Student Accused of Brklyn Bge Rioting Fell in Maze of a Police” Witch Hunt”
Maria Garcia spent three and a half months facing charges for her supposed involvement in a brawl between police and protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge before prosecutors acknowledged they didn't have enough evidence to proceed. Police probably aren't fans of her hoodie paying homage to Assata Shakur, who busted out of prison and fled to Cuba after being convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper. Shakur maintains her innocence. (Ariela Rothstein)
Maria Garcia was in a cell inside the NYPD's 5th Precinct station house in Chinatown, and the detectives seated just beyond the bars were playing the same video again and again.
"They would play the video and look at me and say, 'Yeah, you seem calm now, but you seem very agitated in the video,'" she remembers. "And I was just like, 'You're making a mistake. That's not me. I wasn't there.' And then the detective would continue to play it over and over, and they would look at me and just confirm what they were thinking."
It was Dec. 19th, six days after a melee on the Brooklyn Bridge between police and anti-police brutality protesters, which left one lieutenant with a broken nose. What the police with Garcia were thinking was that she was Female Suspect #1, one of six people whose blurry images had been grabbed from a YouTube video of the bridge altercation and plastered on Wanted posters offering a $12,000 reward. That morning, she said she was at home, working on a final paper for her doctoral geography studies at Rutgers University, when an unknown number called her phone, and someone rang her doorbell and knocked, all at once. She went to the door, and about a dozen officers were waiting outside, she said.
The cops asked if she lived alone, and were confused when she said she did. Their warrant listed her husband Zachary Campbell, though she said they told her it was a special warrant and they couldn't show it to her. She and Campbell are separated and live apart from each other.
"Then they handcuffed me and started telling me that I must have been waiting for this day to come," she said. "And I had no idea what they were talking about."
Garcia works two jobs, as an event planner for the Queens Museum, and as a worker-owner in an interpreter and translator cooperative. She's also a social-justice activist and full-time student. She spent the day of her arrest locked up, first at the 7th Precinct stationhouse on the Lower East Side, then at the 5th, being interrogated on and off. She remembers telling the officers that she wanted a lawyer. She said she didn't answer questions—there were a lot about Campbell—but that she told the detectives what she had done the afternoon and evening of Dec. 13th, and who they could verify it with.
Still, they kept showing the video, saying they knew she was lying, that they knew she was on the bridge.
"I got really scared because I wasn't sure what they were going to make up about me," she said.
She said she wasn't allowed a phone call until 3 p.m., five and a half hours after her arrest. When her attorney arrived another three hours later, he says police barred him from coming upstairs to meet her, for about 40 minutes. She spent the night in the Tombs, was arraigned on charges of resisting arrest, rioting and obstructing governmental administration, and got out on $7,500 bail.
December 13th had all the makings of an unmemorable day. Garcia went to work at the Queens Museum, as she did two days a week, then met a friend for dinner at a Peruvian restaurant on Northern Boulevard, then caught a ride to a friend's house in Woodside to do homework. She said that she was aware there was a protest happening that afternoon, but that she was so busy she didn't know what time.
She related her whereabouts to the detectives and told them who was there with her, but she said instead of simply checking out the alibi, the investigators set out to prove her guilt. They turned up at her work, at her friends' jobs, and at a co-worker's mother's house in New Jersey, flashing stills from the video everywhere they went.
"It was like a big witch hunt," Garcia said.
Prosecutors repeatedly asked for more time to investigate, and in the meantime Garcia's life was on hold. Because the police seized her computers, she had to scramble to rewrite her final papers without her notes, and she took incomplete grades for some classes. Stressed out by the weight of the criminal case, she went on unpaid leave from her jobs.
Cardozo Law School's Criminal Defense Clinic took the case pro bono, and law students, led by her lawyer, clinic director Jonathan Oberman, worked long hours to recreate the day she spent far from the Brooklyn Bridge.
"It's always very difficult to prove a negative," Oberman said. "But from the inception of the case we felt that there was conclusive and powerful evidence that demonstrated she was never on the Brooklyn Bridge."
The clinic collected statements from Queens Museum coworkers, retrieved surveillance footage from the Peruvian restaurant, timestamped 6:10 pm, and provided prosecutors with the license plate number of the car she rode in, to be run through the license-plate readers the police has set up at every East River crossing. The scanners showed the car had never entered Manhattan. Another helpful bit of evidence was the outfit she was wearing in the video, which didn't match Female Suspect #1's black peacoat and red scarf. The clothing was listed in the police's search warrant and didn't turn up at her house, either. Timestamps on her computer showed she was writing into the night.
Oberman described, for the sake of prosecutorial argument, a universe in which Garcia could be guilty:
It's always theoretically possible to imagine that at 6:10 pm, like some character out of a Marvel comic book, Ms. Garcia dipped into a phone booth, changed clothes, sprinted to a subway, got on the subway, got into Manhattan, met a group of people, marched onto the Brooklyn Bridge, all in an hour and 10 minutes—and that she cleverly left her laptop with people who knew her passwords, who could therefore log in for the explicit purpose of cleverly, brilliantly creating a faux-alibi. But short of that, there was no plausible or reasonable hypothesis except that she was at an identified apartment, in an identified building in Queens.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office finally agreed to drop the charges on March 31st. Oberman said he thinks that the massive amount of attention given to the case, and to the Black Lives Matter movement, made prosecutors move especially slowly before tossing the case. He faulted NYPD brass and police unions for trying to use the bridge fight to discredit the protests over the handling of the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases.
"I take the rule of law seriously, and I thought that the post-Ferguson, post-Staten Island demonstrations that were occurring in New York and elsewhere in the country were overwhelmingly peaceful and respectful," Oberman said. "I thought using an unfortunate incident by what appeared to be a splinter group in a blatant way to reshape and redefine the narrative that was otherwise so critically important ... was a troubling aspect of the case."
As for Garcia, she is back at work and school, having sustained herself during her time out of work with the help of favors and money from friends and activists. She said she has not been to a protest since her legal trouble began, and that she is having trouble concentrating as a result of all the stress.
"I'm a very nervous person now." she said.
She declined to talk about how well she knows the five people still facing charges, or if she has spoken to them lately, but said she hopes they avoid jail time.
Asked what she would say to a detective who interrogated her, given the chance, she was conflicted.
"He should have listened to what I was telling him," she said, then paused. "I don’t know if I want to talk to him actually. I would tell everybody to not talk to the police.”
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