A few months before his big brother, Ramarley Graham, was shot to death by a New York Police Department (NYPD) officer, 6-year-old Chinnor Campbell was being bullied in school. His 18-year-old brother showed him how to put up his hands to defend himself and demonstrated how to punch using a pillow. “You’ve got to fight back, or people will keep bullying you,” Ramarley coached.
Their mother, Constance Malcolm, says these lessons were typical of their relationship: “Ramarley would take him to the park, pick him up from school, just do what a big brother would do with his little brother.”
Chinnor didn’t have his big brother’s guidance for much longer. On February 2, 2012, a White NYPD officer named Richard Haste entered Graham’s Bronx apartment and fired a fatal shot into his chest. He was only feet away, as was their maternal grandmother, Patricia Hartley.
Graham would be turning 24 today (April 12) if Haste and his colleagues had not followed him home from a bodega they were surveilling, kicked in the door and fatally shot him.
Local media have covered Graham’s case consistently, due in large part to his family’s sustained activism. But his shooting did not receive the level of nationwide attention that later police killings of Black men and boys would. Graham was slain 2 1/2 years before the Ferguson protests would place a renewed spotlight on police violence and direct action against it. That quirk of time means that many people don’t know who he is (Marlowe and Myers 1).
Ramarley Graham was born on April 12, 1993 to Constance Malcolm and Franclot Graham in The Bronx, New York. At the time of his death he was a student at the Young Scholars Academy of The Bronx where he aspired to travel the world and become a veterinarian. Graham died on February 2, 2012, at the age of 18 after being shot by a New York Police Department officer in his grandmother’s bathroom.
Ramarley Graham was spotted adjusting the waistband of his pants during a NYPD narcotics squad surveillance of a bodega near his home. Officers assumed Graham was concealing a gun. When plainclothes officers approached Graham, they reported that he ran to the home of Patricia Hartley, his grandmother, a few blocks away. Surveillance footage from outside the front entrance to Hartley’s building, however, shows Graham calmly walking up to the door and entering without urgency.
The same surveillance footage shows two officers running up to the building with their guns drawn just moments after Graham enters. As the two officers try to force their way through the locked door, other NYPD officers gained entrance through the rear of the building and opened the front door. One officer ran upstairs to Hartley’s apartment and broke down the door without a search warrant or announcing that he was a police officer.
Plainclothes Officer Richard Haste then ran into the apartment and discovered Graham in the bathroom attempting to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet. Without any orders to comply, Graham was shot once in the chest in front of his little brother, Chinoor Campbell, and grandmother. Haste later reported that Graham reached into his waistband for a gun but no weapon was found in the Hartley apartment. Twenty minutes after the shooting, Graham was removed on a gurney from Hartley’s home by police officers. His family suspected he had already died but he was officially pronounced dead at 3:53 PM at the Montefiore Medical Center.
Patricia Hartley was arrested, detained, and questioned by NYPD about the series of events that occurred in her home for seven hours at the local precinct after watching her grandson, Graham, die at the hands of Haste. Graham’s body was also misidentified after his death, which prevented his parents from seeing his body for four days after his murder.
Richard Haste
In 2012, a grand jury voted to indict Haste, but the indictment was tossed out due to a prosecutorial mistake. A second grand jury declined to indict Haste, allowing him to walk free. After further investigation during a departmental trial in March 2017, Haste was found guilty on all charges and turned in his badge and gun before Deputy Commissioner of Trials, Rosemarie Maldonado, asked Police Commissioner, James O’Neill, to fire him. Although Haste is no longer employed by NYPD, many people are still fighting to see justice for Ramarley Graham (White 1-2).
Ramarley Graham often picked up his 6-year-old half-brother, Chinnor, from school. At home, Graham would help Chinnor with his homework, show him how to do push-ups, and teach him to defend himself from kids who picked on him for being soft. (Ramarley was gentle, too, his friends told me, so he knew how that went.) They’d watch Animal Planet, play video games, or go to the park. But that February 2, Patricia Hartley, the boys’ grandmother, went to get Chinnor instead. Graham was with his friends, Jahmoy McKenzie and Travis Breckenridge, at McKenzie’s house. They smoked a little weed and, knowing McKenzie’s mother would be home soon, moved on, stopping at a bodega. Then Graham headed home to change — he had plans to see girls later.
Wakefield hangs above the city about as far north in the Bronx as one can go before crossing into Westchester. It’s a largely West Indian neighborhood where businesses on White Plains Road, the main thoroughfare, proudly display the Jamaican flag. It was along that avenue, under the elevated tracks of the 2 and 5 trains, that officers Tyrone Horne and Andrew Jarvis first saw something they regarded as suspicious. They were part of a Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, staking out corners and trap houses. By 2012, most of the city’s precincts had eliminated their SNEUs, as street deals had declined, but not in the 47th Precinct; the department thought that a SNEU could still make “quality arrests” in the North Bronx. Sitting in a parked Lexus, Horne and Jarvis, who are both black, watched three black male teenagers walk into and then quickly out of a bodega.
According to internal documents from the NYPD’s Firearm Discharge Review Board investigation obtained by New York, Horne was the first to see what he thought was the butt of a gun sticking out from one teen’s waistband. Later, Horne would tell investigators that Graham looked suspicious because he’d been “walking with a purpose,” and Jarvis would confirm that he saw a gun. They relayed the sighting to the others on the team before following the teens up White Plains Road.
Sergeant Scott Morris, the officer in charge of the SNEU, was sitting in an unmarked sedan a few blocks away. Morris asked Horne and Jarvis to confirm what they had seen. “I definitely see the gun,” came Horne’s reply, according to another officer’s statement. “It’s under his shirt.”
Haste, then 30, perked up when he heard Horne say “gun.” In a series of interviews, Haste described the incident and subsequent fallout to me in great detail. He was parked nearby at the steering wheel of the “p-van” (prisoner van), a 12-passenger Ford Econoline. Haste, who had been in the SNEU for just two months, had worked in the 47th Precinct since graduating from the Police Academy three years earlier and had impressed his superiors by racking up 175 arrests. He told me that he chose to join the SNEU after learning the department didn’t have much use for a white guy as an undercover cop. For the same reason, Haste rarely manned the SNEU’s observation post — he’d stick out too much — and when he did, he’d dress as an MTA employee. Mostly he drove the p-van.
Excited to make an arrest, Haste drove toward Graham. Halfway down a residential street, Haste and his partner, John Mcloughlin, stopped the van and ran at the teenager, who had peeled off from his friends. Video surveillance taken from a camera outside Graham’s building shows him glancing over his shoulder in Haste’s direction before quickly walking into the house. Even before the door closes, Haste, dressed in a blue NYPD windbreaker, runs toward him. But by the time he gets to the door, it’s locked. Haste tries to kick in the door, but it doesn’t budge. A few minutes later, the first-floor tenant lets Haste in through the back door. Haste and Mcloughlin climbed up to the second floor, where Haste said he knocked before his partner kicked in the door to Graham’s apartment.
Inside, Haste saw Graham at the end of a narrow hallway. Gun drawn, Haste said he yelled blanket commands: “Police!” “Show me your hands!” According to Haste, Graham, with his hands in his waistband, hurried into the bathroom while yelling, “Fuck you, suck my dick.” Haste approached the bathroom and peered in to see Graham facing him with his hands still in his pants. Haste says he yelled, “Gun!” and pulled the trigger. He doesn’t remember seeing Graham fall to the floor. Haste also never saw the teenager throw pot — which is what newspapers would report he’d been reaching for in his pants — into the toilet (a bag was found in the bowl). All he remembers is Mcloughlin yanking on the back of his bulletproof vest and yelling, “Are you hit?” Haste tensed his muscles. He was fine. As another officer escorted him out, with Graham’s blood on his khaki pants, Haste passed Morris, whose eyes searched Haste’s face for an explanation. “I thought he was reaching,” Haste said, according to Morris’s statement.
Haste told me that one of his first thoughts after pulling the trigger was Shit, I’m jammed up, copspeak for police who are sidelined. Still unsure if Graham was dead or alive, Haste knew he was about to be overwhelmed by an investigation. And he was: A member of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association approached Haste and told him to talk to Horne, who was suddenly unsure if he’d said he saw a gun or he thought he saw a gun. Horne’s equivocation floored Haste, but he feared talking to him would be a red flag for the Internal Affairs Bureau. He did it anyway. “I made it very clear: ‘I’m not here to tell you what you did or you didn’t see,’ ” Haste says he told Horne. “ ‘All I’m saying is that we all heard the same thing as far as I know. If you’re afraid of saying what you saw, you say something you believed to be a gun.’ ” Multiple people told me Horne — who declined interview requests — would continue to argue that he’d always said he “thought” he saw a gun and distance himself from Haste more than the other SNEU members. By then, Haste knew Graham hadn’t been reaching for a firearm, but he was sure the NYPD would find one in the apartment. After two days of searching, the only gun recovered was a toy replica out back (Walsh 2-4).
In a 2013 civil suit against the City of New York, Graham’s grandmother gave her account of the shooting and its immediate aftermath. His mom provided additional details to Colorlines in a January 2017 telephone interview. Here is their version of what happened:
Hartley had just brought Chinnor home from school and was in the living room while he changed out of his school clothes. She heard commotion outside their apartment and walked toward the front door to see what was going on. Graham was behind her.
Hartley jumped back, and Officer Haste, gun drawn, ran toward her and Ramarley. The grandmother maintains that neither she, nor her grandsons heard police identify themselves or issue any warning. Graham retreated to a hallway bathroom, but moments later, Haste shot him.
Malcolm says that her mother initially believed she was the one who had been shot. “She tell me she look at her chest area and didn’t see any blood,” Malcolm recounted in her Jamaican lilt. “She remember that Ramarley was behind her, but when she looked behind her, she didn’t see him. She looked down, and that’s when she saw him. His head was into the bathroom, his legs were hanging out the bathroom.”
Hartley screamed, “Why did you shoot him? Why you kill him?” and Haste pushed the 85-pound woman backward into a vase, warning her to “get the f**k away before I have to shoot you, too!”
Hartley attempted to make a phone call, but a female cop whom Hartley hadn’t seen enter the apartment twisted her arm behind her back. A male officer grabbed her by the neck, pushed her into a chair and threatened to handcuff her if she moved. Hartley saw her grandson’s legs “moving and trembling,” but when she tried to approach him, police pushed her back.
After the fatal incident, police took Hartley and Chinnor, who was wearing only a red T-shirt and his underwear, outside in the winter cold. Officers then drove Hartley to the 47th Precinct leaving her surviving grandson with a downstairs neighbor, Eric Dixon.
Malcolm came home at 3:30 p.m. to find her home cordoned off. Without telling her what had happened, police took her to the precinct. “They killed ’Marley!” Hartley yelled when she saw her daughter. Police then locked the elderly woman in a room and questioned her for hours.
“They interrogated my mom for seven hours trying to put words in her mouth,” said Malcolm in late March 2017, at one of the many press conferences she and her volunteer support team have arranged over the last five years. “She stood her ground, because she knows what she saw” (Marlowe and Myers 2-3).
… The officers insisted that Ramarley had thrown a gun out the window and tried to get her to agree. When she refused, Hartley says they called her a “fucking liar.” Malcolm demanded a lawyer be present, but police refused to release Hartley, even after Malcolm’s lawyer arrived at the station. In the end, police held Hartley for seven hours, she says. (The NYPD said it was closer to five and a half, but pledged to investigate Hartley’s treatment.)
Following the shooting, city officials, including then–police commissioner Ray Kelly, expressed a commitment to get to the bottom of what happened. Bill de Blasio, then the city’s public advocate, issued a statement. “We need answers and we need them quickly.” But those commitments did little to comfort Graham’s family. Hartley was treated for trauma at the hospital. Ramarley’s father, Frank Graham (who separated from Malcolm soon after Ramarley’s birth but lived in Harlem and remained close to his son), also went to the hospital when his blood pressure skyrocketed. That weekend, Malcolm couldn’t see her son’s body because it had been misidentified. The morgue didn’t find it until a State Assembly member intervened.
Meanwhile, the NYPD pushed its own version of the facts to the press. On the night of the shooting, a spokesman for the department told the New York Times that the teenager had been running from police into his home, though the surveillance camera clearly showed Ramarley walking into the house, and that there had been a struggle between Graham and Haste. The next day, a law-enforcement source told The Wall Street Journal that Graham had been arrested eight times (police documents list seven arrests). None of the arrests resulted in charges.
Horne, of course, couldn’t have known about Graham’s record when he saw the teenager leave the bodega. It stretched between June 2009 and October 2011 and included arrests for robbery, trespassing, disorderly conduct, possession of a weapon, burglary, and selling marijuana. Malcolm detailed a few of the arrests to me and chalked them up to misunderstandings: Friends had accused her son of stealing headphones; police thought he’d taken someone’s bike. Nor was Graham’s record unusual for the neighborhood during the height of the “stop and frisk” era: While black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 made up 4.7 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 41.6 percent of stops in 2011.
According to a former principal at Graham’s middle school, Ramarley had sought advice from teachers on how to avoid the rougher side of the neighborhood. But in ninth grade, he dropped out and began bouncing among odd jobs. His MySpace page featured crudely rendered street-gang logos and pictures of Graham and his friends posing with what looks like weed and what appears to be a handgun. When I asked Malcolm about the pictures, she had a blunt response: “Kids do stupid things.” But in the 47th Precinct, “stupid things” are considered evidence. Supportive officers sent Haste the webpage, ex post facto proof, they believed, that Graham had warranted suspicion. Malcolm wasn’t surprised. “This is what the NYPD does to justify what they did,” she said. When asked to describe the man her son was becoming, Malcolm paused. “He was 18,” she said. “He was just coming into himself when he died.”
Works cited:
Marlowe, Jen and Myers, Amy. “1 Teen, 6 Cops, 1 Bullet and 5 Years of a Black Family Screaming for Justice.” Colorlines, April 12, 2017. Net. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/1-teen-6-cops-1-bullet-and-5-years-black-family-screaming-justice
Walsh, James D. “The Bullet, the Cop, the Boy.” New York Magazine Intelligencer, June 2017. Net. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/ramarley-graham-nypd-shooting.html
White, Davon. “Ramarley Graham 1993-2012).” Blackpast, November 10, 2017. Net. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/graham-ramarley-1993-2012/
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