Into Their Own Hands by Gary Provost

Author:Gary Provost [Provost, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 0101-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

THE UPLIFTED KNIFE

Once upon a time in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, there lived an unpleasant young black man by the name of Ricky Pickett. Pickett, in the words of one of his neighbors, “did a lot of things that shouldn’t have been done.”

Specifically, he snatched purses, picked pockets, mugged the innocent, threatened the weak, stole small appliances, passed bad checks, used stolen credit cards, robbed stores, beat people senseless for their bus fare, lied to everybody, and just generally broke the law whenever he felt like it, and he felt like it a lot.

“He was crazy, just a problem,” says the neighbor, who lived in the same apartment building as Pickett. “His job was to rob people. He did it any way he could.”

Pickett had been in and out of trouble with the law since puberty. As a teenager he was always being accused of something. People would say Ricky stole this, Ricky wrecked that, Ricky smacked so and so. Ricky usually said he didn’t do it. And by 1990, when he was twenty-five, Ricky Pickett had a rap sheet as long as a cue stick. His criminal record stretched back to 1981 and included four robbery convictions for which he had served time at Spofford State Prison. He had a street name, “Grapevine,” and a reputation as a thug, a mugger, and a burglar. He was, according to another neighbor, “a real tough guy who was always knocking somebody around. He robbed a lot of people who lived here.”

It’s tempting to assume that poor Ricky never had a chance. After all, Brownsville is not Scarsdale. But the fact is that Ricky emerged in his damaged condition from a more stable environment than a lot of the kids he hung out with. Ricky’s father, Glenn, who worked for years as a New York City bus driver, made a steady living. The family never broke up. The family never went on welfare. The family stayed together in a fifth-floor apartment on Livonia Avenue. If Ricky had a good excuse for being such trouble, it wasn’t obvious to the people around him. “There’s no way of knowing why they get maladjusted,” the neighbor says.

But maladjusted Ricky was, and by 1990 he did not possess a promising future. To the people who knew him, it looked as though Ricky would either get his head handed to him in a street brawl, or spend much of his life as a guest of the state. He was the father of a two-year-old girl and he was living in the apartment on Livonia Avenue. His parents had moved to North Carolina. And he was making a living the usual way, by knocking people down and stealing their money.

At a little before eleven P.M. on the night of April 12, 1990, Ricky Pickett was in the second-to-last car on the number four Brooklyn express subway train. Ricky was feeling pretty good. He had been drinking earlier, and now, on the train, he and

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