there. “When you come in here, you could be perfectly fine – innocent, just awaiting trial, and let the corruption take hold of you.”

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As an audience of around 120 people in the dark-paneled mock courtroom of Brooklyn Law School listened Sunday afternoon, graphic artist and writer Molly Crabapple recalled sitting in pretrial hearings for the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

 “In the Summer of 2013, I got the chance to visit Guantánamo several times to do a series of investigative reports for VICE,” said Crabapple, in a panel discussion titled “Writing the War.” “By the time I visited, there were 150 men remaining of the nearly 800 Muslim men, who were rendered, kidnapped or incarcerated. And the majority of those men were on hunger strike.”

 Crabapple was among one of hundreds of authors featured in panel discussions and readings at the Brooklyn Book Festival, which has been held annually since 2006.

 This year’s festival ran from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday and featured around 300 writers of nonfiction, fiction, poetry and graphic novels. The day’s events were spread out on 14 stages located at Brooklyn Law School, the Brooklyn Historical Society Auditorium, Congregation Mount Sinai and other spots in the borough.

 Panels were held on topics of gender and sex, war, modern love, comics and technology.

 Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Anna Willoughby, 23, was at the festival for her first time. Willoughby, who had already attended two panels and was planning on seeing another with popular science writer Carl Zimmer, said she was enjoying the debates the topics provoked.

 Crabapple and writer Larry Siems spoke about cultural issues in post-9/11 America and the Global War on Terror. A third author, Brooklyn-based Greg Milner, moderated the discussion.

 Crabapple described the restrictions placed on the press at the island prison.

 “Guantánamo Bay is one of the most censored places in the world,” Crabapple said. “It is a place where every journalist, every photographer that visits there has to wear a giant sign on their neck, saying, ‘Military escort at all times.’

 “All photos that taken in Guantánamo are looked at by a number of military, and they are deleted if they don’t meet their standards of security,” she said. “Even when you see the prisoners, you see them through a one-way mirror, so that they don’t know that you’re there and don’t make any attempt to communicate.”

 Instead of trying to work around the censorship she faced, Crabapple said she decided to highlight it and make it part of the story.

 “With my sketchbook – because I draw rather than take pictures – I was able to get images that photography couldn’t,” Crabapple said. “So I’m forbidden from drawing faces – how do I handle that? I can draw the man from the side or behind, which conceals the censorship. It hides its existence. Or I can emphasize it.”

 Crabapple drew the heads of the guards with blank smiley-face expressions, and the faces of the faces of the prisoners were scribbled out in black.

 Siems, whose most recent work book, “Guantánamo Diary,” was an annotated manuscript of prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a native of Mauritania who was rendered to the Caribbean island naval base. Slahi was approved for release in July but remains imprisoned.

 “It was forced out by secret litigation in a process that took about seven years,” Siems said, of the manuscript that was eventually edited and published in 2015.

 “I cannot begin a panel about writing the war, and asking the question, who gets to tell the story of the U.S.’s recent interventions in the Middle East without noting that I’m sitting here talking about this and not Mohamedou,” Siems said. “I’d say that’s the most graphic illustration we have of the problem – who gets to tell the story?”

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