FINALLY BACK HOME WITH MOMMY
DA zaps raps in yank case
The mom whose baby was yanked from her arms by NYPD cops in a dust-up that went viral was reunited with her child Tuesday night after prosecutors dropped charges and a judge ordered her released from Rikers Island.
“I just need to see my boy,” Jazmine Headley told reporters outside her Bed-Stuy home after she was released from the jail, where she had been held since last Friday’s incident.
“I just want to thank everybody for all the support I’ve been getting in New York,” she added. “I’m just so grateful to everyone.”
Headley hustled inside her apartment after making the brief statement, but her mother released photos of the reunion.
In one photo, Headley hugs her smiling son in front of the family’s decorated Christmas tree.
Headley became a cause célèbre when her 17- month-old son, Damone Buckman III, was wrested from her by NYPD and Human Resources Administration officers at a Boerum Hill benefits center .
The 23-year-old single mom had taken the day off from work to sort out an issue with her child-care credit, and ended up sitting on the floor of the Bergen Street center after four hours of standing because there were no empty chairs, Brooklyn Defender Services, which is representing Headley, has previously said.
HRA-officer union leader Greg Floyd of Local 237on Tuesday disputed the claim that there were no open seats.
Two HRA officers have been placed on leave amid an investigation, and the NYPD has announced its own probe of the incident.
Headley was arrested and arraigned on charges that included acting in a manner injurious to a child, but the Brooklyn district attorney on Tuesday dropped the case.
“Continuing to pursue this case will not serve any purpose and I therefore moved today to dismiss it immediately in the interest of justice,” DA Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.
The final hurdle was cleared Tuesday afternoon, when Judge Craig Walker, at an emergency hearing, ordered Headley’s immediate release.
She was being held on an outstanding New Jersey warrant related to her 2017 failure to appear in a credit-card-fraud case, and her release was conditional on her reporting to court in Mercer County, NJ, Wednesday to clear up the matter.
Headley’s lawyers set up a GoFundMe page Tuesday to raise money for her to “get back on her feet.” It surpassed its $25,000 goal, with more than $28,000 as of 1 a.m. Wednesday.
Everyone agrees: Friday’s incident at the Brooklyn HRA office, where cops fought to pry a baby from his screaming mom, should never have happened. And there’s a ton of blame to go around here. Police Commissioner James O’Neill immediately ordered an investigation into the nightmare, and rightly so: His officers’ use of force to wrestle away the child — a 17-month
old baby! — looks massively excessive. Yet the mom, Jazmine Headley, reportedly refused to move from the floor where she was sitting. As patrolmen’s-union chief Pat Lynch notes, “The event would have unfolded much differently if those at the scene had simply complied with the officers’ lawful orders.”
Headley’s lawyer, Lisa Schreibersdorf, argues that, with no chairs available, her client was forced to sit on the floor after standing nearly four hours waiting to discuss benefits with an HRA agent.
But Teamsters Local 237 boss Greg Floyd, who represents HRA guards, says his mem- bers told him there were open chairs. And Headley, he added, bit one of the guards.
OK, there may well be more to the story than what’s seen on that viral video. Yet surely the cops and the guards could’ve tried harder to defuse the situation.
Why call in the police rather than an HRA social worker to calm the mom down? And what of the de-escalation training the NYPD rolled out after the fatal 2014 takedown of Eric Garner as he resisted arrest? It clearly didn’t help much here.
HRA also bears blame for operating centers that get so overcrowded and forcing clients to wait so long. The average wait runs a full hour, the agency says; that means some go far longer. That’s not only inhumane; it invites just the kind of chaos that erupted Friday.
Noting that “this indictment should have been handled differently,” Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez has dropped all charges against Headley. In fact, everything in this mess should’ve been handled differently.