On the night of April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old banker named Trisha Meili was jogging in New York City’s Central Park — something she often did after work to help her unwind. But shortly before midnight that night, two joggers discovered Meili unconscious in a wooded ravine.
The media tipped into a frenzy of accusations many would say were racially-tinged, claiming the teens had been “wilding” before the attack. Then-mayor Ed Koch even reportedlycalled them “monsters.”
All five were later convicted and sentenced to between five and 15 years in prison.
It wasn’t until more than a decade later that the truth would emerge and DNA evidence would free them. In the intervening years, the young men’s stories have the subject of countless articles, books and films, the latest of which isWhen They See Us, a scripted four-part series from Ava DuVernay. Who are the Central Park Five, and what was the real story?
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Years in Prison After False Convictions
Richardson, Salaam, Santana, Wise and McCray were questioned shortly after the attack on Meili, and they gave incorrect and conflicting information about crucial details of the crime. Their DNA was also not present at the scene.
Yusef Salaam.
Trump Took Out Ads Calling for Reinstatement of Death Penalty
The vicious attack on Meili played into deep-seated fears about crime and violence that were already bubbling over. AsThe New York Timesputs it, “…The daily pulse of New York life included a murder, on average, every five hours, every day; rapes nearly twice as often; and robberies just five or six minutes apart.”
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Salaam later said his family received more death threats after Trump’s inflammatory ads. “I knew that this famous person calling for us to die was very serious,” SalaamtoldThe Guardianin 2016. “We were all afraid. Our families were afraid.”
Despite the fact that the young men were exonerated in 2002, Trump still believes in their guilt — at least as of 2016, when he told CNN, “They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.”
A Serial Rapist Later Confessed to the Crime
In 2002, a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes, then serving a long sentence for murder and rape, confessed to attacking Meili in the park that night in 1989.
Reyes was dubbed the “East Side Rapist” for the string of rapes — and one murder — he committed in the months after the Central Park Five had been arrested. In 2002, when the already-imprisoned Reyes finally admitted that he was also responsible for Meili’s Central Park rape, he reported details of the crime that only the perpetrator would know. He was also connected to the crime via DNA evidence.
The Men Were Exonerated in 2002
After Reyes’ confession, the Central Park Five’s convictions were vacated. In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city of New York settled with the Central Park Five for$41 millionin a civil rights lawsuit they had filed.
“They spent a lot of their lives in jail, in prison, wrongly,” de Blasio said at a news conference. “We have an obligation to do something fair for them, for the whole city to turn the page and move forward.”
The Scars Linger
“We had all gone through hell,” Salaam said recently in theNew York Times,with Richardson noting, “PTSD is real and I go through that. … We always say we have invisible scars nobody sees.”
source: people.com
