Movie addresses slaying’s effects on victim’s kin
TELEVISION The filmmaker titled “Strong Island” after a hip-hop term for the region popularized in the 1990s by the rap group Public Enemy.
The shooting death of William Ford, a 24-year-old schoolteacher from Central Islip, New York, is the focus of “Strong Island,” an emotionally charged documentary made by one of Ford’s younger siblings.
In April 1992, Ford went to the auto-body shop Super Stang, where he got into an argument with the owner about a recent repair to a car belonging to his girlfriend.
Though unarmed, Ford was fatally shot by an employee, Mark Reilly, with a .22-caliber rifle, according to Suffolk police.
Reilly was charged with manslaughter but claimed self-defense, noting that an angry Ford had been to the garage once previously and allegedly had thrown a vacuum cleaner. A grand jury declined to indict Reilly, and the case files remain sealed.
The reason for the dismissal, according to filmmaker Yance Ford, is that William Ford was African-American and Reilly is white, as were members of the grand jury.
Such a conclusion might strike some people as a “typical liberal agenda,” Ford acknowledged in a recent interview, but he added: “Suspend your belief that you already know this story. Because you don’t.”
Ford’s film, streaming on Netflix, isn’t a journalistic expose of a flawed legal system or an attempt to retry a particular case. It is a first-person account of a tragic death that left the victim's family feeling that justice hasn't been done.
“I can’t help but ask the litmus-test question,” Ford said in the interview. “If the roles were reversed, where would my brother be today? If your answer is jail, or parole, then there’s only one way to explain it.”
“Strong Island” makes the case that segregation and racism on Long Island are to blame. In the wake of his brother’s death, Ford says, his family was harassed by unexplained phone calls at night and followed home by unidentified cars.
Barbara Ford describes testifying before an all-white grand jury that, she says, seemed uninterested in her story.
“How could you come to a viable decision if you’re reading a magazine?” she says in the film. “I will die believing that they didn’t care because my son was a young man of color. I will always believe that.”
Ford says he looked for Reilly to include in the film, even hiring a private investigator. “But I stopped and asked myself, 'Why am I doing this?' Mark Reilly already said everything he had to say to me when he shot and killed my brother.”
He titled “Strong Island” after a hip-hop term for the region that was popularized in the 1990s by the local rap group Public Enemy. Although the title evokes both the time and place of his brother’s death, Ford says, he also used it in hopes of grabbing the attention of a younger generation.
“This is something you’re going to be interested in,” he says, "something that actually does concern you and your life.”