When I was reading this, I didn’t realize how dark it would be in just the first paragraph. It started off normally where the woman was working, and then she came home and took a jog. However, when the story said she took a jog at central park late at night, I knew something bad was going to happen; and I was right. She got raped and suffered inhumane injuries that would scar anyone for life. The jogger was hospitalized and took many months to fully recover. After fifteen months, her brain was still damaged, and that prevented her from functioning normally. She couldn’t focus her eyes or walk without assistance, lost her sense of spell, and couldn’t read without experiencing double vision. Doctors believed that she lost these functions permanently.
It was believed that African-Americans were responsible for this incident, and it led to an “emotional undertow” in American black history. People used to believe that deep inside African Americans, they fantasize raping white woman. Black men were accused of raping white woman despite that they weren’t, and yet, black women were being raped by their slave master white man, and that sometimes even lead to a birth of a mixed baby. If a white woman ever says that a black man gave them a look, that black man would be hung with a white audience enjoying their view.
Prosecutors targeting minors for this case, and it was common to hide the names of minors from the public, but this time, they released the names because they believed the case to be very serious. One kid named Yusef Salaam was fifteen years old at the time, and he was being interrogated. New York state law required that kids fifteen years old and under require a parent for an interrogation, and the district attorney lied that he was sixteen years old. Then during court, the district attorney told David Nocenti, Yusef’s attorney, that Yusef had no legal standing in the case because of his age, but yet, she still interrogated him without his mom by his side.
This incident brought out unlawful, hypocrisy actions being down by authorities, and stirred the racism that was deep down in people.