Abner Louima: 26 years later

Jun 19, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard truths…

Kaieteur News – Abner Louima made worldwide headlines in 1997.  Today, 26 years later, his harrowing and riveting story that rocked America, and stunned the world, took more turns.  There are some rays of light and flecks of good.  It is a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit, of what separates man from beasts.  There is a lesson, more than one, for the citizens of this ruptured country, as they struggle to cope with circumstances that can be, at times, inhuman in their oppressiveness, and appear overwhelming in their burdens.  What follows is more than issues of police brutality, or attempted coverup, or whistleblowers, or justice prevailing.  Indeed, it is about all those, but it is also of the greatness that men and women are capable of, under the most unimaginable of circumstances.

In August 1997, Abner Louima was one of many Haitian immigrants living in the Brooklyn, New York.  Though trained as an electrical engineer in his native Haiti, the only work he could get was as a security guard; paying his dues he was.  In the course of a fight on a fateful Saturday night in August 1997 by a nightclub in Flatlands, Brooklyn, he was arrested for attacking a police officer, with several charges laid; the allegation that he had attacked Police Officer Justin Volpe was later found to be false.  But it set in motion a chain of events of seismic proportions.

Mr. Louima, a US citizen, was beaten in the police car by uniformed officers, on the way to the precinct.  What then followed at the precinct was beyond a horror of horrors, among the absolute worst that man can inflict on another man.  As if to show him who was boss, as if to remind him of his place and color and impotence, Abner Louima had his testicles brutally squeezed by Police Officer Justin Volpe, and a broomstick shoved up his rectum causing severe ruptures to his colon and bladder.  But PO Volpe was not done just yet: he haughtily walked around that Brooklyn precinct house, waving the bloody, feces covered broomstick, as if it were a grisly trophy of war, and then proceeded to shove it into the mouth of the helpless Louima.  Not a single police supervisor or presence in that precinct thought it fit to utter a word of objection at that heinous and unbelievable barbarity, several in one.  It was an earlier version of whose knee was on whose neck.

It took an ER nurse at Coney Island Hospital, Magalie Laurent, to expose the gruesome horror, which led to universal outrage.  Mr. Louima’s injuries were so horrible that the police officers’ explanation of “abnormal homosexual activities” was just not believable, could not be.  Charges followed, and disgraced Police Officer Justin Volpe was sentenced to 30 years in prison.  He was released recently after serving 26 years for his crime that is beyond description.

The victimized and brutalized Abner Louima won an $8.75 million settlement and has involved himself in extensive humanitarian work in his native Haiti, and in the US.  He has also participated in anti-police brutality marches in New York.  In the words of Mr. Louima: “Maybe God saved my life for a reason; I believe in doing the right thing.”

Where is God when such a diabolical atrocity can occur?  What is the right thing?  I believe that if it were not for some divine intervention, Abner Louima might have died like a black dog, and no one the wiser for the gruesome crimes inflicted upon him.  The right thing was done by the ER Nurse Laurent, whose humanity and conscience, sense of right and wrong and justice could not hold her captive to silence.  There is a time for silence, and there is a time to speak out.  There are wrongs, and then there are wrongs that are unmentionable, so stomach churning they are in the mere contemplation, in the volumes of their compilation.  I urge my fellow Guyanese to concentrate their minds on this.  Some crimes are bloody and feces-filled; many others are lily white and bloodless.

We have our Justin Volpes right here running red hot pokers into our hearts and hopes; they don’t carry a broomstick, but the spear of history, the bigotry fostered by feelings of supremacy, and the jackboot of the oppressor.  There is no whistleblower like Magalie Laurent; there are only many aiders and abettors, and covering up collaborators and comrades.  There are insiders and outsiders.

Now the twists.  Justin Volpe is free 26 years later.  Abner Louima has forgiven, though the pain and memory still wracks him daily.  Disgraced Officer Volpe own words glint with haunting power: he now has “nothing but love” for the sodomized, brutalized Louima.

We struggle with demons in Guyana that simply would not let go of us.  We look back and we gain renewed strength to live with even greater rage, greater bitterness.  Meanwhile, the real richness of life passes us by, while the powers of the world take the fullest advantage of our social concussions, our corrosive infusions, our self-inflicted devastations.  When we refuse to relinquish the past, we have just sacrificed the promise of the future.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Kaieteur News.

 

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• Abner Louima, Guyanese to concentrate their minds on this, Haitian immigrants living in the Brooklyn, what separates man from beasts

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