Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura

But past the porch of the Victorian town house a rich interior reveals itself: tall ceilings, a mahogany staircase, stained glass doors and picture frames virtually untouched since the home was built in 1856.

The house, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, has an even more remarkable story — Byas’ father, a teacher who was born into a family of former slaves in South Carolina, bought it in 1957 for $7,500.

But now the house is going through a tumultuous chapter. Byas, 54, is working to reclaim it after she was duped into signing away her property deed, according to federal prosecutors. Though the house is worth about $1.2 million, she gave it up, unwittingly, for $120,000.

“I pride myself as a true New Yorker — angry, skeptical, not trusting,” Byas said. “But I felt like the stupidest person on the planet.”

A booming real estate market in Brooklyn is fueling a crime that law enforcement authorities say has taken hold in largely African American neighborhoods that are being gentrified — deed theft, which involves deceiving or sometimes coercing a homeowner into signing forms that transfer ownership of a property.

In many cases, a homeowner is made to believe the documents involve some type of financial assistance but turn out to be the property deed.

Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, both known for their collection of largely intact town houses that cost a fraction of what similar homes sell for in Manhattan, have become hotbeds for deed theft, according to law enforcement authorities. Homeowners in Prospect Heights, Brownsville and East New York have also been targeted.

Of the nearly 3,000 deed fraud complaints recorded by the city since 2014, 1,350 — about 45% — have come from Brooklyn, according to data compiled by the city’s Department of Finance. (The borough accounts for roughly 30% of the city’s housing units.)

Authorities believe the problem may be more widespread since homeowners may not realize right away that they have been victimized.

“It’s just a drop in the bucket,” Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said at a recent town hall meeting in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “It’s really hot in the real estate market in Brooklyn. People want to steal our homes.”

In Byas’ case, which led to the arrest of a man and his son, the aim was to flip her home and try to resell it to buyers who have been flocking to central Brooklyn seeking more affordable homes in lower-income neighborhoods.

Those orchestrating the schemes often hide behind limited liability companies and shell companies, making it difficult for homeowners to determine if they are being swindled and by whom.

“By the time a homeowner realizes what has happened, the home may have already been sold or mortgaged multiple times,” said Christie Peale, executive director of the Center for NYC Neighborhoods, a nonprofit organization that helps homeowners.

Even though rising property values in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant have provided homeowners with more equity, many remain cash poor.

As they grow older or lose a spouse, their homes can accumulate liens stemming from unpaid property taxes or water and sewage charges, making them vulnerable to fraudsters who often search public records to identify homeowners under financial stress.

“Deed theft has become a common tool of career criminals and unscrupulous real estate developers to illegally obtain real estate, most often with the goal of selling it at a huge profit in high-demand housing markets,” Letitia James, the state attorney general, said in an email.

Dairus Griffiths, 65, has been mired in a five-year legal battle to recoup his home in Bedford-Stuyvesant after he was ensnared in a scheme and ended up giving up the house, which was worth $1.3 million, for $630,000.

Griffiths was facing foreclosure after a tenant stopped paying rent, causing him to fall behind on his mortgage payments.

Not long after foreclosure proceedings began, a man named Eli Mashieh approached Griffiths claiming to run August West Development, a real estate firm in Queens, according to Theresa Trzaskoma, Griffiths’ lawyer.

He told Griffiths that he was going to lose his house and offered him a cash advance, Trzaskoma said. Feeling pressured and fearful that he would soon be evicted, Griffiths signed a document selling his home for $630,000, believing it was a preliminary sales agreement that he would have the chance to reconsider.

After talking to his daughter, Griffiths did try to cancel the sale, but when he called Mashieh he refused, saying it was a done deal. Mashieh obtained a default judgment, and the sale eventually went through.

“It made me feel defeated, because my dad, he was a hardworking man,” said Griffiths’ daughter, Doris Briggs. “I feel like he was taken advantage of because the house is in a neighborhood that’s growing.”

But Daniel Richland, a lawyer for Mashieh, refuted Griffiths’ claims and said a court had effectively ruled that the sale was legitimate.

Some homeowners may not even know that their deeds have been stolen, authorities say. Documents proving the sale of a property are recorded by the city registrar’s office but not necessarily checked to ensure that they are legitimate. Owners might continue paying the mortgage for a property they no longer own.

“It is, in fact, easier to steal ownership of a home than actually burglarizing it,” said Travis Hill, who oversees real estate fraud for the state attorney general’s office.

Recovering a home whose deed has been illegally transferred can be difficult unless there is clear proof of wrongdoing, like a forged signature. In one case, authorities arrested a man accused of committing fraud because the signature on a deed came from someone who had been dead for years.

It is also challenging to determine whether the person had entered a bad, but not necessarily fraudulent, financial deal. “It’s often a very hard line to straddle,” said Noelle Eberts, a lawyer at the New York Legal Assistance Group who represents Byas.

In Byas’ case, two men, Herzel Meiri, 64, and his son, Amir, set up a limited liability company called Launch Development.

The two men instructed employees to search online for financially distressed properties in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, according an indictment filed by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Byas was among 60 homeowners the men, along with five other accomplices, were accused of swindling.

The men described themselves as foreclosure specialists who helped property owners with loan modifications or promised that they would be able to transfer their properties to trusted relatives to avoid losing their homes.

Homeowners were encouraged to sign documents that were later used as proof they had agreed to sell their homes to Launch Development, prosecutors said.

The company also deceived banks into approving the sale of homes by providing falsified documents, including paperwork edited or completed after homeowners had signed them.

“Launch Development resold many of the homes, which were purchased at fraudulently deflated prices, for an enormous profit,” the indictment read.

The Meiris pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. Herzel Meiri was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in August 2018, and Amir Meiri to five years’ imprisonment in November 2018.

Byas’ ordeal began in 2008, after she learned she had multiple sclerosis and could no longer work. By 2014, she owed about $69,000 in unpaid mortgage payments and other bills and was facing foreclosure.

She believed a second mortgage would prevent her from losing her home.

One day, a young man rang her doorbell claiming he worked for Homeowners Assistance Services of New York, an organization specializing in foreclosures that turned out to be linked to Launch Development.

He was polite, had a cherubic face and was someone Byas said she would feel comfortable inviting to a cookout. “When you’re in a panic, you think, ‘I can’t believe my luck,’ ” she said.

After several visits from the man, Byas was taken by a private car service to Launch Development’s offices in Queens, where she described being, at various turns, cajoled or pressed into signing reams of documents. Instead of a loan agreement, she had signed a deed document, giving away the title to her home.

In total, the company schemed to buy her home for $120,000, about 10% of the property’s value. She was able to show that she had been swindled because the check came from Launch Development, which had been on the radar of law enforcement authorities.

Still, five years later, the title to her property is in the hands of the government, and she is waiting to hear when she will get it back.

“We were living the American dream,” Byas said. “This is a house that your ancestors worked for. They came from nothing.”

This article originally appeared in

Why Black Homeowners in Brooklyn Are Being Victimized by Fraud

NEW YORK — Broadies Byas’ home is a hidden gem. From the outside, it looks unassuming, if somewhat neglected.

But now a strategy to tackle racial inequity in the school district is challenging the town’s self-image, casting a harsh light on segregation and the stark achievement gaps between black and white students — and raising pointed questions about race and class.

In the district that serves Maplewood and its neighbor, South Orange, the plan is to eliminate guaranteed seats in neighborhood elementary schools, bus children to other buildings and reduce the grouping of students by test scores, which has resulted in white students filling a disproportionate share of higher-level classes.

Though children of all backgrounds would be bused, a significant number would likely be white because of school enrollment trends.

Johanna Wright, a member of the district’s board of education, said the clear racial disparities in the system should make everyone feel the need to respond.

“There can be no more lying about the racism that infects public education in our school district,” she said.

While the district is generally considered high performing based on measurements like standardized test scores and the number of high school graduates bound for college, there are major differences between white students and black students.

The school district has, as far back as the 1960s, made efforts to racially integrate its schools — including using busing. But critics say some of the schools have struggled to achieve the ultimate goal of full integration. While Marshall &amp; Jefferson Elementary Schools have participated in busing before, Seth Boyden Elementary School has not.

Black students in the district are, on average, academically three grades behind their white peers and are five times likelier to be suspended than white students, according to an analysis in 2017 by ProPublica. On state tests in math and language arts, black students lagged behind their white classmates in all seven elementary schools.

And though the district has just one high school, white and black students have disparate experiences. White students made up 64% of the students who took Advanced Placement courses at Columbia High School, the ProPublica analysis found, while black students represented just 22%. In classes geared toward gifted and talented students, 83% of the seats were filled by white students, compared with the 7% of seats filled by black students.

“You can peer through a doorway of a classroom and you can tell, based on the racial makeup of the class, what level it is,” said Walter Fields, leader of the Black Parents Workshop, a local advocacy group that filed a lawsuit this year accusing the district of discriminating against students of color.

In private Facebook groups and online forums, the district’s initiatives have set off impassioned clashes: Some parents say neighborhood schools provide convenience and familiarity; others worry that their children will be placed in less rigorous classes, and some question the district’s commitment to improving the treatment of black and Hispanic students.

Elizabeth Payne, a parent, was one of the few residents willing to talk openly about her opposition to busing, saying it was pointless unless the towns addressed economic disparity first. She said it would cause problems “down the line.”

“They don’t really put kids first at all,” Payne said in an interview. “And I don’t think that shipping them across town to another school is going to help.”

Across the country, school districts are grappling with similar issues involving segregation and racial inequities.

The topic has also seeped into the race for the White House after Sen. Kamala Harris took former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading Democratic contender, to task for his past opposition to busing.

On the surface, Maplewood and South Orange are fairly diverse — about 60% of the combined population of 42,000 is white, while the rest of the residents are people of color. And the towns are well-off; the median household income in both communities exceeds $120,000, more than double the national average.

But housing patterns have divided the district. Of its seven elementary schools, one is predominantly nonwhite students, while the rest are majority white. The school with more students of color lags behind the others in academic achievement and has a higher concentration of low-income students.

While the schools, like the towns, are diverse, students are often separated by race. White students represent about half of the roughly 7,100 students. African Americans make up 35%, and the rest are Hispanic, Asian or of mixed race, according to the census.

But those figures mask significant differences in the elementary schools.

At Seth Boyden Elementary School, which is in a section of Maplewood that is less well-off than other parts of the district, 57% of the 522 students are black. The highest African American enrollment in the town’s other elementary schools is 18%.

Over half the students at Seth Boyden receive free or reduced-price lunches; in the town’s other elementary schools that figure never climbs above 20%.

The district has long tried to address the differences by allowing white parents to send their children to Seth Boyden, though that has largely failed to rectify the imbalance. Black parents at Seth Boyden had not been allowed to send their children to other schools until 18 months ago, when the district ended that policy.

“To find a segregated elementary school in probably one of the most progressive towns in New Jersey, I mean, on the East Coast outside of New York, I don’t know how that happened there,” said Thomas Ficarra, who started the integration effort during the 20 months he served as interim superintendent, before leaving in June. “It was astounding to me.”

Ronald Taylor, who took over as superintendent in July after leading another New Jersey school district, said in emailed responses to written questions that the integration plan was still evolving and was “far from complete.’’ He said he was confident that once finished and “properly rolled out,’’ it would help achieve racial equity.

Taylor said he did not have enough information to address questions about the achievement gap. “I am in the earliest stages of my appointment and cannot make rushed judgment of our challenges,” he said.

In 2014, after the federal Office of Civil Rights found black students significantly underrepresented in advanced classes, the district agreed to hire a consultant to develop solutions. But the consultant, Thelma Ramsey, left without producing a plan.

Ramsey said school officials and some parents thwarted her efforts.

“In America, in order to have real equality, the other side thinks they have to give up something: ‘If I give you two pennies, I’m going to lose one penny,’” said Ramsey, a school principal in New Jersey. “And that’s not it.”

The school district is aiming to address the educational disparities by adopting controlled choice — a system used elsewhere that is designed to ensure that schools reflect a community’s demographic and economic makeup. Parents would be allowed to rank their school choices, but there would be no guarantee they would get their top pick. Children would have to travel to other parts of the district.

School officials said many children already are bused to schools outside their neighborhoods, in part because of overcrowding.

Many details of the plan, which also includes spending $140 million to renovate and repair school buildings, have yet to be sorted out, and it is not expected to begin before September 2021.

Ficarra recalled how some parents reacted when the integration plan was first presented.

“We got the kind of resistance where people say, ‘We are very much in favor of total integration — but,’ ” he said.

Rhea Mokund-Beck, a leader of the South Orange-Maplewood Community Coalition on Race, a grassroots group, said the district’s integration plan was “the beginning of the conversation that in so many other places we don’t even have the opportunity to start.”

Parents and former students said they believed one reason black students have struggled is teacher bias in a district where the vast majority of the workforce is white. Of the district’s 712 school employees, 554 are white, while 123 are black.

White teachers need training to “step away from their biases,’’ Mokund-Beck said. “We need to make sure that students can opt in to challenging classes that have nothing to do with race.”

T.J. Whitaker, who teaches English at Columbia High School and is one of its few black teachers, said black students often begin high school having rarely read books by black authors.

He said officers are sometimes summoned to deal with unruly students, a practice he opposes. “We have to battle to keep the police out of the classroom,” he said. “We have to battle to have students access higher-level classes. We have battles we continuously have to fight.”

Khadijah White, who graduated from Columbia High School in 2000, remembers being told by a white teacher that she wasn’t smart enough to take high-level science classes, including an AP biology class. As a result, she said, she gave up her dream of becoming a forensic investigator.

“I was very much discouraged,” said White, who lives in Maplewood. She ended up getting a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is now an assistant professor of journalism at Rutgers University.

Some parents wonder whether the district’s integration plan can really close a persistent achievement gap.

At Columbia High School, White said, “The kids are all in the same building, and they’re still segregated. Who gets to be put in the top levels of the school, versus who gets put in the bottom levels?”

Some residents say the towns’ progressive self-promotion too often stops at the school door.

“Very liberal,” Whitaker, the high school teacher, said. “But rarely radical.”

A Suburb Believed in Liberal Ideals. Then Came a New Busing Plan.

MAPLEWOOD, N.J. — This suburb, with its high-performing schools, seems a haven of diversity and progressiveness. Signs that trumpet “Stigma-free Town” and “Hate Has No Home Here” hang from lampposts and, after a series of fatal police shootings across the country, “Black Lives Matter” placards popped up on lawns.

Alzorriz, 52, a bike-safety enthusiast from Spain, had just rolled up to the traffic light on the opposite side of the road when the SUV careened into him, killing him instantly.

Baig, 18, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with manslaughter.

With Citi Bike expanding and the creation of more lanes for cyclists, there have never been more people biking in New York City. The push to carve out space for them often angers drivers.

Still, as the number of cyclist deaths climbs in New York — Alzorriz’s was the 19th this year, nearly twice the 10 deaths all of last year — there are growing calls to increase the legal culpability of drivers.

Advocates want stronger laws, as well as a cultural change similar to the one around drunken driving.

“I know we all make mistakes, and I don’t hate the driver,” Sandra Cotuna, a friend of Alzorriz said in an interview before Baig had been charged. “But he took my best friend away. If he’s walking away free, to me that is not justice.”

Andrew Gounardes, a state senator who represents parts of southern Brooklyn, called for the young driver to serve jail time.

“If this is the case of some woman walking down the street just shooting a gun in the air randomly, and hitting people and killing them, we’d be all up in arms,” Gounardes said. “We’d be prosecuting, we’d be having press conferences, and everyone would want to be sure that that person was held criminally liable.”

But while activists say the law is not protecting cyclists enough, some lawyers say it is too strict for honest citizens who accidentally cause just that — accidents.

“You can’t criminalize every negligent act,” said Thomas Lucarelli, who has represented cyclists and pedestrians injured by cars. “If a driver is driving reckless or violating the law — driving drunk or intoxicated — that’s criminal charges.”

But, he said, if there is no criminal intent and it is a negligent accident, legally, “there is no criminal accountability.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio has described the 19 deaths of cyclists this year as an “epidemic.”

In comparison, 114 pedestrians were killed last year in traffic fatalities, according to city data. The number of people injured or killed by cyclists is increasing, too. This year, two pedestrians were killed by bikes; last year there were none.

In court on Wednesday, Jeffrey Lewisohn, Baig’s attorney, said: “As tragic as it is that someone passed away, it was an accident. He would like the opportunity to finish his GED and go to college.”

“It was a tragic accident and now he’s got criminal charges. It’s not appropriate.”

But in a statement, Gounardes agreed with the district attorney bringing charges against Baig.

“Our city’s unofficial policy for too long has been that no matter how reckless, dangerous and harmful a person’s driving, there will never be consequences and oftentimes the driver will remain on the road,” Gounardes said.

“That needs to change. I stand ready to work with community members and other elected officials to change the law so that drivers who kill or gravely injure others no longer enjoy impunity.”

New York has a raft of laws around traffic violations, but prosecutors and defense lawyers say drivers who cause fatalities are almost never criminally charged, unless there are extenuating circumstances: if the driver was under the influence of alcohol or other substances; intended to harm someone; or was aware of the risk of harm but chose to ignore it.

Running a red light alone is almost never considered reckless driving, even though in Alzorriz’s case, it had fatal consequences.

“If you’re not drunk and you stay at the scene, it’s very unlikely that anything is going to happen to you,” said Jon Orcutt of Bike New York, an advocacy group, and the former director of policy at New York City’s Department of Transportation.

“You have penalties in society in order to create a deterrent,” he said. “But I don’t think we’re doing that with regard to how people drive in the city.”

Failing to yield to pedestrians and cyclists, a common cause of accidents, carries a penalty of up to $750. The practice of opening a door in the path of a moving cyclist or car — so-called dooring — is illegal but carries just a $150 fine. Last month, Em Samolewicz was killed while riding her bike after a driver opened the door of his van into traffic, causing her to crash and tumble. A tractor-trailer ran over her.

To date, only one vehicle-related cyclist death has reached the trial stage. Last October, a bus driver was found guilty of killing a cyclist after a bench trial in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. The judge convicted the driver of failing to yield the right of way, a misdemeanor, and failure to exercise due care, a violation.

Part of the reason so few cases reach trial, lawyers said, is that they are difficult to prove in court. Judges use the so-called rule of two: There has to be evidence of egregious behavior or a gross deviation from normal behavior, and prosecutors must show that the driver violated at least two traffic laws.

Defense lawyers said that criminalizing drivers who fail to exercise due care — by briefly taking their eyes off the road to calm a child in the back seat, for example, or being momentarily distracted by a cigarette falling on a lap — is too harsh.

“To saddle someone with a criminal record that could decimate their career, their family, their ability to provide for their family, have a future, is, on its face, not big of a price to pay when someone dies and there’s a tragic, wrongful, horrible death,” said Jeremy Saland, who represented the bus driver in the Manhattan trial.

“At the same time, it’s a high burden and a horrific standard to saddle someone with that criminal record when they weren’t criminally negligent or reckless or intentional.”

Prosecutors have said that the criticism they and the police receive is unfair. In some cases, cyclists are at fault, too, said an official in a New York City district attorney’s office who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak.

Still, changes could be legislated, the official with the district attorney’s office said, citing a proposal to require trucks to have a safety netting to prevent cyclists from falling under wheels.

Facing pressure from advocacy groups and relatives of those killed, de Blasio’s administration announced a $58.4 million plan last month to reduce cyclist deaths.

Focusing on 10 Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods that account for nearly a quarter of the city’s cyclist fatalities and serious injuries, the plan, named Green Wave, would build an average of 30 miles of bike lanes with protective barriers each year — up from roughly 20 miles.

De Blasio has also called for charges against Baig, the 18-year-old driver who sped through a red light, resulting in the death of Alzorriz.

“If you kill someone through your negligence, maybe that’s not murder one, I’m not a lawyer, but I’d say it should be a serious, serious charge with many years in prison,” he said last week.

Additionally, a bill sponsored by Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn would impound vehicles involved in at least five red-light or speed-camera violations in a one-year period. That would take 25,000 cars off the road, according to Lander, until those drivers took a safety course.

Lander introduced the bill after a driver plowed through a red light in Brooklyn in March 2018, killing a 5-year-old girl and a 1-year-old boy. The girl’s pregnant mother, Broadway actress Ruthie Ann Miles, miscarried as a result of injuries from the crash.

Gounardes has also introduced several proposals, including one that would terminate the license of anyone who has at least three moving violations in a year.

“It is completely and 1,000% legitimate to be upset and frustrated and angry at the fact that our criminal justice system does not seem to be able to handle cases where people are killing other people because of their reckless, dangerous and stupid behavior,” Gounardes said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/nyregion/bike-deaths-nyc.html" id="b7711a5d-e601-36cd-a0c6-2e48a39f4a67">The New York Times</a>.

Cyclist Deaths in New York City: Accidents or Crimes?

NEW YORK — When Umar Mirza Baig barreled through a red light at a terrifying speed and T-boned an SUV, sending it flying across the street into José Alzorriz, a cyclist, the moment was caught on dashboard cameras in Brooklyn.

The driver, Shane Piche, 26, pleaded guilty to third-degree rape earlier this year. But instead of going to prison as the victim’s family had hoped for, Piche was sentenced Thursday to 10 years of probation.

He was also assigned the lowest-level status on New York’s sex offender registry, according to an official with the state Supreme Court in Jefferson County. The Level 1 status is reserved for offenders with a low risk of committing another similar crime, and means that his future addresses will not be made public.

In explaining the sentence, Justice James P. McClusky said that Piche had no prior arrests and that only one victim had been involved, according to the Watertown Daily Times newspaper.

Piche was ordered not to be left alone with anyone younger than 17, and to pay $1,425 in court and other fees, according to the court official. Prosecutors had initially charged him with second-degree rape, as well as first-degree unlawfully dealing with a child and endangering the welfare of a child.

The sentence has led to angry calls to the judge’s chambers from people outraged by the sentence, which was shared widely on social media and has generated thousands of signatures on an online petition calling for the judge’s ouster.

The case in Watertown, about 70 miles north of Syracuse, also has reignited a fresh debate over the severity of punishments handed down to sex offenders.

In 2016, former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner was sentenced to six months in prison after having sexually assaulted an unconscious woman. The furor surrounding his case prompted nationwide demands for the resignation of the sentencing judge.

Last year, a doctor in Houston, Shafeeq Sheikh, was given 10 years of probation after raping a patient.

Susan Estrich, a professor at the University of Southern California’s law school, called it “shocking” that Piche was allowed to plead guilty to what she said were “watered-down” third-degree rape charges.

“It’s outrageous,” she said. “This is back to the future. This is what we’ve been fighting against for 30 years.”

She said the plea agreement effectively blamed the 14-year-old victim. “This is the beginning of a backlash in the courts — leaning over backward to protect men,” Estrich said.

Hours after Piche’s sentencing, a petition was launched on MoveOn.org to remove McClusky from the bench. The judge was elected in 2011 to a 14-year term on the Supreme Court.

“Remove him from his position immediately for his blatant disregard for survivors of sexual assault,” reads the petition that by Tuesday had gathered more than 20,000 signatures.

Prosecutors had requested that Piche be assigned a Level 2 sex-offender designation, which would have meant that his future addresses would have been published on the state’s sex offender registry.

The victim’s mother had said she had been hoping that Piche would receive prison time.

“He took something from my daughter she will never get back and has caused her to struggle with depression and anxiety,” the mother said in a statement obtained by WWNY, a Watertown-area television station. In February, when Piche entered the guilty plea, the girl’s mother told the station that Piche “bought her daughter gifts and invited her and other minors to his home, where he gave them alcohol.”

Piche’s lawyer, Eric T. Swartz, could not be reached Tuesday for comment, but he told WWNY that the sentence was just.

“He’ll be a felon for the rest of his life. He’s on the sex offender registry for a long time,” Swartz told WWNY. “Maybe not the rest of his life because of the level, but this isn’t something that didn’t cause him pain and this isn’t something that didn’t have consequences.”

The maximum sentence for third-degree rape is 1 1/3 to four years in prison, according to a spokesman for the Unified Court System, Lucian Chalfen. But he said McClusky was “well within” the sentencing range for the negotiated plea.

“The defendant is now a convicted sex offender who will spend the next decade on a very onerous and intrusive sex offender probation and have to register as a sex offender,” Chalfen said in a statement.

He said the majority of the “vitriolic calls” to McClusky have come from out-of-state callers who “know nothing about the facts and circumstances of the case, thanks to social media.”

“Judicial independence is a cornerstone of our society,” Chalfen said. “Removing judges for handing down sentences that some may disagree with cuts both ways, leaving us with no process of accountability.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/nyregion/bus-driver-rape-watertown.html" id="f2258e39-7b62-3c20-affe-2889dafab904">The New York Times</a>.

A School Bus Driver Raped a Teenage Student. His Sentence Includes No Prison Time.

He was her bus driver, ferrying her to school in Watertown, a small city in upstate New York. Then, one day last summer, having plied her with gifts and alcohol, he invited the 14-year-old to his home and raped her.

<h1>The only certainty the family of Everett Palmer Jr. has — after months of demanding answers — is that he was alive when he was sent to York County Prison and that he was dead 48 hours later.</h1>

But what happened to Palmer during two days in solitary confinement at the Pennsylvania lockup remains a mystery.

When his body arrived at a funeral home, it showed troubling signs: Palmer’s head had been badly damaged and a ring of black and purple bruises ran around his neck, according to the funeral director, who was the first to see the remains.

“I think he was murdered,” Palmer’s mother, Rose Palmer, said as she choked back tears last week at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Queens Village, near the family’s home.

The Pennsylvania State Police and the York County district attorney will say only that the death, first reported by NY1, is still under investigation.

After 14 months, Palmer’s family has not been given permission to see video footage of his detention. The York County Coroner’s Office concluded in an autopsy report, obtained by The New York Times, that the manner of Palmer’s death was “undetermined.”

Adding to the Palmer family’s grief and confusion, the former soldier’s brain, heart and throat — perhaps holding clues that could shed light on how he died — still have not been returned after the autopsy.

On Monday, his mother and six siblings filed a motion in a Pennsylvania court seeking to compel testimony from the guards and others involved, as well as to gain access to evidence, including a video of Palmer’s final moments.

“There has been no explanation of what happened to Everett Palmer,” said Lee Merritt, a lawyer representing the family. “We believe that an in-custody death demands a certain level of transparency that has been lacking.”

Palmer’s case received nationwide attention recently over the family’s claims that his organs had gone missing. (They had not; they are being retained in a lab for investigation, the York County Coroner’s Office said.)

But how he died in custody and why the authorities seem reluctant to release their findings remain the bigger mystery.

Though the York County Coroner’s Office has said it could not say for sure how Palmer died, an independent forensic expert hired by Palmer’s family offered a different verdict: homicide, involving physical restraint under police custody.

One contributing factor in his death was methamphetamine intoxication, pathologists for the family and the coroner’s office agree, raising questions about how he obtained drugs while confined alone and stripped of his belongings.

The official autopsy report’s inconclusive findings help “law enforcement avoid the appropriate scrutiny of their actions,” Merritt said.

David Sunday, the York County district attorney, said he could not provide information about “ongoing investigations.” Ryan Tarkowski, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Police, also declined to comment, saying the investigation is open.

Mark Walters, a spokesman for York County, said evidence in the case has not been made public because investigators have not completed their work.

“I don’t understand why people don’t take a step back,” he said. “This is the way investigations work. You want to make sure that everything is right, and done with integrity. Do you want to have an investigation that lasts five minutes? It’s going to take time.”

Pamela Gay, who leads the York County Coroner’s Office, said Palmer’s organs would be released to the family once the inquiry is over.

“Things aren’t evident right away,” she said. “We’ve done everything by the book. We want to do this with the utmost integrity and professionalism.”

Palmer, a 41-year-old father of two, was a brawny paratrooper turned fitness trainer who most recently lived in Seaford, Delaware. He had been taking medication for post-traumatic stress disorder, his relatives said.

Palmer’s family said he was on his way to New York on April 7, 2018, to see his mother, who was about to have an operation. He had been hoping to stop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to resolve an outstanding warrant. A year and a half earlier, he had been arrested in rural York County on charges of drunken driving.

But instead of resolving the case and continuing with his trip, he was arrested by the Lancaster police and detained on $5,000 bail, the family said.

When Palmer arrived at the York County jail, he was agitated and “rambling,” and talked about having suicidal thoughts, the autopsy report said. He was placed on suicide watch in a single-person cell and medical staff checked on him multiple times.

Two days later, at around 4 a.m., Palmer was seen striking his head on his cell room door, the autopsy report said, cutting and puncturing the back of his head and leaving bloody traces on the door, the report said.

An officer ordered him to lie down and put his arms behind his back, the report said. When Palmer failed to comply, an officer used a Taser on him — twice. Five officers then entered his cell, and a 23-minute scuffle ensued. Palmer kicked and bit the officers who tried to pin him down.

“The officers secured the decedent by various physical control techniques including securing his midsection and lower extremities, securing his hand by applying handcuffs to his wrists,” the report read.

A hood intended to stop him from biting was placed over his head. “The officers lifted him out of the cell and into the restraint chair and applied the lap belt, leg restraints and hand restraints,” the report said.

The report confirmed the existence of security camera video of the incident. But the coroner wrote that the “video footage of events inside the decedent’s cell did not give a clear picture” of everything the officers did to restrain Palmer.

Palmer was taken first to the jail infirmary, then to York Hospital, where he was pronounced dead before 6 a.m. on April 9, the report said.

Gay, the coroner, concluded that Palmer died of “complications following an excited state, associated with methamphetamine toxicity, during physical restraint.”

She noted that he had “multiple bruises along the head, extremities, left hip and left side of the torso.” She also wrote that sickle cell disease was a contributing factor. (Palmer’s family maintains he did not have that illness.)

Zhongxue Hua, the forensic pathologist hired by the family, came to a similar conclusion about the cause of death but said Palmer would not have died had he not been violently restrained.

“It should be changed to ‘homicide’, instead of ‘undetermined,’ ” he said in an interview. “I agree with the cause of death, but I have a real issue with the manner of death.”

Ephraim George, a funeral director in New York City, was the first person to look at Palmer’s body after the autopsy. “You could definitely see the bruising around the neck,” George said. “It went around his neck, on both sides. I told the family, ‘You need to look further into it.’ ”

Rose Palmer, the mother, said she had not slept well for more than a year.

“All I do is think about my child. What happened, how it happened,” she said. “And because I don’t know, I have all kinds of scenarios going around in my brain.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/nyregion/everett-palmer-death-police-york-county-pennsylvania.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

A prison death, a mysterious autopsy and official silence

When his body arrived at a funeral home, it showed troubling signs: Palmer’s head had been badly damaged and a ring of black and purple bruises ran around his neck, according to the funeral director, who was the first to see the remains.

<h1>CHESTNUT RIDGE, N.Y. — The mother of an unvaccinated child here in the New York suburbs says eating papaya helps to combat measles. The father of another child who has not been immunized believes that big pharmaceutical companies are paying millions of dollars to doctors, government officials and even judges to bury the truth about vaccine complications.</h1>

Another mother says the souls of her children are on a journey that vaccines would impede. “As a parent, for me, a lot of my job is to just not put extra obstacles in that soul’s way,” she said.

All three parents represent an anti-vaccine fervor on the left that is increasingly worrying health authorities. They often cluster around progressive private schools that are part of the Waldorf educational movement, and at the Waldorf school here, 60% of the school’s 300 or so students were not vaccinated against measles and other highly contagious diseases as of late last year.

The measles epidemic in the New York region has largely spread among ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Rockland County and in New York City. But health authorities fear it could jump to other unvaccinated groups like the ones linked to the children of families who attend Waldorf schools.

Another mother says the souls of her children are on a journey that vaccines would impede. “As a parent, for me, a lot of my job is to just not put extra obstacles in that soul’s way,” she said.

Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura

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