Controversial Black Man Beat and Tortured by Buffalo Police Again

by Chris Stevenson
 
  It seems that for the 2nd time in 15 months members of the Buffalo Police department physically assaulted the same man who was beaten in his home and possibly saved from being strangled to death by a black female officer. I use the word allegedly because this is a news report and not the op-ed column I generally do. There is nothing whatsoever alleged about the bruises and cuts this writer saw on the face of Neal David Mack on the night of 2/6/08. Following up on a call I received from Police Officer Cariol Horne-the principle officer who intervened when Mack; an African American, was already pummeled and was being strangled by white police officer Gregory Kwiatkowski- I accompanied their attorney Anthony Pendergrass to the Erie County Medical Center (ECMC) to inquire if he was there. Pendergrass was already out searching for Mack's whereabouts since there evidently was no record of his being in custody.

  Understanding the close relationship between hospitals and police still didn't prepare me for what would transpire in the next few seconds. While Pendergrass was at the front desk, a black woman sitting on a bench behind me indicated that the man we were looking for was just escorted in. I walked into the emergency room area and looked around until I saw a man's head lying in a bed in one of the patient rooms. The head seemed to be of a dark-skinned black man and I knew Mack was light skinned but I went to get a closer look and it was him. Mr. Mack was lying down moving seemingly semi-consciously and his head was black and blue from the bumps and bruises of the beating he took. He recognized me as I approached him and I was then intercepted and arrested by officers, some who no-doubt brought him there.

                            
  For legal purposes I will not go into the details of my arrest and of course my mission was for all intent and purposes to find a missing person. I would find out later what Horne, Pendergrass and I suspected; that not only did they physically abuse Mack, but there was a long period of time between when the officers encountered him and the time he was admitted to ECMC. I interviewed Mack days after our release: "I was on Edison and Weston at the store, I went to the store and I came out and these guys was in the car and they said 'you look familiar' and I said 'you look familiar too.' The police kept going (driving) back and forth, I seen them before they seen me. The next thing I know they was going toward the car, they told them to come here. The kids got out the car, then all of a sudden they went towards the car and they ran. The cops took out a gun, they (the kids) took off running, so then they grabbed me.

  The car I was in was parked, I wasn't in no car... my sister said they probably recognized me, they was trying to get revenge on me." Mack said there were 2 officers that initially encountered him. Since the time of the 11/1/06 incident no official punishment was made toward officer Kwiatkowski or either Horne, but Horne has been on Injured On Duty status due to the blow she received from the much larger Kwiatkowski and that piece of indecision from Buffalo's Chief of Police H. McCarthy Gipson has made the case devolve into one that has racially divided the department as well as the citizens of the Buffalo community. Horne was expected to have been fired by now as the result of closed-door hearings but she let her reluctant union attorney take a walk and hired Pendergrass and co-counsel Dr. Kenneth Nixon; a Civil Rights attorney and both fought to have the still-ongoing hearings made public. Around that time Buffalo's local major media stepped in to counter the disclosures and view of the black media.

  Mack continues: "There was 2 cop cars going past but witnesses said there was about 9 altogether. I know there was a few of them and they had me and one cop said 'you remember me? And kicked me in my head, trying to crush my head to the cement while I was lying on the ground... that's why the bruises were all upside my head like that." Mack says most of the officers were white: "I seen one black cop looking, I figured he he was going to help but he was back there and he's looking." According to Mack it was about 5pm when he first encountered these officers: "I was supposed to pick my son up at 5:30 (from playing basketball ironically in the gym located at the same Bailey Ave Precinct the officers work out of), so it must have been 5(pm).... they beat me for a while but the witnesses seen it because they said I was dazed. They knocked me upside my head man and they (witnesses) said after they beat me, they sat me in the car. It must have been for a long time, you know why? Because my son I'm supposed to be picking up from Langfield, I looked out the window, I heard my son say 'what is he charged with?' And they threatened him like he's going to be arrested, like they had you, remember.?"

  Mack, who recognized me and witnessed much of what happened with my own arrest while he was at ECMC, then said that after his son arrived at the scene the officers tried to disperse all the surrounding witnesses: "they didn't know other people were taking pictures the whole time." Mack then stated that he was driven to the E. District Station but was not escorted inside the precinct building (Buffalo arrestees as a rule are driven to the downtown Central Booking or Holding Center, not the arresting officer's precinct). He alleges several squad cars drove to the back of the building in a clandestine manner: "They stuck my head between the car and the door so they could crush my head, instead of loosening my handcuffs they tightened them more and I thought my hands were going to pop off.

  What they did, they rode right to the precinct, they pulled in the back and they sat there for at least a half-hour. Right in the back in the Bailey and Langfield Precinct and 3 more cop cars sat there too and they was laughing. Lt. Leatherbarrow and Cooley, I remember those 2, I was talking to them. Cooley, I was asking why he was acting like that, I said 'you got any kids?' He said yeah, I said 'and you acting like this? You don't even know me,' so Leatherbarrow, he's the one that kept telling me he didn't want to hear it. I was naming Internal Affairs people, he said 'what they gonna do? He said 'what the heck they gonna do? they ain't gonna do nothing!'"

  Truth be told, Buffalo's Internal Affairs (they actually call it Professional Standards) is notorious for not being notorious. By-and-large only black officers are really investigated and penalized. There is virtually no fear of PSD consequences from white police officers in Buffalo. This makes the entire department a white boys club in the truest extreme even though it is laced with black officers in high positrons and a lot of black POs. A source named some of the officers involved in Mack's incident; Thomas Leatherbarrow, William J. Cooley, Raymond Harrington, John Gueli, Robert Marth and Kevin Kindzerski. The officer that allegedly kicked Mack in the head may have encountered Mack at his home during the Horne/Kwiatkowski incident. According to Mack's attorney Anthony Pendergrass, the officers were blatantly on their own program and the beatings began before 5pm: "He was dispatched at the hospital around 6:15 (pm). in fact he was in custody from 4:20 when the call first came out. They tortured him, they did what US forces are doing in Iraq. They were fighting him at 4:30, at least that's what their radio calls say."

  Mack says the officers made him sit in the squad car behind their precinct with the radio blasting rock music in order to come up with a story to justify or cover over their brutal treatment of him. He added resisting arrest was an initial charge but they hadn't yet figured out what the arrest was for. Apparently Mack's much controversial choking incident with Officer Kwiatkowski was partly on the minds of at least some of the officers in this latest incident. Beneath the wave of the Horne hearings is the ongoing accusations and arrests of people connected to the principles of the 11/1/06 Horne/Kwiatkowski incident that has even reached the Commissioners Office.

  This newest alleged beating of Mack seems at the outset to be a bone-headed attempt to make the dept. score points out of some bizarre high-school-level homage to Officer Kwiatkowski (in Buffalo the worst cops are revered by other officers and these are not the white community's best and brightest), or attempt to indirectly discredit Horne by singling out Mack. He also alleges they stuck a needle in his rear early during the encounter and tried to plant drugs on him: "Cooley... I busted him out, he kept saying 'face the wall!' and I turned and he kept going in my wallet. I said 'man what you going in my wallet for, he started taking my papers and reading through them. Then I see him going into his pocket, he had a yellow package... he tried to put them in my pocket, I seen him. I said 'what you trying to do... I said I'm looking dead at you man. He put them back in his pocket and he kept telling the other cops, he said 'yeah it's gonna look good when he go gets his coat... they gonna catch him with it right on him.'"

  According to Mack one of the officers was wearing a glove while searching his pocket and they spread a gooey substance in his left-hand pocket and at some point at the hospital the officers held him down while a thin white doctor shot another needle in him: "They took me to the hospital a couple hours later, I don't know whatever time it was... it was dark. In the daytime they was beating me... when you was there that's when they started kicking everybody out. After they grabbed you, they got nervous, they said 'Pendergrass is out there and Carol.' They got nervous man... so they took me out the side door." Mack denies resisting arrest, having crack on him and stealing a car, he says the car he drove was rented by his sister. Buffalo's Public Information could not be reached at this time.

  I make no bones about my going to search for Mr. Mack in the dead of night in spite of a weather advisory as well as a wife advisory (she still thinks I'm insane for doing it); it needed to be done. Given the same set of circumstances I'd do the exact same thing. This is not just another example of police brutality, it was an emphasis on torture and in his case payback. Local activists came out to support us unbeknownst to me at the time, including Sam Radford of the BLAC and newspaper columnist and talk radio host Ted Kirkland who offered to bail me out (as did another activist Diana Goodwin later on). Community groups will rally in front of City Court in Buffalo on our next date of March 5th 9:30am.
 
Chris Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Criterion. Contact him at pointblankdta@yahoo