Graphic Design
A reprint from This Week in Haiti, Vol. 15 No. 22, with
permission granted by Haiti Progres.
It was cool outside as the crowd streamed out of the
Club Rendez-Vous on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, shortly before 4 a.m. on Saturday, August
9 [1997]. An eyewitness told Haiti Progres that a fight began between two women and the
exiting crowd watched, some shouting, some laughing. Someone in the club called the police
and a squad car from Brooklyn's 70th Precinct soon arrived.
The police began pushing people around and at one point shoved a pregnant women, the
eyewitness said. The crowd started to hoot and cry "abus," a French word
denoting both violence and the violation of rights. The police became more aggressive
toward the crowd, trying to disperse them.
A Haitian man in the crowd said to one of the policemen: "You would not act so tough
if you weren't wearing that gun," referring to the handgun carried by New York City
policemen. The policeman--later identified as Justin Volpe,
25--removed his gun belt, handed it to his partner and challenged the Haitian man to a
fist fight. In the course of the fight, the Haitian man knocked the cop down. The cop then
grabbed his radio and called for back-up. The Haitian man who had decked Volpe ran away,
along with some of his friends. The cop, however, was enraged and began yelling at other
on-lookers still milling outside the club.
"The white cops started with some racial stuff," Abner
Louima, 30, told Mike McAlray of the New York Daily News on August 12 from his bed
at an Intensive Care Unit at Brooklyn's Coney Island Hospital. "They said, 'Why do
you people come to this country if you can't speak English?' They called us n*ggers."
Abner Louima did not think he was involved because he had just been a bystander watching
events. "A cop said to shut up. I didn't think he was talking to me," Abner
continued. "He pushed me to the ground and handcuffed my hands. Two cops put me in
their patrol car and drove to the corner of Glenwood [Road] and Nostrand [Avenue]"
(which is about 2 blocks from the Rendez-Vous). "There was another car there. They
kicked [me] and beat me with their radios. They were yelling, 'You people can't even talk
English, I am going to teach you how to respect a cop.' None of the cops had their name
tags on. They put me back in the car and drove me to the corner of Glenwood and Beford
[Avenue]" (a darker and more deserted area another 2 blocks away, just north of
Brooklyn College campus). "They met two other cops and beat me again. This time in
the legs, too."
But Louima's ordeal was only just beginning as he was now taken to the 70th Precinct by
the 4 cops involved in these beatings--Volpe and his partner Charles
Schwartz, 31, along with Thomas Wiese, 33, and his
partner Thomas Bruder, 34. The cops arrived with Louima,
already battered, at the 70th Precinct on Lawrence Street just off Ocean Parkway at 4:50
a.m. [The Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes] said
that, in public in front of the main booking desk, Louima was stripped from the waist down
to supposedly search for weapons or drugs. "My pants were down around my ankles in
full view of the other cops," Louima recounted. "They walked me over to the
bathroom and closed the door."
"There were two cops. One said 'You n*ggers have to learn to respect police
officers.' The other one said, 'If you yell or make any noise, I will kill you.' Then one
held me and the other shoved the plunger up my behind. He pulled it out, shoved it in my
mouth, broke my teeth and said, 'That's your sh*t, n*gger.'"
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