New York Anorak
OVER the past two weeks New York City has been swept up in the grief of families who have lost loved ones in tragic and extraordinary circumstances.
First there was the Bronx fire a little over a week ago that killed nine children and one adult, including the wife and four kids of an illegal immigrant taxi driver Mamadou Soumare.
In the week that followed the fire New Yorkers gave thousands of dollars to help pay for Mr Soumare to accompany his family’s bodies back to their village to be buried. Politicians stepped in to give Mr Soumare paperwork that would allow him to leave the country and return legally. The Daily News raised almost $40,000. And a local businesses has offered to rebuild his home.
That funerals took place in Mali at the weekend. And as the Daily News reports his relatives in the Malian capital Bamako are already anxious that Mr Soumare returns to New York so that he can keep sending money home to his relatives.
“If Mamadou comes and decides to stay here, we will not allow him. I and my brothers are not going to accept it,” said his cousin, Chouaybou Soumare, 46, who worked abroad for years before opening a travel agency in Bamako.
“If he stays here, the help that he gives to the village will not continue to us,” he said. “If he stays in the village, it will be catastrophic. We will not tie him down, but we will say, ‘You have already lost your family. But it will be worse if you don’t go to the U.S.'”
Meanwhile, the execution-style shooting of two unarmed police officers continues to consume city papers.
Sunday was the funeral of Eugene Marshalik, a 19-year-old New York University student and auxiliary cop who was killed by a crazed former marine who went on the rampage in the West Village on Wednesday.
The gunman David Garvin walked into a restaurant, shot and killed the bartender and then fled. A block away Garvin passed Marshalik and 28-year-old Nicholas Pekearo, both unarmed auxiliary cops, who gave chase. But a couple of blocks away Garvin turned on his pursuers killing Pekearo first, and then Marshalik who had a taken cover behind a parked car.
Garvin killed Marshalik with a single bullet to the back of the head. The execution-style killing was captured on CCTV. Garvin was killed a couple of minutes later in a hail of police gunfire.
The New York Post reports Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg paid tribute to Marshalik at his funeral.
Kelly said Marshalik wanted to be a prosecutor and was working as an auxiliary cop to gain experience to bring to the courtroom. Kelly said the student was waiting on a grade for a paper he had written on police tactics.
“The professor had it on his desk,” Kelly said. “He got an ‘A.’ ”
Posted: 19th, March 2007 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
