krxs10:

Teenage boy accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life w/o trial. Boy then commits Suicide.

A young man named Kalief Browder, 22, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime, has just committed suicide.

He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. There was no proof to suggest he did and when the police searched him they found nothing, but he was arrested anyways. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. 

After several attempts at taking his own life, Kalief Browder was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home in the Bronx.

Browder told several stories of being beaten and abused by other inmates or officers, and a disturbing surveillance footage was released of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him that it  Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell. 

As his father explained, he’d apparently decided that these torn strips of sheet were not strong enough. That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise upstairs, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself.

R.I.P. #Kalief Browder. I’m sorry they took your childhood and your future away like that.

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