I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street by Matt Taibbi

Author:Matt Taibbi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780812988840
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2017-10-23T23:00:00+00:00

“It was a hard decision for me to do that, because I don’t want to be targeted out here,” he says. “But I talked to my girl and she told me do the right thing, do what you think is best. And I did.”

James took a few days, then reluctantly decided to go in. At first he was heartened by the process. The investigators from the DA’s office seemed to be genuinely interested in what kind of witness he would be, and James worked hard to convince them that he’d be a good one.

“I told them I’d been on drugs thirty-three years, but I’d been clean for seven,” he says. He talked also about his work at the shelter. He remembers seeing one of the investigators look at James’s last mug shot, then at the healthy, well-dressed, lucid, confident man he was now. He thought he saw genuine relief in the prosecutor’s eyes.

“They showed me a picture of me when I last got arrested and they really looked at the difference,” he says. “I thought these guys were really genuine.”

But then on the allotted date, he went to the dull gray glass-and-steel court building just up the hill from Tompkinsville Park, and found the questioning to be far from what he expected. He remembers being shown a picture of the scene of the crime, a picture that among other things showed a piece of cardboard he and others sometimes used to sit on on the sidewalk.

“And they were like, ‘What’s that?’

“And I said, ‘Cardboard.’ And they said, ‘What’s that for?’ ”

James looked around the courtroom, which was mostly full of white jurors, and began to get a funny feeling. Why did anyone care about cardboard?

“Well,” he said, “we sit on it.”

“Why?”

He frowned. “If it’s cold, or if you want to keep your clothes clean.”

“I see.”

James says in earlier interviews he had been asked about what he’d seen, had talked about the chokehold and other things. But once the lights went on for real, he got none of that. “Inside the grand jury room, they didn’t ask any of those questions,” he said.

They peppered him with more strange questions, and soon after that he was dismissed. He went home confused. “The more I thought about it, the more irrelevant the questions seemed,” he said.

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