Dies the Victim, Dies the City

By Jimmy Breslin
New York Daily News
November 1976

They were walking along in the empty gray afternoon, three of them, Allen Burnett, Aaron Freeman, and Bill Mabry, Burnett the eldest at seventeen, walking up Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn and singing out Muhammad Ali rhymes into the chill air. As they reached the corner of Kosciusko Street, it was Allen Burnett’s turn to give his Ali rhyme:
“AJB is the latest. And he is the greatest..”

“Who AJB?” one of them said.

“Allen J. Burnett.”

They were laughing at this as they turned the corner onto Kosciusko Street. The three wore coats against the cold. Burnett was in a brown trench coat; Freeman, a three-quarter burgundy leather; and Mabry, a three-quarter beige corduroy with a fox collar. A white paint stain was on the bottom at the back of Mabry’s coat. Mabry, walking on the outside, suddenly was shoved forward.

“Keep on walking straight,” somebody behind him said.

Billy Mabry turned his head. Behind him was this little guy of maybe eighteen, wearing a red sweater, dark pants, and black gun. Aaron Freeman, walking next to Mabry, says he saw two others besides the gunman. The three boys kept walking, although Mabry thought the guy in the red sweater had a play gun.

“Give me the money.”

“I don’t have any money,” Allen Burnett said.

The guy with the gun shot Allen Burnett in the back of the head. Burnett pitched into the wall of an apartment house and went down on his back, dead.

The gunman stood with Allen Burnett’s body at his feet and said that now he wanted coats. Billy Mabry handed back the corduroy with the paint stain. Freeman took off his burgundy leather. The gunman told the two boys to start running. “You don’t look back!” Billy Mabry and Aaron Freeman ran up Kosciusko Street, past charred buildings with tin nailed over the windows, expecting to be shot in the back. People came onto the street and the guy in the red sweater waved his gun at them. The people dived into doorways. He stuffed the gun into his belt and ran up Bedford Avenue, ran away with his new coats. Some saw one other young guy with him. Others saw two.

It was another of last week’s murders that went almost unnoticed. Allen Burnett was young. People in the city were concentrating all week on the murders of elderly people. Next week you can dwell on murders of the young, and then the killing of the old won’t seem as important.

Allen Burnett’s murder went into the hands of the Thirteenth Homicide Squad, situated on the second floor of a new police building on Utica Avenue. The outdoor pay phone in front of the precinct house has been ripped out. The luncheonette across the street is empty and fire-blackened. At first, a detective upstairs thought the interest was in a man who had just beaten his twenty-two-month-old child to death with a riding crop. That was unusual. Allen Burnett was just another homicide. Assured that Burnett was the subject, the detective pointed to Harold Ruger, who sat at a desk going through a new manila folder with Burnett’s name on it. Ruger is a blue-eyed man with wavy dark-brown hair that is white at the temples. The twenty-four years he has spent on the job have left him with a melancholy face and a soft voice underlined with pleasant sarcasm: “They got two coats. Helluva a way to go shopping. Looks like there was three of them. That leaves one guy out there without a coat. I’ll look now for somebody who gets taken off for a coat tonight, tomorrow night, the next few days.”

In a city that seems virtually ungoverned, Harold Ruger forms the only municipal presence with any relationship to what is happening on the streets where people live. Politicians attend dinners at hotels with contractors. Bankers discuss interest rates at lunch. Harold Ruger goes into a manila folder on his desk and takes out a picture of Allen Burnett, a young face covered with blood staring from a morgue table. In Allen Burnett’s hand there is a piece of the veins of the city of New York.

Dies the victim, dies the city. Nobody flees New York because of accounting malpractice. People run from murder and fire. Those who remain express their fear in words of anger.

“Kill him for nothing, that’s life – that’s what it is today,” his sister Sadie was saying. The large, impressive family had gathered in the neat frame house at 30 Van Buren Street. “He was going into the army in January and they kill him for nothing. That’s the leniency of the law. Without capital punishment they do what they want. There’s no respect for human life.”

Horace Jones, an uncle, said, “The bleeding hearts years ago cut out the electric chair. When the only way to stop all this is by havin’ the electric chair.”

“We look at mug shots all last night,” Sadie said. “None of them was under sixteen. If the boy who shot Allen is under sixteen, there won’t be any picture of him. How do you find him if he’s under sixteen? Minors should be treated the same as everybody else. Equal treatment.”

“Electric chair for anybody who kills, don’t talk to me about ages,” Horace Jones said.

The dead boy’s mother, Lillian Burnett, sat with her head down and her hands folded in her lap.

“Do you think there should be an electric chair,” she was asked.

“I sure do,” she said, eyes closed, head nodding. “Won’t bring back my son, but I sure do want it. They tied up three old women and killed them. If they had the electric chair I believe they would rob the three women, but I don’t believe they would kill them.”

The funeral was held two days later, at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church, on Washington Avenue. A crowd of three hundred of Allen Burnett’s family and friends walked two by two into church. Walked erectly, solemnly, with the special dignity of those to whom suffering is a bitter familiarity. Seeing them, workmen in the street shut off pneumatic drills. Inside the church, the light coming through the doorway gleamed on the dark, polished wood of the benches. The casket was brought in by men walking soundlessly on the carpeted floor. The doors were closed, an organ sounded, and people faced the brutality of a funeral service; a baby cried, a woman rocked and screamed, a boy sobbed, a woman fainted, heads were cradled in arms. The mother screamed though a black veil, “My baby’s gone!”

An aunt, Mabel Mabry, walked out of the church with lips trembling and arms hugging her shaking body. “My little nephew’s dead,” she said loudly. They find the ones who killed him. I’m tellin’ you, they got to kill them too, for my nephew.”

The city government, Harold Ruger, just wants to find the killer. Ruger was not at the funeral. “I got stuck in an eighty-floor elevator,” he said when he came to work yesterday. “I was going around seeing people. We leave the number, maybe they’ll call us. That’s how it happens a lot. They call.” He nodded toward a younger detective at the next desk. “He had one, an old man killed by a kid. Information came on a phone call, isn’t that right, Al?”

“Stabbed eight times, skull fractured,” the younger detective said.

Harold Ruger said, “What does it look like you have? Nothing. And he gets a phone call, see what I mean? The answer is out there and it will come.” His finger tapped the file he was keeping on the murder of Allen Burnett.