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DOVER — The Woodman Museum has hired as a new executive director to lead the 102-year-old institution on Central Avenue.
David Tompkins started his new career on Thursday after the board of trustees chose him out more than 35 candidates.
While Tompkins, 59, has called Dover home for him and his family for the past 16 years, he has spent many of those years working in other parts of the country. His new five-minute commute is perhaps one of his favorite aspects of the job, allowing him to spend much more time with his family and lead an organization he wants more people in the region to know about. He’s also excited about taking a leadership role in an organization with firm footing with lots of growth potential, a change from his most recent work.
The Kansas City, Kansas, native comes to the Woodman Museum with more than 30 years of senior executive experience that has been mostly focused in the performing arts. For much of this century, Tompkins has overseen and turned around many non-profits, such as the Boston Ballet, Ballet Arizona, Modesto Symphony Orchestra, Orlando Ballet, Ballet West and Portland Ballet, Tompkins told Foster’s Daily Democrat on Thursday.
In these roles, he’s helped restructure their organizations, retire debt and create a sustainable business model, Tompkins said. His career has brought him to 14 cities in 11 states. Tompkins said his turnaround rate is 100 percent, but making those turnarounds reality led to burnouts along the way. In addition to his theater work, Tompkins has worked on numerous feature films, television shows and concerts, including being the production stage manager for the annual Sundance Film Festival award ceremony held in Utah, according to his bio.
Tompkins is spending this week reading through old files and getting a better understanding of the museum. Then he plans to get out, meeting community members and conduct a listening tour to learn how they see the Woodman and where they would like to see it go.
Tompkins first public introduction comes this Friday at the Cochecho Arts Festival. Head Woodman trustee Dave Dupont and his company Dupont’s Service Center are sponsoring the headlining act as well as raffling off a set of Michelin tires with proceeds benefiting the Woodman. Tompkins will be there to say hello, which will be mostly introductions.
While Tompkins has lived in the city for years, he said he only knows a handful of people well. “There are parts of me that know Dover and there parts of me that don't know Dover at all,” he said.
Tompkins said he has a love of history that makes him feel home at the Woodman. He also wants to use his background to promote arts and culture at the museum, a key aspect in the founding of the museum that started in 1916 from a trust established by Annie E. Woodman.
Tompkins said his time living around the country in many cities drives home how special the Woodman is. “It’s a cultural jewel, and we’re lucky to have it,” he said.
One of his goals is to remind those who have lived in Dover for years who haven’t been to the museum in years to return. Another is to let newer residents of the Garrison City know about the museum and how unique it is.
Mike Day, the museum’s operation director, agreed. He said the museum is often called the “hidden jewel” of the city. One key goal for the Woodman is to drop the “hidden” part, Day said.
Tompkins takes over the position that has been vacant since January when Elizabeth Fisher’s year term ended as part-time executive director. Fisher had filled the position after the museum’s first executive director, Wes LaFountain, left in Dec. 2016, less than two years after he took the job.
Invincea, a midsize cybersecurity firm based in Fairfax City, Va., said Wednesday morning it is being bought by Sophos, a British cybersecurity firm, in a deal that could be worth up to $120 million.
The deal keeps the 90-person firm in Fairfax City and also coincides with a spinoff of Invincea Labs, an arm of the company that holds at least 20 research and development contracts with the Department of Defense.
John Backus, a partner at the venture capital firm New Atlantic Ventures and one of Invincea’s earliest investors, said the company wasn’t looking for a buyer but jumped at the chance when Sophos offered what was seen as a good deal. Invincea would receive $100 million with a chance to collect another $20 million contingent on meeting certain business goals.
“Sophos made us a good offer and, when someone makes you a good offer, sometimes it’s hard to say no,” Backus said.
The core technologies of both companies focus on some form of “endpoint” protection designed to automatically deny hackers access. These sorts of automated fixes, like firewalls or anti-virus programs, have gone out of style lately in favor of solutions that track hackers’ movements. In recent years, Invincea has built out its own threat detection technology, but still refers to itself as a “next-generation anti-virus” company.
For Sophos, a company that is publicly traded on the London stock exchange, Invincea is the latest in a stream of acquisitions designed to build out a comprehensive set of corporate security fixes. Invincea’s commercial business targeting big corporate customers is expected to complement Sophos’s solutions, which are geared more toward midsize firms.
The buyout makes Invincea the latest in a string of D.C.-area cybersecurity outfits to cash out after taking money from local investors, contributing to a small but growing software product industry here.
Tenable Network Security, which recently raised $250 million in a deal that partially bought out its founder, sells a platform designed to help corporations quickly scan for holes in their networks. Other transactions involved Mandiant and Sourcefire, which sold for $1 billion and $2.7 billion, respectively. Both cyber firms built businesses around technologies that track cyberthreats.
Buyouts like this are seen as a coup for the local technology ecosystem because the founders tend to stay and invest in new companies, and Invincea’s board is packed with local investors. In its early days, the firm benefited from taxpayer-funded seed investments through the CIT GAP Funds program. The company’s first big funding round came from New Atlantic Ventures and Grotech Ventures, both of them large venture funds based in Northern Virginia. The company went on to raise at least $45 million from larger investors, including Dell Ventures and Aeris Capital, and last year raised $10 million from ORIX Growth Capital, a private equity firm.
Local economic development boosters seem heartened by Sophos’s decision to keep the small company in Northern Virginia. Under the terms of the deal, Invincea will keep its name and remain in Fairfax City and slowly integrate its engineering team with that of Sophos.
Fathom trips will cost about $1,540 per person with seasonal variations. Russell said Boise will be the home base for herself and five or six Fathom employees.
Carnival hopes to soon expand its social-impact traveling options beyond the Dominican Republic, she said.
Russell founded Create Common Good in Boise in 2009. The nonprofit provides job training in agriculture and food preparation to people who face barriers to employment, including refugees, homeless people, convicts, former addicts and women referred by the Women’s and Children’s Alliance.
Russell and her husband, Jeff Russell, founded the Boise bookkeeping firm Easy Office that became Jitasa, which provides accounting services to nonprofits and has grown to 85 employees. She also has worked for General Motors, Nike and Intel.
The father of a star high-school athlete confronts New York City’s patterns of violence.
Tayshana Murphy, whom everyone knew by her nickname, Chicken, hoped to win a basketball scholarship and become the first member of her family to get a college degree.
On the evening of September 10, 2011, Taylonn Murphy took the subway to West Harlem to visit his eighteen-year-old daughter. He found her sitting on a bench, joking with her friends, in front of the building where she lived with her mother. “I need to talk to you,” he said, as he walked past her into the lobby. “When you get a chance, come upstairs.” It was a Saturday, two days after the start of her senior year, and she would likely stay out late, but he didn’t mind waiting. He had news that he knew she’d want to hear: a basketball scout from the University of Tennessee was coming to watch her play.
His daughter’s name was Tayshana—she had been named for him—but everybody knew her by her nickname, Chicken. She had hazel eyes, a contagious grin, a powerful build, and, on the inside of her right forearm, a tattoo of a basketball, with the words “It’s not a game, it’s my life.” She had missed the prior season, after tearing her A.C.L. and undergoing knee surgery. But she had begun playing again, and ESPN’s HoopGurlz had just named her the sixteenth-best female point guard in the nation. Now she was hoping to win a basketball scholarship and become the first member of her family to get a college degree.
Chicken lived with her mother, her two brothers, her sister, and her sister’s baby, in a fifteenth-floor apartment at 3170 Broadway, just below 125th Street, near where the subway emerges onto an overhead track. The building is part of a large public-housing project called the General Ulysses S. Grant Houses, situated a few blocks north of Columbia University. Murphy was separated from Chicken’s mother, Tephanie Holston, but he came by often to visit. That evening, he went into Chicken’s room and sat on her bed, surrounded by her basketball trophies. He took a couple of painkillers, to ease an ache in his neck and his back incurred in a recent car accident, and then, without intending to, he fell asleep.
Shortly after four o’clock the next morning, he awoke suddenly to hear his sixteen-year-old son, Taylonn, Jr., shouting, “They just shot Chicken!” Outside the apartment, Murphy heard screams coming from the stairwell. He ran down eleven flights, and found Chicken lying in a pool of blood in the hallway. Her sister, Tanasia, was hugging her and wailing, “Wake up! Wake up!” Somebody was shouting into a cell phone, pleading with a 911 operator to send help quickly. But, to Murphy, it looked as if his daughter was already dead.
She had, in fact, died almost immediately, after being shot three times, in the wrist, the hip, and the chest. A few hours later, a worker from the city medical examiner’s office placed Chicken’s body into a canvas bag and wheeled her out of the building on a gurney. Her mother walked alongside, one hand clutching the gurney’s metal frame. Murphy followed several steps behind, his eyes fixed on the ground.
In the days after the shooting, Murphy stayed at the apartment, answering calls from friends, relatives, coaches, school officials, and reporters. Weeping teen-agers came by at all hours, and Murphy did his best to comfort them. More than a hundred surveillance cameras monitor the Grant Houses, and soon the police had identified two suspects. One of them, Robert Cartagena, age twenty, had grown up in a housing project called the Manhattanville Houses, a block away, on the other side of 125th Street; the second suspect, Tyshawn Brockington, twenty-one, lived nearby. TV news shows broadcast their photographs, but nobody seemed to know where they were.
A wake was held at 6 p.m. on September 16th, at a funeral home in Queens, not far from the Queensbridge Houses, the project where Chicken had lived between the ages of three and fourteen. Murphy expected a few hundred mourners, but Chicken had been known throughout the city, and some three thousand people came. Teen-agers crowded along the sidewalk, chanting her name, and some wore laminated pictures of Chicken on chains around their necks. Murphy saw people he didn’t even recognize try to cut the line, claiming, “That’s my cousin!” The wake was supposed to end at nine, but it went on until almost midnight.
The burial was the next day, in New Jersey, and afterward the family attended a vigil that a friend organized in Queensbridge. Several hundred young people, holding white candles, stood around the perimeter of the basketball court where Chicken had played nearly every day of her childhood. Murphy had grown up playing basketball, too. Now forty-two, he approached a lectern on the side of the court with the weary gait of an aging athlete. He has a thin mustache that runs to the base of his chin, and large eyes behind square-frame glasses. He was still wearing his funeral clothes: black jacket, black tie, and black fedora.
The next morning, before he could decide, a detective called: the suspects had been found, in Columbia. They were extradited to New York, and arraigned in a courthouse downtown. From their photographs, Murphy had assumed that they were “real killers and gangsters.” But, when he saw them, he says, “These guys were babies. Small in stature. Baby faces.” He asked himself, What am I going to do with these little guys?
Murphy had never thought much about how to stop the disproportionately high rates of violence in certain parts of the city, but now he could think of almost nothing else. Last year, there were three hundred and thirty-three homicides in New York City, the lowest number of any year on record. But almost twenty per cent of the shootings in the city occur in public-housing developments, which hold less than five per cent of the population. Violent crime is so concentrated in some projects—places like the Ingersoll Houses, in Brooklyn, and the Castle Hill Houses, in the Bronx—that to residents it can feel as if shootings and sidewalk memorials were part of everyday life.
Taylonn Murphy stands at the spot where his daughter was killed, in a hallway of the Grant Houses, in West Harlem.
Murphy began speaking often with Yahmadi and soon started following his example. Six weeks after Chicken’s murder, he attended a vigil in Brooklyn for Zurana Horton, a mother of thirteen, who had been killed by stray gunfire after picking up her eleven-year-old daughter from school. In February of 2012, a police officer chased Ramarley Graham, who was eighteen, into his family’s Bronx home, mistakenly believing that he had a gun, and shot and killed him. Murphy visited the house and befriended Graham’s parents. Four months later, a four-year-old boy, Lloyd Morgan, Jr., was killed by crossfire on a playground at the Forest Houses, in the Bronx. Murphy went to a press conference there the next day and found Shianne Norman, the child’s mother. “Hey, Sis. I know what you’re going through,” he called to her. “I lost my daughter. My daughter was Chicken.” Norman broke away from the reporters to speak with him, and they exchanged phone numbers. The next week, Murphy attended her son’s funeral.
He frequently had trouble sleeping, and he spent hours at night making lists of the problems that he saw—“violence,” “poverty,” “P.T.S.D. in the community.” Then he researched them on the Internet, and typed up ideas about how to fix them, including more counselling for children and teens traumatized by violence. He sketched out plans to start a foundation in Chicken’s memory, which would organize an annual basketball tournament. And he spoke on the phone with other parents of murdered children, many of whom were also unable to sleep. Some nights, Shianne Norman called, and they talked about their sadness and the unfairness of what had happened to their families.
She told him that, whenever she tried to talk to her boyfriend about their son’s death, he fled the room. The police had arrested two teen-age boys for Lloyd, Jr.,’s murder, and, when Norman had to go to court, Murphy went, too. One day, at the courthouse, he met Lloyd Morgan, Sr. He seemed angry and not interested in talking, but Murphy persisted, and eventually the two became friends. Norman says, “It was like a weight lifted off his back that he could actually have someone who understood him.” The couple are now engaged, and Norman credits Murphy with saving the relationship.
Murphy was born in the Queensbridge Houses, but, when he was four, his father, a Vietnam veteran who worked as a prison guard, moved the family into Lindsay Park, a middle-income housing complex in Williamsburg. In his junior high school, Murphy was in a gifted program, as was Jay Z, whom everyone knew as Shawn Carter, and who lived nearby, in the Marcy Houses. At Lindsay Park, Murphy had an unofficial big sister, named Esaw (Pinky) Snipes. For a while, they lived in the same building, and in the summer they went to day camp together. After they both moved away, they saw each other at Lindsay Park’s annual Old-Timers’ Day reunions. That’s where Murphy met Eric Garner, who died last year, on Staten Island, after a police officer put him in a choke hold; he was Pinky’s husband.
Murphy had not been nearly as focussed on basketball as Chicken had, but he was good enough to play for August Martin High School, in South Jamaica, Queens, which had a strong team. This was in the mid-eighties, and South Jamaica was the center of the city’s crack-cocaine trade. Murphy started selling marijuana in his junior year, and soon moved on to powder cocaine and crack, carrying a beeper in his book bag. Shortly after graduation, he was arrested—as he recalls, for steering customers to a seller—but a judge gave him “youthful offender” status. (If he obeyed the rules of his probation, the crime would not appear on his record.) Around the same time, while walking through Bedford-Stuyvesant one evening, he was shot in the arm by a stranger. The shooting seemed random—and unrelated to his drug-selling—but he took it as a sign that he needed to make a change in his life.
He was charged with both weapons possession and murder and was taken to Rikers Island. Six months later, he was still there, awaiting trial, when he met Tephanie Holston, the friend of another inmate’s girlfriend, in the visiting room. She was nineteen then, and, Murphy recalls, she was “gorgeous inside and out.” She lived in a housing project in Brooklyn with her two young children and her grandmother. Murphy assured her that he had not killed anyone, and he managed to make her laugh, which impressed her, given the gravity of his situation. She began visiting him three times a week.
Silberblatt, who worked for the Legal Aid Society, believed that Murphy was not guilty and that his first two trials had been “a farce.” He shared his doubts with the prosecutor, and worked out a deal in which Murphy would plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter. Murphy still maintained his innocence, but he agreed to the deal because, he said, it involved a rarely used agreement known as an Alford plea. (Typically, a defendant who pleads guilty has to say in court that he committed the crime, but with an Alford plea a defendant doesn’t have to admit to any wrongdoing.) By agreeing to the plea deal, Murphy wouldn’t have to risk a third trial, and he would soon be able to go home.
A judge sentenced him to one to three years and, with time served, he was released in April, 1992. On May 4, 1993, Chicken was born. If not for those two hung juries, Murphy, instead of having a daughter, might have spent decades in a penitentiary upstate. That’s what happened to his friend Derrick Hamilton; he was convicted and spent twenty years in prison. Last January, four years after Hamilton was released, a conviction-review unit in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office re-investigated his case, concluded that he was not guilty, and asked a judge to throw out his conviction.
When Murphy was a child, everybody called him Yummy, because he loved to eat. His favorite food was chicken, and when Tayshana was a baby he called her Chicken Wings, later shortened to Chicken. She first picked up a basketball at age three, and by six she could dribble a ball between her legs. She learned how to play by watching Murphy’s pickup games, and when she was nine she joined a boys’ travelling team called Triple Threat. She suffered from chronic asthma, and sometimes had to go to the hospital after a game, but she never wanted to stop playing. When she returned to Queensbridge after her fifth-grade graduation ceremony, she ran straight onto the basketball court, without stopping to change out of her dress.
By then, Chicken had moved to the Grant Houses with her mother and her siblings. Murphy couldn’t afford his own place, so he usually stayed with his mother or his brother, both of whom still lived in Lindsay Park. When Murphy had been on Rikers Island, the prosecutor’s plea deal had seemed like a get-out-of-jail-free card. But, in the fifteen years since, he had come to view it as a mistake; with a manslaughter conviction on his record, he had found it nearly impossible to get a decent-paying job. When he tried to explain to prospective employers that he was innocent, he could tell that they didn’t believe him.
Ron Artest, who then played for the Los Angeles Lakers, had grown up in Queensbridge. He funded Triple Threat, the travelling team Chicken had played for, and he paid her tuition when she entered high school. But Murphy still had to pay for her sneakers, school uniforms, and supplies, and the expenses for the travelling teams she played on. He took whatever jobs he could get: setting up for fashion shows on the West Side piers; promoting concerts at the Paradise Theatre, in the Bronx; driving a truck for a moving company. When he wasn’t working, he accompanied Chicken to practice, yelled advice from the sidelines at games, and drove her to out-of-state tournaments, sometimes as far away as Atlanta.
Chicken transferred to another Catholic school, and then, after her sophomore year, enrolled at Murry Bergtraum, a public high school in lower Manhattan, which had one of the top girls’ basketball programs in the country. But she tore her A.C.L. before the season started, while playing in a tournament. After her surgery, Murphy sensed that some of the college scouts who had shown interest in her earlier were skeptical that she would still be as explosive on the court. Her first full game was at the Nike Rose Classic, a prestigious girls’ tournament in Brooklyn, in the spring of 2011. She was supposed to wait another week, to get a sleeve fitted for her knee, but she persuaded the coach to let her play, and scored nearly thirty points.
Forty-five hundred people live in the nine brick towers that make up the Grant Houses. The Manhattanville Houses, with six buildings, are home to three thousand people. According to the New York City Housing Authority, the average household income for both projects is twenty-four thousand dollars a year, and nearly forty per cent of the residents between the ages of eighteen and sixty-one are unemployed. The projects are more than fifty years old and in severe disrepair. In the apartment where Chicken lived, the bathroom sink had fallen off the wall, and another wall had crumbled, leaving a gaping hole; the elevators often broke down.
For decades, the Grant and Manhattanville Houses had been embroiled in a feud. As in other projects, some young people joined “crews.” The Grant crew called itself 3 Staccs; Manhattanville’s was the Make It Happen Boys. The crews were not affiliated with established gangs, like the Bloods or the Crips, and their disputes were not about drugs or money. Rather, they fought over turf and status. Often, the conflicts seemed to be fuelled by little more than boredom.
After Chicken’s death, every time Murphy visited the Grant Houses he was besieged by grieving teen-agers, who called him Pops, slapped palms with him and hugged him, sometimes resting their heads on his shoulder. Some of Chicken’s friends were angry; many appeared depressed. They asked him why they should bother trying to finish school when it wasn’t guaranteed that they would live to see twenty-one. Murphy began referring to himself as a “one-man bereavement team.” He told the young people that he loved them and to stay in school, because Chicken would have wanted them to.
Last May, in Queensbridge Park, at a picnic to mark what would have been Chicken’s twenty-second birthday, her sister, Tanasia, shows a tattoo commemorating her.
In the spring of 2013, Tyshawn Brockington became the first of the two murder suspects to go on trial. He had a prior arrest for assault, and, according to prosecutors, he belonged to the Manhattanville crew. Murphy and Tephanie Holston attended every day of the trial. Hakiem Yahmadi, Shianne Norman, and the parents of Ramarley Graham went when they could.
For the first time, Chicken’s parents heard the full story of their daughter’s murder. That day, dozens of young people from Grant and Manhattanville had been fighting. Brockington was assaulted, and that night a large group from Grant attacked Robert Cartagena on 125th Street. Chicken was on the street and watched the fight, then returned to 3170 Broadway and hung out in front of the building with friends, listening to a boom box and dancing. A few hours later, Brockington and Cartagena went to the Grant Houses looking for revenge. When they saw a crowd in front of 3170, they chased six teen-agers—Chicken, her brother, and four other boys—inside. The day before, Chicken had suffered an asthma attack; now she slowed down, and Brockington and Cartagena caught her in the hallway. It wasn’t clear who fired the weapon, but witnesses testified that, before Chicken was shot, she pleaded for her life. The jurors convicted Brockington of murder, and Judge Thomas Farber sentenced him to twenty-five years to life.
She didn’t attend every day of the trial. “I couldn’t take it,” she says. “It made me mentally and physically sick.” She saw Chicken’s parents in the courtroom and wanted to speak to them, but she didn’t know what to say, or whether they would even want to hear from her. After the trial, Derrick Haynes, a Harlem community activist and high-school basketball coach, asked her if she would like to meet Murphy.
Haynes had closely followed Tyshawn’s trial; he himself had grown up in the Manhattanville Houses, and, a month before the shooting, he had coached Tyshawn in a basketball tournament. No one is certain how the trouble between Manhattanville and Grant began, but Haynes says that it dates back to at least 1972, when he was eight, and his fifteen-year-old brother, Eli, was shot while trying to break up a school-yard fight. Eli, who died the next day, told the police that he had been shot by a boy from the Grant Houses.
Friends at the picnic wear laminated pictures of Chicken.
Since Chicken’s death, the violence in Grant and Manhattanville had grown worse. A sixteen-year-old was shot in the shoulder, a twenty-one-year-old was shot in the leg, and at least three bystanders were hit. Taylonn, Jr., was still living in the Grant Houses with his mother, and during this time he acquired a rap sheet. At the end of 2012, he was arrested for burglary, after a dispute involving a cell phone; he was charged as a “youthful offender” and put on probation. The next summer, he was arrested again, accused, with four others, of punching a Manhattanville resident and robbing him of a hundred dollars.
At the same time, the neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying. Double-decker tour buses frequently drove by the projects, and passengers took pictures of the residents. “It’s like they’ve never seen people before,” Arnita Brockington said. Meanwhile, a sleek, nine-story glass block, designed by Renzo Piano, was rising right across Broadway. It will house Columbia University’s new science center, the first of sixteen buildings to be erected as part of a six-billion-dollar addition to the main campus.
Two doors down from the office was a shuttered storefront, with a faded sign that read “Flerida Beauty Salon.” Murphy and Haynes discussed trying to take over the space and convert it into a crisis center. In the meantime, they began walking through the projects with Arnita Brockington. In the Grant Houses, people asked Murphy, “Why is she here?” “What are you doing with her?” But, eventually, residents got used to seeing the three of them together. Stories had begun circulating that the police were planning a major crackdown, and they warned the teen-agers to stay out of trouble.
At the end of the picnic, friends and relatives released lanterns over the East River.
Early on the morning of June 4, 2014, the thrum of helicopter rotors could be heard throughout West Harlem. Police Commissioner William Bratton tweeted a picture of himself standing on a street corner, surrounded by officers, with the caption “With members of the #NYPD Gang Division & Chief of Patrol this AM in West Harlem.” With Bratton watching, some five hundred officers had raided the Grant and Manhattanville Houses. Arnita Brockington woke to the sound of someone banging on her door. The police burst in, she said, before she could finish dressing. They were looking for her seventeen-year-old son, Naquan, whom they handcuffed and took away.
The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., had secured the indictments of a hundred and three young men, all of whom were allegedly members of three neighborhood crews: 3 Staccs, the Make It Happen Boys, and Money Avenue, which was based a few blocks east, on Manhattan Avenue. A press release from Vance’s office described this as the “largest indicted gang case in NYC history.” The youngest defendant was fifteen, the oldest was thirty; the average age was twenty.
Four years earlier, shortly after Vance took office, he had created the Crime Strategies Unit, and prosecutors had zeroed in on West Harlem as a “violent crime hot spot.” Now they alleged that, since the start of 2010, the three crews had been responsible for two murders, at least nineteen nonfatal shootings, and about fifty other incidents in which shots were fired but nobody was hit. One of the murder victims was Chicken. The other was Walter Sumter, an eighteen-year-old who had been shot in the chest just after midnight on December 30, 2011, as he was leaving a party. That homicide had yet to be solved. By filing a gang-conspiracy case, prosecutors hoped to put an immediate end to the crew-versus-crew violence. Or, as Vance’s chief assistant explained, “We like to take it out at the root so it doesn’t come back.” The D.A.’s office had already filed thirteen other such cases in Manhattan.
The indictments reflected a strategy, favored by Vance’s office and the N.Y.P.D., to build conspiracy cases that rely heavily on social media. For the West Harlem case, police and prosecutors had scrutinized more than a million social-media pages, and eavesdropped on thousands of inmate phone calls. The indictments were filled with posts that the defendants had allegedly written on Facebook, bragging about past crimes and threatening future ones, with claims such as “ima kill u” and “i want one of them dead.” Prosecutors use such posts to show relations among the defendants and to prove intent, while defense attorneys often contend that their clients were merely posturing.
Murphy learned about the raid at around 6 a.m., when he got a call from Derrick Haynes. He was devastated to discover that his son was among those indicted. At the time, Taylonn, Jr., was already in jail; four months earlier, he’d been arrested in connection with an assault. Now he and thirty-five others—all alleged members of 3 Staccs—faced a number of felony charges, including weapons possession, assault, attempted murder, and conspiracy.
Meanwhile, the topic of police-community relations had become front-page news, following the deaths of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner. Students at Columbia began inviting Murphy to speak on campus. George Joseph, now a senior, who has written articles for The Nation and The Intercept, says, “Everyone learns a lot from talking to Taylonn. He always has really positive energy, he’s always looking forward.” Murphy became friends with some students, and he invited them to meet residents of the Grant Houses, to join a picnic to mark Chicken’s twenty-second birthday, and to attend Ramarley Graham’s third-annual memorial service, in the Bronx. At large rallies against police brutality, Murphy marched alongside Columbia students, and introduced some to his childhood friend Esaw Snipes Garner.
Compared with some of the protesters, Murphy had a more nuanced view of the police. If not for the efforts of law enforcement, his daughter’s killers would still be at large. (He referred to the period after she had been murdered and before her killers were caught as “the longest ten days of my life.”) Besides that, his whole life had afforded him a unique understanding of the criminal-justice system. He was the son of a prison guard, but he also knew how it felt to be a prisoner. He had made money selling drugs, but had also been tried twice for a murder he had not committed. He had learned how it felt to sit in the spectator section of a courtroom and watch the killers of his child go on trial, and now he was sitting on a courtroom bench again, and finding out how it felt to be the father of a defendant.
In January, nearly eight months after the raid, Manhattan prosecutors filed a new criminal case, charging four young men—all alleged members of 3 Staccs—with the murder of Walter Sumter. One of the accused was Taylonn, Jr. In court papers, prosecutors laid out their theory: Sumter had been a member of the Money Avenue crew, and had been “widely hated by the 3 Staccs gang.” He had allegedly obtained the 9-mm. handgun that had been used to kill Chicken, and crew members used it to shoot at 3 Staccs members.
Prosecutors persuaded the judge to join the murder case with the gang-conspiracy case, arguing that the alleged crimes were related. This is not an unusual practice; combining major felony charges with conspiracy charges can make convictions easier to obtain. And if, as sometimes occurs, a jury acquits a defendant of murder but convicts him of conspiracy, it is still a victory for the prosecution. According to Taylonn, Jr.,’s attorney, Patrick J. Brackley, the murder case is “very flawed.” He said, “There is no forensics, no fingerprints. There is no weapon that is connected to Taylonn, Jr.” At trial, the prosecutors’ case will likely rely on social-media posts and on testimony from other defendants in the hundred-and-three-person indictment, who are now coöperating with law enforcement.
Hi Mr Murphy I know we don’t know each other but I used to play ball with your daughter my name is Rayah Feb 1 2015 I lost my young cousin Christopher Graham. It made the news. If you’re free Monday at 9 am his funeral is at Unity. I would really appreciate your uplifting wise words.
Graham, who was twenty-two, had been shot in the head after performing at a rap show in the Bronx. Rayah thought that Graham’s friends would need to hear “real stuff” at his funeral, and she remembered Murphy, whom she had heard speak three years earlier, at the funeral of a friend.
Taylonn, Jr.,’s latest legal troubles had not deterred Murphy from continuing his work. On the morning of Graham’s funeral, he attended another court date for his son, then took the subway to the Unity Funeral Chapel, in Harlem. By the time he arrived, the crowd was spilling out the door, and the pastor was finishing up. Some of Graham’s friends had laminated his photograph and wore it on chains around their necks.
He spoke briefly, then ended as he always did: “I love you all.” A few feet away, a young man popped the cork on a bottle of pink Moët & Chandon, sprinkled some on the ground in Graham’s honor, and then passed it around to his friends, who quickly finished it.
In early June, almost two years after Murphy and Derrick Haynes had started talking about opening a crisis center, they obtained a lease to a six-hundred-square-foot storefront on Old Broadway, in a building that belonged to the city. It wasn’t the former beauty shop but an abandoned social club next door, where local residents had once gathered to play dominoes and cards. After it closed, tenants who lived upstairs appeared to have used it for storage; there was a refrigerator, a supermarket cart, a VCR, an iron, an eight of hearts, and unopened mail from years back. The stench—of dust, dirt, and mildew—was suffocating. But to Murphy and Haynes the location, between the two projects, was ideal. The rent is fourteen hundred dollars a month. They had paid for two months, with a donation from an elderly woman who used to live nearby. Now they needed to raise money to renovate the space.
In the year since the raid, there had been one homicide in the projects, but, according to the N.Y.P.D., it was unrelated to the feud. Of the hundred and three defendants charged in the conspiracy case, eighty-one have pleaded guilty; three were convicted at trial; one was acquitted; and the rest are waiting for their cases to go to trial. Most of those who had been convicted were in prison, though several were out on probation or attending court-ordered programs. Arnita Brockington’s son Naquan pleaded guilty to attempted gang assault, and is now in a medium-security prison upstate; he is eligible for parole in 2018. Taylonn, Jr., is still on Rikers Island awaiting his trial, which will likely start early next year.
After checking that neither boy had an open warrant, the police released them, and the block grew calm again. Murphy shook his head. “Everyone else in their right mind would say, ‘You can’t pay me enough to deal with this headache,’ ” he said. But later that afternoon he planned to walk through the Grant Houses, to find out who had been behind the dispute, and explain again why the violence had to stop. Not everyone got the message: two weeks later, a twenty-four-year-old man was shot in the Grant Houses.
Soon after the raid, the district attorney’s office had started a youth-sports program in Manhattanville, but Murphy and Haynes believed that much more was needed. They hoped to offer job training, G.E.D.-prep courses, and parenting classes. Murphy had already set up a “first responder” team, made up of two mothers whose sons had been killed, to visit families who have lost a child. Arnita Brockington will work in the office, and Columbia students will volunteer time there. By the end of the summer, the men had yet to raise enough money for renovations, but they had submitted applications for grants.
Ritchie Torres is a rising star who represents a Bronx district on the New York City Council. His job is about to get a lot harder.
WOW! If you are looking for privacy, some land, a gorgeous pond view and plenty of room - I've got what you are looking for! Come on in and take a tour with me! Inside you will find an open plan, the family room is open to the dining room and the huge kitchen with an island and a HUGE breakfast bar. Granite counters, 5 burner gas stove and a full size refrigerator and full size freezer side by side unit and mega storage make this kitchen a delight for any cook. The dining room has floor to ceiling windows looking out to the covered porch and stocked pond and a totally private wooded setting. The master bedroom is BIG and has it's own sitting area, and again - floor to ceiling windows and french doors to the covered porch and pond. The master bath has his and hers vanities, jetted tub, stand-up shower and the biggest walk-in closet I've ever seen. On the opposite side of the house are two more bedrooms, sharing a hall bath. Upstairs is another bedroom with it's own private bath and another huge walk-in closet. This room could be used as a media room or bonus room, but right now, it's a great teenager suite! Back downstairs is an office - it has a closet and could be a bedroom too. The laundry room is big and has room for a freezer. Across the entire back of the home is a deep, covered porch, with fans and recessed lights, looking over the pond. A three car garage completes the house. The property is included with 4.2 very private acres with a stocked pond and all the deer you can handle! Call your Realtor today to see this one!
I resent the intent of Haines City officials to include CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) members' names on plaques to be affixed to buildings currently being erected on the site of the former Oakland Elementary and Oakland High schools.
In fact, I resent having city officials' names being placed on any of these facilities. When officials substituted their wishes and desires in lieu of the compassionate pleas of a number of former Oaklanders and community residents, they forfeited this recognition.
Although it is being disguised, this is the same selfish, despicable and contemptible group that sacrificed historical treasures in the historically black community of Oakland to erect trophies in their names. This act on their part is repugnant and scandalous.
Those who demonstrate a lack of the prerequisite sophistication, refinement and cultivation to recognize the accumulated intrinsic value of historically significant structures and geographical sites, effectively forfeit their opportunity to hold elected office. The have often demonstrated that they are not fit for office.
The structures being erected to allegedly replace the Oakland cafetorium and gymnasium will never replace nor acquire the status of the buildings that were so foolishly razed.
Those who officials pandered to also have culpability. They also deserved to be ostracized. Their continued gullibility foster and promote absurd and incompetent actions by officials. It is always reasonable and prudent to consult with those who are better positioned to provide competent guidance than to blindly support any and everything that comes down the pipe.
This CRA board notwithstanding, city officials' names do not deserve to be affixed to sanitation trucks.
Haines City's CRA is a template for conflict of interest and fraud. The entire City Commission hold seats on the CRA board. The commissioners' presence on this board not only gives an appearance of conflict of interest, it is a real conflict of interest.
CRA funds are to be used exclusively for blighted and low-income communities. With exception of Southern Dunes, all of Haines City is eligible for CRA funds. This is ridiculous and represents a fraud on the entire city of Haines City.
This represents a back-door and despicable redirection or channeling of CRA funds to affluent and undeserving areas and neighborhoods.
We have been reporting on the rise of some really nasty diseases caused by tick bites - everything from Lyme disease to Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Well, now a new study is shedding light on an old technique to repel ticks that many people don't use. It is a repellent that you spray on your clothing and not on your skin. And here's more from NPR's Allison Aubrey.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Back in the 1980s, the U.S. military tested the use of a pesticide derived from the flowering chrysanthemum plant to protect soldiers from insect and tick bites. It's called permethrin, and now decades later, many outdoor enthusiasts use it, including Danny Quinteros.
DANNY QUINTEROS: I love being outside, whether it's hiking, backpacking, climbing.
AUBREY: He's got a plan to hike the Appalachian Trail, which cuts through many tick-infested areas, so he's got a can of permethrin, and he's about to spray it on a T-shirt.
QUINTEROS: What you want to do is to stay back 6 to 8 inches away from the clothing.
AUBREY: He applies an even coat, then flips it over to spray the back.

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