Re: Dead Space 3 V1 0 22 Trainer By SKIDROW
Anastacia Iacono
Darkness. Silence. Earplugs: You don't hear the street begin to breathe. The tent people and the blanket people, the single-room-occupancy people coming out for prayer and breakfast at the missions, the stay-awake-all-night dancing-in-place-for-twenty-hours tweaking people, the flat-out face-down sidewalk people. The corner men who piss at the foot of the two-story glass cross on the side of the mission. The cross that brought you to this corner.
Zip the tents open, smell the street. Zoom into the right-now-right-here, crouching on your milk crate in front of the tents and staring down at the sidewalk you sweep and sweep until you break the broom, and then how can you keep it clean? "Tall beautiful black king." You don't feel like that now. So you take up the play. Macbeth. A battered paperback you study, learning the lines, reading them aloud. Come, seeling night...
The street throbbing. Gospel booming from Miss Mecca's corner store, radios rolling by in wheelchairs. I'm a boss-ass bitch, bitch, bitch on repeat, and so many ancient songs, Public Enemy, N.W.A, and older music, music from the listeners' last good days, the Dramatics, Marvin Gaye, voices that balloon into the evening like a pop-up living room. The mission workers think Skid Row gets worse at night, but they're wrong. It's better. The cool air tamps down the fumes. The tents rise.
You read out loud; loud. Maybe it's the chemistry. End of the month, money dried up, everybody's stash dwindling or gone. No spice left to contain you, just the crystal rising in your gorge. I have almost forgot the taste of fears...
Juju says no, he loves to listen. He knows what you're reading. He remembers from high school, years ago. It's beautiful. The play, your voice. You sound like Africa. That's what they call you here: Africa. You've never told anyone your name. That's for home. Your father's house, to which you will return.
When Charly moved to the street, he told shopkeeper Mecca Harper (pictured) that he'd been in a mental institution. "Hey, baby," she said, "that's your story." Nobody has to bring a past to Skid Row if they don't want to, so Charly left his behind.
The irony is almost too crude, but there it is: Charly "Africa" Keunang read plays because when he was younger he'd dreamed of becoming an actor, had immigrated to the U.S. to be in the movies. That didn't happen until the day he died. Just past noon on March 1, 2015, three police officers shot him six times, according to the autopsy commissioned by the family. They had him pinned to the sidewalk. Several bystanders took phone videos; one posted his online.
But this story is about Charly. One black life that mattered, no more nor less than any other. The video that went viral begins just before noon on that Sunday, light dappling the sidewalk between the man holding the cell phone and a figure windmilling his arms at a circle of four police officers. That's what the public knows. In security-camera footage from the Union Rescue Mission, in front of which Charly lived and died, the conflict builds more slowly. The police say they were responding to a robbery call. In the fifty-block Skid Row district officially designated a homeless "containment" zone, an open can of beer draws multiple squad cars. At first there is only one policeman, Sergeant Chand Syed. An unusual response, if the situation was as threatening as they'd later claim.
Two more policemen arrive. Most of the police are indistinguishable to Skid Row residents, but one of the officers, Francisco Martinez, has a reputation. "Hard-ass bitch cop," says a witness. "Napoleon cop." His partner is an African-American rookie, never identified by the LAPD, whose name is Joshua Volasgis.
Martinez and Syed are wearing body cameras. The LAPD has to date refused to release that video. But I've been able to carefully review the body-cam videos and listen to recordings of police interviews with several of those involved.
The scuffle between them, Laru will tell me, was over a woman. Charly thought Laru had been harassing her. A conflict was documented by the Union Rescue Mission's security camera: Charly tipped Laru's tent into the street. Kicked it a couple of times. Then he sat down on his milk crate. Crawled into his tent. No bat, big or little.
The detectives ask Martinez if he saw a bat. No, he says. But he can imagine it: "For the benefit of the tape," say the detectives, describing what we can't see on the audio recordings, Martinez is holding his hands "about maybe eighteen to twenty inches apart."
The clearest documentation of Charly's last five minutes and fifty-two seconds begins shortly before Martinez and Volasgis arrive. It begins, in the video from Sergeant Syed's body camera, with a survey of a quiet Sunday morning on Skid Row. There's the fig tree with its dense canopy, the red wall, the two-story glass cross. There's a flattened tent, a crumpled tarp, a blue tent still standing. That's Charly's.
About five feet away sits Laru. "Our victim, supposedly," Sergeant Syed tells Martinez and Volasgis when they arrive. Charly's standing in between his tent and his milk crate. He's wearing black slacks, a black hoodie with a gold pattern, and a dark cap.
As with Syed's, there is thirty seconds of silence on the copy of Martinez's body-cam video. Then we hear birds in the trees. We hear Martinez. He's a buzz-cut cop in wraparound shades, barrel-chested and barrel-bellied. He says to Charly, loudly, "You don't tell me how to do my job."
Syed tries to talk Charly out. Martinez moves in with the Taser. Volasgis follows, gun aimed side grip. Syed and another sergeant who's arrived peel back the tent. There's Charly. He's on one knee, his arms wrapped around him. "C'mon, brother," says Syed. "Just relax. Step outside." Charly picks something off the tent floor. Something smaller than the palm of his hand. "Put your hands up!" snaps Syed. Charly starts to rise and it looks like he's about to put up his hands, but we will never know, because Martinez shoots his Taser, two darts connected to electrified wire, and Charly turns, and this is where it begins. The end:
Volasgis punches Charly "two, three times in the facial area," he tells detectives, "and he wraps me up at that point as he falls to the ground." A fluid motion, he says: "Grab, punch." Volasgis feels someone holding on. It could be Charly. It could be Martinez. It could be both. "My belt," he'll say.
One officer says, "Stop moving!" Another officer picks up the cry: "Stop resisting!" he says, to the body on the ground, to the crowd that has gathered, the cameras that are recording, the detectives who will question them. "Stop resisting!" he says.
Ten months before he died Charly started a Twitter account, under the handle @bothleservant, writing in English and French, his native tongue. He called himself Both because that's what it felt like to be Charly: human and divine, the good and the bad. Le Servant, because he hoped the sins of his past would help him be humble. "En realite 'ton enemy jure' c'est tout ce que tu as," he tweeted on May 21, 2014. "In reality, 'thy sworn enemy,' that's all you have."
Containment is really recycling: A concentration of services such as shelters and food kitchens (not nearly enough; approximately 1,000 fewer beds than there are homeless) combined with "broken windows" policing results in a relentless jail-prison-street churn, as police pursue petty users, crack down on open containers, and wage war on jaywalkers. In the first year of Safer Cities, police issued some 12,000 citations, around 80 percent of which were for "pedestrian violations," according to a 2007 UCLA study. How do poor people pay all these tickets? They don't. That's the point. An unresolved ticket becomes an arrest warrant. The result is the criminalization of Skid Row, which then justifies the deployment of more force, since a large percentage of the population is, technically, "wanted."
Meanwhile, the L.A. Times reproduced accounts of the body cams the police would not actually show them, citing unnamed sources. These sources spoke not of the shooting but of Charly's hopeless punches. That Charly fought back wasn't in dispute. The question was whether police had been justified in killing an unarmed man.
Sources familiar with the investigation had an answer: Charly was an ex-con, a bank robber. And he was wanted for not reporting to his probation officer. Both things are true and neither is an answer. Their point was to change the question. Not "Was the killing justified?" or looming even larger, "Do the LAPD have a race problem?"
Last July, half a block from where Charly was shot, police responded to an unarmed mentally ill homeless man named Carlos Ocana sitting on top of a billboard. He was known on the street for climbing. Harmless. Police tased him; he fell and died.
Charly Leundeu Keunang was born in Douala, the largest city in Cameroon, to Heleine Tchayou and Isaac Keunang on September 6, 1971. Isaac was an auto mechanic, a good middle-class job, and the Keunangs lived in a house with a yard big enough to host the neighborhood soccer games, over which Heleine would preside from inside the home. His sister, Line, three years older, was her deputy. In a family photograph Isaac wears a suit and tie, Heleine a collared, western dress. They're a handsome couple, plump-faced; in America you might think them midwestern. Charly, 3 or 4, has his father's lips and cheekbones, his mother's eyes. But he's his father's son. You see it in the way Isaac holds the boy, the way Charly leans back into his father's big arms.
"It was just kind of easy for him to have friends," says Line. They were silly close, peapod close, almost always pictured holding hands. "Sis," he would say, urging her to play with him, "c'mon, you need to be active." She preferred to watch his games. He loved movies, too. They didn't get to see many, so Charly wrote his own screenplays. Once he built a makeshift film projector and sold it to a friend. The boy's father went to Isaac Keunang to complain: The only movies the projector showed were those of the viewer's own imagination. Isaac told the man that he should wish for his son to be blessed with such notions.
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