After the murder of George Floyd my brother asked if I thought that the same thing could happen in my town. I told him that Minneapolis could have been any city in America, yet a death so blatantly brutal in police custody had not happen in my city. I was wrong. It did happen here in Rochester NY. I just did not know about it. It has been easy not to know because unlike in the George Floyd killing, which took place in broad daylight and was recorded by a brave witness using her cell phone, the only people who could have taken pictures of the death of Daniel Prude at 3:16am were the police.
We first heard of the chilling killing of Daniel Prude on Wednesday September 2, 2020 and only after the city gave the family’s lawyers, Elliot Shields, a total of 88 minutes of police body camera footage. The released the terrifying video and the written the reports reveal shocking details of Daniel Prude’s agonizing death, which took place on March 23.
A variation of a long history of institutional racism reemerged as a black American came from Chicago to visit his brother in Rochester and a day later as he was detained by police officers, his soul forcibly left his humiliated body on one of our streets. Like George Floyd, Daniel Prude stopped breathing when Rochester cops restrained him. The papers described Daniel Prude as “suffering from acute mental-health problems when he was detained.” And for months the police denied responsibility and blamed Daniel Prude for his own death.
The material that was finally released reveals, with eerie similarity to George Floyd, how during 11-minutes the police used force to Daniel Prude’s head and back as he lay in agony and naked on the pavement. One officer used both hands to push the side of his head into the pavement, another officer used his knee to hold him down and a third held down his legs. An officer pushed down Daniel Prude’s head for 2 minutes and 15 seconds before letting up and saying “You good now?” Even though there was no response, the officer resumed pushing with one hand for another 45 seconds. Not one of them found it in his heart to covered the body during the struggle or when he stopped breathing. When Daniel Prude’s 18 year old daughter Tashyra Prude saw the released video she cried, “To see my father in a state of helplessness — where he, complying, wasn’t giving anybody a hard time and was in need of help — it’s devastating.”
In this unbearable moment of grief in our town I turn to a long Jewish tradition and to The Torah reading for this Shabbat because of its compelling message on empathy, the essence of humanity. The reading starts [Deuteronomy 26:1] “When you enter the land,” and instructs the agrarian Israelites to share the first harvest with those in need and then go to the place of God with an offering. Each person has to hand the basket of the first produce to the priest. As the Kohen places it on the alter each Israelite has to recite a brief collective history, which is told interchangeably in both the singular, “I,” and the plural, “we.” Each Israelite recounts the story of how our ancestor, a fugitive Aramean, went to Egypt and became an enslaved nation for 400 years; the suffering people cried out to God. God heard their cry and freed them from Egypt and brought them to the Promised Land. Each Israelite has to declare that that they have given to the stranger, the widow and the orphan, adding, “I have not forgotten.”
In the midst of a cry for justice in our town we too must say, “I have not forgotten.” The Israelites could not simply leap from slavery to the good harvest without empathy for the needy and without remembering past suffering. Similarly, we too can no longer move from one killing of a black person to another, from one tragic injustice to the next without empathy. Drawing on the sacred text we should say, “We have not forgotten our history of 400 years of oppression stretching from slavery through Jim Crow and seeping into the very fabric of our social life, stifling our humanity and decency. We must do it because as a nation we have given the police the shield of their badges, and the power of their weapons, and the arrogance to take the life of black people with impunity.
If we want to have a democratic just society we must end this tragic license to take black lives. We must commit to the sanctity of every single life. Peter Stein, the senior rabbi of Temple B’rith Kodesh, a Reform synagogue in our town, wrote on his Facebook,
“My Jewish tradition has a central teaching, that the world was created beginning with one single life, to teach us that each and every life is precious, and the taking of a single life is akin to the destruction of the entire world.
I say the name Daniel Prude out loud. Say it with me. The list of other names to remember, of Black men and women who died violently, is grotesquely long. Each one was a whole world, of hopes and dreams and love.But Daniel died here, in my city, just a few minutes from where
I sleep peacefully each night. I don’t want my city to be a place of violence and hatred, and I will say his name until justice and peace are restored in my home.
Today, I say the name Daniel Prude, and I reach out to those who are in need of an ally, a support, and an additional voice for justice. Join me.”
Joe Prude lost his brother in a blink of an eye. “I placed a phone call for my brother to get help, not to get lynched. How many brothers have to die for society to understand this has to stop?” As we grieve with the bereaved, as we hold the police officers accountable, and as we hear Tashyra Prude heart-wrenching cry we must answer Joe Prude’s question with a commitment to unravel and dismantle our pandemic racism. The promise that we will remember Daniel Prude must mean that we commit to make racial justice our most sacred act.