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(The terrible political consequences of ultraleftism.)
NY Times, June 7, 2020
The 2 Lawyers, the Anti-Police Protests and the Molotov Cocktail Attack
By Nicole Hong and William K. Rashbaum
The day before he went out to protest, Colinford Mattis, 32, an
Ivy-educated corporate lawyer in Brooklyn, chatted for over an hour on
the phone with a close high school friend. They discussed George Floyd’s
death as just “another example of an unarmed black person being killed,”
the friend said, but they talked about grocery shopping and YouTube
videos as well.
The next afternoon, Urooj Rahman, 31, who is also a lawyer and Mr.
Mattis’s close friend, attended a Zoom talk about building “solidarity
movements” between people of color. Ms. Rahman had recently finished
fasting for Ramadan and was caring for her mother at home, also in Brooklyn.
What happened next came as a surprise to many who know the two young
lawyers.
The pair took to the streets on May 29 with thousands of New Yorkers who
were voicing their outrage over Mr. Floyd’s death. But after midnight,
police officers spotted them in a tan minivan driving through the Fort
Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. At one point, Ms. Rahman climbed out,
walked toward an empty police patrol car and threw a Molotov cocktail
through its broken window, prosecutors said.
Their arrests shortly after were a startling turn for the two, who were
otherwise role models in their communities. Both children of immigrants,
they rose from working-class Brooklyn neighborhoods to win a long list
of awards and campus leadership positions. Mr. Mattis graduated from
Princeton University and New York University Law School, while Ms.
Rahman went to Fordham University for college and law school.
A little over a week after their arrests, it is difficult to draw
conclusions about their motivations. If the charges prove to be true,
were the two spurred by an ill-advised moment of anger — or did they act
out of a deeper, darker disillusionment with the political system in the
wake of Mr. Floyd’s death?
A portrait of Mr. Mattis and Ms. Rahman was assembled from interviews
with more than three dozen of their friends, relatives, colleagues,
neighbors and former professors. Those who knew the two well said they
had long been passionate about social justice issues and had expressed
frustration over Mr. Floyd’s death, but never showed a desire to commit
violence.
Investigators have been scrutinizing their social media accounts and
personal backgrounds to determine whether the pair had been involved
with groups that espoused violence, according to law enforcement
officials briefed on the investigation. But they appear to have found no
evidence of such ties, and prosecutors did not offer a motive in court
filings.
Still, in a video interview with Loudlabs News NYC, first reported by
The New York Post, less than an hour before the attack, Ms. Rahman said
it was understandable for people to be in the streets and enraged about
police brutality.
“This has got to stop, and the only way they hear, the only way they
hear us is through violence, through the means that they use,” she said.
She suggested that the destruction of police property was appropriate.
“People are angry because the police are never held accountable,” she said.
In the video, she was standing near a convenience store, according to
people with knowledge of the investigation, where some of the materials
for the attack were purchased.
At a hearing last week, a lawyer for Ms. Rahman all but acknowledged her
guilt, suggesting that the two had foolishly engaged in a reckless act.
“This was lawless, this was stupid,” said the lawyer, Paul Shechtman.
“This was two people swept up in the moment. But it is two people with
no history of violence, no criminal history at all.”
Mr. Mattis's lawyer, Sabrina P. Shroff, said at an earlier hearing, “The
government tries to argue to this court that Mr. Mattis’s behavior —
assuming that they can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt and conceding
nothing at this point — is indicative of who Mr. Mattis is. They are
clearly wrong.”
Since the arrest of the two, friends and family members are struggling
to understand what happened.
Ikenna Iheoma, the friend who spoke with Mr. Mattis the day before the
protest, said they had never discussed violence against the police. “We
went to private high school,” he said. “That’s not the lane we go to. We
try to intellectualize and come up with policy solutions.”
Friends said Mr. Mattis had sounded relatively upbeat since the
coronavirus outbreak began, even after he was furloughed without pay on
March 31 from his job as an associate at the law firm Pryor Cashman LLP.
Mr. Mattis had been working on multimillion-dollar deals, including the
acquisition last year of the fashion brand Anne Klein.
Several friends said Mr. Mattis had not told them that he had lost his
job. He did, however, tell one friend in April that he was already
interviewing at other firms.
Mr. Mattis, a reliable presence at Princeton’s boisterous annual
reunions, had been planning to attend a virtual event for his 10-year
reunion on the day he was arrested, friends said.
Salmah Rizvi, who was also at the May 29 Zoom talk with Ms. Rahman, said
nothing seemed unusual about Ms. Rahman’s recent behavior.
“She was in a good spiritual state this past month,” said Ms. Rizvi, who
called Ms. Rahman her best friend. “She’s always been vocal about the
important role of nonviolent resistance in seeking change.”
Ms. Rahman was a staff lawyer at Bronx Legal Services, helping poor
tenants facing evictions. Her supervisor, Jackeline Solivan, said she
was deeply committed to the job and, like other colleagues, had been
stressed about pressures on her clients caused by the outbreak.
Friends said they were not aware that the two were going to attend the
protest that Friday, the second night of demonstrations in New York City.
While the previous night had been quiet, the scene at Barclays Center in
Brooklyn turned chaotic on that second day. Videos on social media
showed police beating protesters with batons and protesters throwing
bottles and debris at police.
In the middle of the chaos, shortly after midnight, Mr. Mattis and Ms.
Rahman, while riding around in his minivan, pulled over near the 88th
police precinct at Classon and DeKalb avenues.
Ms. Rahman stepped out of the passenger seat and threw a Molotov
cocktail through the broken window of an empty police car, setting the
dashboard on fire, according to prosecutors, who said the episode was
captured on surveillance video. No one was injured.
Inside the van, the police also found a Bud Light beer bottle filled
with toilet paper, a liquid believed to be gasoline and a lighter.
Prosecutors said Ms. Rahman tried offering Molotov cocktails to other
protesters so they could throw them.
The two were charged in Brooklyn federal court with causing damage by
fire and explosives to a police vehicle. If convicted, they face a
mandatory minimum of five years in prison.
After Mr. Mattis and Ms. Rahman spent more than two days in jail, a
federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn released them each on $250,000 bond
to home confinement with GPS monitoring, describing the allegations as
“one night of behavior.”
Prosecutors appealed the ruling twice, calling the two a danger to the
community. A federal appeals court sent them back to jail on Friday,
pending the outcome of their bail appeal.
The police also arrested another woman in Brooklyn, Samantha Shader, who
was charged in federal court with throwing a Molotov cocktail at a
police car in a separate incident that night. Four officers were able to
escape from the car before any injury.
There does not appear to be a connection between the incident with Ms.
Shader and the one that prosecutors said involved Mr. Mattis and Ms. Rahman.
Mr. Mattis and Ms. Rahman most likely met at a birthday party in
Manhattan in October 2014, according to a mutual friend. Friends were
not aware of romantic involvement between the two, but said they were
very close.
Ms. Rahman’s friends said her roots as an activist seemed evident when
she attended Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the most selective
public high schools in New York.
Andrea Wangsanata, a high school classmate, recalled that Ms. Rahman was
often “vocal and adamant, advocating on the side of people who were
systematically oppressed.”
Ms. Rahman was born in Pakistan and grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a
neighborhood with a large population of Muslim immigrants. The
neighborhood came under intense police scrutiny after the Sept. 11
terror attack, which became a defining experience for Ms. Rahman,
childhood friends said.
Law school friends remembered that she criticized the policing in her
neighborhood. In 2014, she co-authored a paper titled, “Changing the
NYPD: A Progressive Blueprint for Sweeping Reform.”
Through college and law school at Fordham, she lived primarily at home
with her mother. Her father died in 2012.
While Ms. Rahman pursued public interest law, Mr. Mattis took a more
lucrative path.
Martin Guggenheim, one of Mr. Mattis’s law professors at N.Y.U.,
remembered him explaining — “sometimes apologetically” — that he wanted
to work at a law firm because he was the first person in his family with
the opportunity to have that kind of career.
Mr. Mattis grew up in East New York at a time when the neighborhood was
among the poorest and most violent in the city. Throughout his
childhood, his mother, a Jamaican immigrant who worked as a home health
aide and youth counselor at a group home, fostered several children.
He struggled with literacy in the early years of elementary school. By
middle school, he became a voracious reader, a neighbor said.
Mr. Mattis went to boarding school at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware
with the help of Prep for Prep, a competitive program that places
high-achieving minority students in private high schools. He later was
quoted in the program’s admissions packet as saying he “wanted a better
future than that which was offered to me by going to my local high school.”
He was a football player in high school and briefly played rugby at
Princeton, where he was also president of the Black Student Union and a
member of Cap and Gown, one of the university’s exclusive eating clubs.
His college friends said they were particularly stunned by the
allegations because he was known as a peacemaker on campus, the one who
brought students of color to parties hosted by wealthy white students.
In recent years, Mr. Mattis shared posts on Facebook drawing attention
to protests against police brutality and the death of Eric Garner in
police custody.
Last summer, Mr. Mattis’s mother died of cancer. He moved back to her
house in East New York and became responsible for the three children she
was fostering, which his half sister said had been their mother’s dying
wish. The children are all under the age of 11.
“He goes to every parent-teacher conference,” said the half sister,
Doreen L. Crowe.
In recent months, Mr. Mattis chatted with friends about ideas he had for
improving his neighborhood. He sat on the community board in East New
York, focusing on housing.
Bill Wilkins, who serves on the board, had high hopes for Mr. Mattis,
praising his charm and intelligence. Mr. Wilkins noted that the board’s
offices were in a Police Department building, and that the board had
recently facilitated the donation of 5,000 surgical masks to the local
precinct, though Mr. Mattis had no direct role.
Mr. Wilkins, a community activist who described himself as a child of
the civil rights movement, said the news of Mr. Mattis’s arrest was
upsetting.
Mr. Wilkins said his hopes for “passing on the mantle” to Mr. Mattis
seem to have been dashed.
“We need Colin in the struggle,” he said, “but not what he is alleged to
be doing.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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