A Boy's Death Ignites Clashes in Crown Heights (original) (raw)
New York|A Boy's Death Ignites Clashes in Crown Heights
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/21/nyregion/a-boy-s-death-ignites-clashes-in-crown-heights.html
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- Aug. 21, 1991
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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August 21, 1991
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Hasidim and blacks clashed in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn through the day and into the night yesterday as the two communities, separately and bitterly, each mourned a member killed, one in a traffic accident on Monday night and the other stabbed in the racial melee that followed.
Bottles, rocks and ethnic slurs were hurled as hundreds of police officers struggled to separate the screaming, taunting groups near the headquarters of the Lubavitcher sect, at 770 Eastern Parkway.
As darkness fell, about 500 blacks, mostly young teen-agers, gathered at the intersection of President Street and Utica Avenue, where the accident had occurred and where the dead child had lived. They, set afire at least three vehicles, one a police car, hurled rocks at houses owned by Jews and looted a sneaker store. Five reporters and photographers were beaten, two by police officers and three by black protesters. Collision and a Clash
The Dinkins administration voiced fears that the turmoil in a neighborhood where there has long been friction between blacks and the tightly-knit, Orthodox Lubavitcher community could worsen the city's already tense racial atmosphere.
The trouble began on Monday night when a car driven by a Hasidic man jumped a sidewalk and killed a 7-year-old black boy, Gavin Cato, and critically injured his cousin of the same age, Angela Cato. Word of the crash spread throughout the central Brooklyn neighborhood and brought out hundreds of blacks, mostly teen-agers, who surrounded the scene, some throwing bottles and jeering the police. As some angry youths roamed the neighborhood, a Jewish student from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, was stabbed. He died in a hospital yesterday morning, and two teen-agers were arrested in the killing. 'Our Streets!'
The confrontations were fueled by rumors that the Hasidim involved in the car accident were given medical attention before the black children.
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