Why does it feel like it’s 1991?
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Doreen Sheldon grew up in Albany’s South End and used to walk past the police station then known as Division 2 on her way to school. She was raised to have respect for law enforcement.
Now 77, Sheldon also remembers the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till by a white mob in Mississippi. “Why don’t they like us?” she remembers asking her grandmother.
I called Sheldon at her home in Wilmington, Del. (“Joe Biden’s town,” she said), after she initially reached out to Harry Rosenfeld, who was the Times Union’s editor on the morning of Jan. 3, 1991, when Sheldon’s 21-year-old son was found dead in a Division 2 cell.
The police and every other official finding concluded that Corey Sheldon, who had been arrested at his cousin’s South End residence as a suspect in a Washington Park robbery two weeks earlier, had committed suicide by hanging himself with a National Guard field jacket that he had been allowed to wear inside the cell, which according to police accounts was chilly.
His mother remembers getting the news. “They came to our house in the morning, and they came up to the steps and said, ‘Come to the hospital’ — because he had been hurt,” she said.
Police said he was discovered in his cell at 8:15 a.m.; he was pronounced dead at 12:35 p.m. The state Commission of Correction concluded months later the death was from asphyxiation resulting from a suicide attempt.
The family’s $40 million lawsuit against the city — which alleged the young man has been “subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment and suffered an intentional killing or wrongful death,” such as what would result from a failure to detect a propensity for self-harm — was dismissed in 1996.
Able journalists for the Times Union explored the incident in its immediate aftermath and again in recent years and found no additional evidence that Sheldon was killed, and this column won’t bring anything new to light.
But what struck me as I went through the paper’s archives was how the outrage that coalesced around the death of Corey Sheldon echoed what we had heard in the streets of Albany — and Troy, Schenectady, Glens Falls and elsewhere around the region — in the two weeks since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Division 2 is now known as South Station, where the first bursts of violence broke out a week ago after what had been a day of peaceful protests.
In 1991, the city’s police force was led by its first black chief, John Dale — who had also been the city’s first black detective and its first black supervisor. Dale called Sheldon’s death a tragedy but insisted he had not been the victim of violence; the chief and Mayor Thomas M. Whalen III
decried what they saw as activists’ attempts to capitalize on it. They singled out Alice Green of the Center for Law and Justice and attorney Mark Mishler, two figures who remain central to the city’s social justice efforts.
On Friday, Green gave a short intake of breath when I mentioned Corey Sheldon’s name. It was a reminder of just how long she has been engaged in this work. “We keep doing this every time someone is killed,” she said with a mix of weariness and anger.
A week after Sheldon’s death, a meeting of community stakeholders was held to discuss the incident and the broader problem of black residents’ distrust of law enforcement.
“I was scared (to speak out) but I couldn’t take it any more,” Carolyn Edmonds, an Arbor
Hill businesswoman, said at the meeting, according to the Times Union’s report. “I have seen people harassed, abused, beaten and charged for no reason at all.” She had seen “good officers, too.”
Those are sentiments that could have come from Arbor Hill on Monday, when demonstrators blocked Henry Johnson Boulevard and lay down on the pavement to re-enact Floyd’s death.
Another line from the January 1991 meeting, spoken by someone who was not identified in the resulting story: “When we start tearing up s__, we’ll get better taken care of.” That furious, sorrowful expression hasn’t aged a day, and I’d very much like to track down the speaker and ask them, almost 30 years older, what they’re thinking.
Back in January 1991, that sentiment was a harbinger of the fury that would follow the beating of Los Angeles resident Rodney King at the hands of four white cops. That episode was captured by an onlooker on his deck wielding a camcorder — the first significant example of the sort of citizen copwatching now being practiced by everyone with a smartphone, meaning everyone.
Doreen Sheldon, who worked for decades at a now-shuttered local nursing home, still believes her son died due to police misconduct. As the father of a son only a year younger than Corey Sheldon was when he died, I can’t imagine living with the pain of that kind of loss. The trauma never ends.
She and her husband moved to Delaware more than a decade ago to be close to another one of their children.
“I can’t live in Albany,” she said. “I can’t even go there.”