Starve mom stays in jail
VANDALS splattered red paint on the horseback statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History early Thursday, attacking the 26th President as a colonialist oppressor.
The paint was found covering nearly the entire the base of the statue — depicting the famed Rough Rider and New York police commissioner on horseback, flanked by a black man and an American Indian — about 7:15 a.m., cops said. It’s believed the vandalism happened sometime after 4 a.m.
“Now the statue is bleeding,” the vandals said in a manifesto found on a Tumblr site for the monument removal brigade. “We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation.”
Protesters have called for the Upper West Side statue to be taken down in the past, claiming it’s a symbol of white supremacy.
No words were written in the paint.
A few hours later, a group claiming responsibility for the defilement described the act as “a work of public art and an act of applied art criticism.”
“We have no intent to damage a mere statue,” the vandals wrote. “The true damage lies with patriarchy, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism embodied by the statue. It is these forms of oppression that must be damaged again and again … until they are damaged out of existence.”
They claimed the Roosevelt statue “not only embodies the violent historical foundation of the United States, but also the underlying dynamics of oppression in our contemporary world.”
They demanded that the museum remove the artwork.
But the museum has left that decision to City Hall, which has formed a special commission to review whether the city should keep, ditch or alter monuments with controversial histories.
While the city would not say what statues are being investigated, they are reviewing past recommendations made by the public, including demands to remove the city’s Christopher Columbus statues. A statue depicting the explorer in Central Park was vandalized last month.
Yet one shouldn’t resort to throwing paint to make one’s point, a city official said.
“There’s no place for vandalism in this conversation,” said Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, who co-chairs Mayor de Blasio’s monument commission.
The city is launching an online survey inviting New Yorkers to weigh in on which statues should stay or go.
The bronze Roosevelt sculpture by James Earle Fraser was unveiled at the museum’s entrance on Central Park West in 1940. A STATEN ISLAND judge denied bail Thursday to a mom accused of starving her 7-month-old son to death, authorities said.
Anwar Jawad, 25, kept her head down during her arraignment.
Prosecutors painted a horrific picture of neglect that led to the death of little Dameen Mohammed on Jan. 7.
“There were bones sticking out through his skin. It was clear that this child had been left unattended for a long period of time, neglected, not fed, not nourished and dehydrated,” said Prosecutor Wanda DeOliveira.
Dameen was dead for more than 24 hours when Jawad and her mother brought him to NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn. “The baby was presented with no pulse, in the early stages of decomposition,” DeOliveira said.
Cops reclassified the child’s death as a homicide in September. Jawad is charged with murder.