HER DEATH, OUR FEARS AND OUR CITY

How reactions to the killing of Tessa Majors echo 30 years ago, even as the times do not

Majors was accosted and killed by the steps in Morningside Park that ascend the natural cliff that separates Barnard and the Columbia campus in Morningside Heights from West Harlem. Going back to my teenage years in the early 1990s, the park had a reputation as a dangerous place after dark and even during the day for college students and families alike. This year, the park, just 30 acres, lived up to its old reputation with a series of violent assaults committed by young teenagers and the most robberies of any city park, including at least five by or on the staircase.

There are more college students in New York than there are people in Baltimore. A newly arrived college student murdered by a stranger in a street crime is the worst fear of a million mothers and fathers across the country.

Majors was wearing running shoes, and some news reports had her jogging down the stairs when she was accosted. That’s the worst fear of a million women, realized by Central Park jogger Trisha Meili and Spring Creek Park jogger Karina Vetrano.

Many New York families — White, Black, Hispanic and Asian — have had to give up the pleasure of a leisurely stroll in the Park at dusk, the Sunday visit to the playground with their families, the bike ride at dawn, or just sitting on their stoops

— given them up as hostages ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter… How can our society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!

Meantime, the worst fear of a million parents in New York City is their child being railroaded, like in the confessions coerced from the so-called Central Park Five for the rape, assault and robbery of Meili (then publicly known only as the Central Park jogger) and the questionable methods by which police and prosecutors found and then finally convicted Chanel Lewis for the 2016 murder of Vetrano.

Referring to the arrest this week of Majors’ alleged killers, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer Friday said that “There are just more questions than answers. Who was with a 13-yearold, and how would he confess so fast? We need a lot more information before we believe anything.”

The police — again under tremendous pressure in a front-page case — have offered a credible account of how they found the first teen, who reportedly had a knife on him when he was stopped because he was wearing an outfit matching that worn by one of the attackers, and was accompanied by his uncle and guardian when he was questioned and confessed.

Still, history suggests reasons for caution.

The Central Park Five — also teenagers as young as 14 at the time of the jogger’s attack — were questioned for hours, some without any adults present, before they confessed. Several of them may have been brought in for questioning and then decided to confess in part because they’d been members of group of teens that night roaming the park attacking other New Yorkers.

In Vetrano’s case, the police still haven’t delivered a credible account of how they found Lewis, who was 20 when she was murdered in 2016 in Spring Creek Park. Police gave reporters different and unlikely stories on background, and then dubious sworn accounts in court, where it also emerged that they had engaged in and kept hidden from his defense attorneys throughout his first trial (which ended in a hung jury) what his attorneys at his second trial (where he was convicted) called a “race-based dragnet,” collecting