A NIGHT NOT FORGOTTEN
Column written 8/7/98
© 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal
All Rights Reserved
His name is Borgela Philistin, Jr., a name that would not be remarkable, nor seemingly strange in the land of his birth - Haiti..
As a 19 year old, he was a well educated, hard-working youth who caught a hack in the northern neighborhoods of Philadelphia, trying to get home.
What followed was a nightmare that shattered lives for all times, as illustrated in the following statement that he gave to the cops on June 17th, 193, 3:21 AM in the infamous Roundhouse homicide unit, stark-naked, and beaten;
Q: How long were you wrestling with the officers?
A: Two minutes.
Q: What were you doing while the officers were grabbing you?
A: I was trying to break away.
Q: What happened next?
A: I think the second officer had pulled out his gun and said that if I didn't stop struggling that he would shoot me, I couldn't stop, we were all on the ground, one officer was holding me around the waist and the other one was trying to grab my hands. I noticed the gun on the ground, I picked it up and when I did the officer said "you sonofabitch", and he was hitting me on the back to let the gun go and I …and then I fired shots towards the ground so I could run, I didn't aim at them one of the officers was hit, I saw the blood I panicked and started running."
Charged with the premeditated, first-degree murder of a cop named Robert Hayes, and the aggravated and simple assault on another cop named John Marynowitz, Philistin was on the fast track to Pennsylvania's Death Row.
With little or no knowledge of the law, he couldn't possibly marshal all of the statements of contending witnesses that descended on the case, and so he essentially let his lawyer run the show.
The statements of witnesses were reflective of a heat-of-passion defense, borne out of a fight provoked by a cop, who, literally, grabbed him and ripped him out of the car that he was in, according to the statement of Darell Odom, a witness who said:
The Officer was telling him to keep his hand up, the guy kept wiggling. Then the Officer like pulled him out of the car, out the window. Then the guy and the copy wrastled a little bit. The guy tried to run. The other cop now came around to help. Then the two officers and the guy were wrastling on the ground. The officer was telling the guy stay down. Do you want to die or something [?] (6/17/93, p3)
Another witness, a man named Bruce Weaver's statement showed:
They were fighting, like wrestling together. The police officer took a flashlight and hit the guy over the head with the flashlight. He got the guy down on the ground and they started fighting, wrestling again (p.1)
Philistin reports his statement was coached, the direct result of the vicious beating he received at the roundhouse (Police Administration Building), but no one, neither his lawyer, nor anyone else wanted to hear that. The cops claimed the reason for the resistance, the fight, and the furious gunfire was because Philistin was a drug dealer, a charge he vehemently denied. Interestingly, the only evidence of drugs admitted into evidence in the case bore no trace of his fingerprints.
This scenario is an evasion of what the witnesses' statements suggest - a struggle, and a shooting, triggered by an assault against a man stilling in a car. A man punched, struck with a flashlight, and pulled out of the car window, and quite literally, scared to death, and terrified of becoming yet another grim, silent statistic; another black man labeled as yet another 'justifiable homicide!'
With a statement procured under the aura of fear, and the cover that this guy was a drug dealer, no jury in America (much less Philadelphia) would think 5 minutes before sending him to Death Row. Did they consider a 3rd Degree verdict?
Who know? We know that they delivered a death sentence, and mounds of years tacked on.
Borgela Philistin wasn't a radical, a tough guy, or a drug dealer (despite the alleged statement). He was a regular guy, trying to make a living in a city where life remains a rough, dog-eat-dog existence.
He excelled in high school, and read and wrote (still does) in two languages. He wasn't looking for anything other than a night like any other on the 16th of June 1993, when lights began flaring in the rear of a neighborhood hack. The violence that greeted him at the car window that night was a direct link to the violence that happened shortly thereafter, and transformed the lives of half a dozen families that night and forever.
He had no criminal record, and worked briefly before that night at a regional hospital in the dietary department.
He thinks back to that night, and says, "I was trying to get home, and get some rest that night. When that guy reached in that window and hit me, and the other cop hit me in the teeth with that flashlight, the pain went through me like lightening to my brain. I was stunned I was in shock. I was scared to death! I came from a country where you respect authority, but was I just supposed to let them beat me, shoot me? I thought they were going to kill me."
Can anyone really say that such a fear isn't justified?
He is one of over 200 men and women on Pennsylvania's Death Row, and despite the media projections, he is hardly a monster. At the time of the incident, he was 19, barely 180 pounds, and he was faced with two healthy, mature Philly cops who put him in fear of his life.
He is only a man. J
© 1998 MAJ
© 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal
All Rights Reserved