Paul Bass Photo
Bird with his battered iPhone 6.
“Help! Help!” Bret Bird screamed. A dozen or more bystanders could see him being attacked. They could hear him.
Some waited by the line of cabs in front of the train station. Some were busy beginning weekend travel. Two sat mere feet from the melee.
But no one responded as Bird continued screaming and wrestling with one of his assailants over an iPhone 6.
Viewing train station video footage of the attack after it all ended, the district’s top cop, Lt. Holly Wasilewski, was stunned to see so many people witnessed the attack without even whipping out a cell phone.
“Nobody called 911. Nobody did anything,” she marveled. “They stood and watched.”
It could have been New Haven’s Kitty Genovese moment updated for the social-media age. Except that, in the end, an “angel” heard Bird’s voice and rushed in.
Cold
“I thought it was smart,” Bird said of his visit to Union Station last Friday afternoon.
Bird, a 44-year-old part-time college biology teacher who also manages a couple of properties in town, was physically bruised and emotionally shaken as he recalled the episode in a coffeehouse conversation a week later. His mind also turned to the question of what it means to be one’s “brother’s keeper” in today’s society.
Bird had to catch a 4:49 a.m. train to New York on Saturday for a neurology and immunology seminar. Since the Metro-North window doesn’t open until 6:10 a.m., he decided to walk to Union Station on Friday afternoon to buy his ticket in advance.
He bought the ticket, then decided he could use a hot drink before venturing back into the cold. Then he looked at the line out the door of Union Station’s main-floor Dunkin Donuts. He left the station.
It was around 3:50 p.m. and still light out. As he prepared to walk home to Wooster Square, the Union Avenue pedestrian walk signal flashed on. Bird noticed the Best Mini Market convenience store across the street in the parking-lot entrance to the Church Street South apartment complex.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
He hadn’t noticed the store before. He didn’t know that, as violent crime has steadily decreased in New Haven the past three years, it has remained a scourge at Church Street South. He didn’t know that city officials have butted heads for years with the out-of-state slumlords who own the 301-unit complex over conditions there. He didn’t know that New Haven has tried, to no avail, to get the landlord to improve conditions or sell the property to someone who’ll build a nicer community. He didn’t know that New Haven’s previous mayoral administration tried to convince the federal government last year, to no avail, to cut off the $3 million in taxpayer Section 8 rent subsidies it sends to Church Street South’s owners each year to keep them in business. He didn’t know that Lt. Wasilewski has begun meeting monthly with Church Street South tenants (pictured) to work together on making the complex safer.
All Bird knew was that he was thirsty, and cold. And he might be able to grab a hot drink.
So he crossed the street. Along the way, he took out his green iPhone 6 and texted his sister. He was still texting as he entered the Church Street South lot.
About 10 feet in, he said, “I was hit in the head. Someone grabbed my phone.”
Four teens had him surrounded. In full view of the late-afternoon Union Station crowd.
Bird held fast to the phone. He didn’t want to relinquish it.
“My life is on that phone. My social security. Bank accounts. Push a button it’s all there. It’s principle,” he said.
“Also, they didn’t ask nicely.”
With his free arm, Bird put the phone-grabber in a headlock.
Bird, who stands six feet tall and weighs about 220 pounds, last wrestled in high school. Why did he put a fight? “If everybody stands down and waits for the police to come, I feel sorry for them,” he said.
Bird and the phone-grabber fell to the ground, still wrestling. It all happened in full view of the dozen or so people Bird had just passed leaving the station. Two people were close to the melee in the lot, clearly visible in the video Wasilewski reviewed. It showed one woman continuing to sit still on a stone curb. It showed a man walking back and forth by her and the melee.
Bird could no longer see beyond his attackers, because his glasses had flown off. He still had the phone, and an L.L. Bean bag on his arm, as he continued grappling with the phone-grabber. They stood up, then fell on the ground again.
“Dude,” Bird claimed he told the young man, “this is not going to end the way you thought.”
Back on the ground, Bird was now being kicked and hit by the other teens.
“Throw us the phone!” they yelled. And: “Finish him off! Finish it! Finish it!”
At this point, Bird started yelling as loudly as he could: “Help! Help! Help!” He didn’t later remember how many times he yelled it, except that he did it over and over and over again, without any response.
Then a man appeared. He had happened to be across the street at the train station. When the screams eventually reached his ears, he ran over.
The man — whose identity is being withheld to avoid repercussions — stepped into the melee, Bird said. The phone-grabber let go and stepped back. Then he and his cohorts approached Bird and the man, who is about Bird’s height and age but huskier, Bird estimated.
Exhausted, Bird fell to the ground behind the man who came to his rescue.
“You ain’t no cop!” one of the teens yelled.
“What?” the man responded in a tone of challenge.
“You come across this street again, nigger, we’ll kill you!” the teens taunted. The man, like the teens, is black; Bird is white.
The man grabbed Bird and told him to run: “Let’s just get out of here!”
“My glasses …” Bird remarked.
The man grabbed Bird’s glasses and escorted Bird away. The teens fled through the housing complex.
Inside the Best Mini Market, no one knew an attack had taken place, Noel Patel said a week later. He was working the register at the time of the attack and hadn’t noticed any commotion. “Friday is the busiest time of day for me” inside the store, he said.
“You’re My Angel”
After leaving the scene, the man deposited Bird at the Amtrak office inside Union Station. The Amtrak police interviewed him. They determined that the attack occurred outside train station property, so they notified New Haven police, who came and interviewed Bird again.
Bird and the man offered descriptions of the teens.
“What were you doing there?” one city officer asked Bird. “Those are the worst projects in town.”
Another officer disagreed. He selected Farnam Courts off Grand Avenue. Bird was more familiar with that complex; until he got rid of his car this year, he used to stop there on weekly runs delivering donated loaves of Chabaso bread to the hungry. Bird, a lifelong Mormon, said he spent three years making those deliveries as part of an effort called LDS Feed the Need.
Before departing, Bird hugged the man who’d rescued him. “You’re my angel,” he told him. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Then Bird pressed $20 into his hand.
“No thanks. That’s not why I did it,” the man said.
“Absolutely,” Bird said. “I’m very thankful. It could have been a lot worse.”
Brother’s Keepers
Bird returned to the station (by cab) the next morning for his seminar. He’d been bloodied a bit in the attack. His ribs were bruised. He had cuts and scrapes. He needed new glasses.
Wasilewski and fellow officers investigated the case. They brought in Bird and the “angel” to make IDs of suspects. As of Friday, she said, a warrant was being drawn up for the arrest of one of the alleged attackers, a 15-year-old boy. The investigation continues. The video she reviewed was of limited use because a tree blocked some of the action; the video camera is stationed down the block by the train station garage.
Later Bird would learn that either he or the phone-grabber had activated the camera during the tussle. Unfortunately no useful pictures were taken; the photo at left is the clearest image that emerged.
They remained on his phone a week later — reminders, along with the emotional scars, of the greater danger he had escaped. He sweated through nights of partial, oft-interrupted sleep. “I felt really shaken,” he said. “My stomach has not settled since. It was very traumatic.” He’s been loading up on valerian root and kava kava “to settle the nerves.”
As he replays the step-by-step events of that afternoon, he also focuses on the actions, or inaction, of the bystanders.
So does Lt. Wasilewski. “It’s upsetting,” she said. “I can understand not wanting to get involved. But it doesn’t mean anything to call 911” so police can get to the scene right away.
To Bird, calling 911 isn’t enough. He argued that bystanders should have intervened the way his “angel” eventually did.
“We need to be our brother’s keeper,” Bird said. “If there is a cry for help — whether it’s poverty or someone being attacked — we should help.”
He attributed the bystanders’ inaction to the fact that “we’re a digital society. We’re not social unless it’s social media. We traded our safety and security for our liberties.”
“Just like this device here,” he continued, pointing to his battered iPhone. “Somebody could be listening to all this right now, according to Edward Snowden. All these rules and and regulations don’t make you safe.”
Part of the answer might lie in arming more citizens, Bird argued. He doesn’t own a gun, he said. But he plans to suggest to his neighborhood block watch that it obtain permits for some members to patrol the area armed.
Meanwhile, he’d like to play the role of angel himself, in a more modest way than his own angel did last week. One afternoon not long before the Union Station incident, Bird said, he had come across teens who fled on bicycles when they saw him passing by Cafe Fuel on Chapel Street. In their wake he found a bicycle on the sidewalk with its lock clipped off, next to a rack. He asked a Cafe Fuel employee if she knew whose bike it was; she didn’t. So he has stored it in hopes of returning it to its owner. He shared this photo of it. If you know to whom it belongs, contact the Independent here and we’ll pass the info along to Bird.
Is it possible to get a better photo of the bike? It might also be helpful to send it around to the local bike shops; they typically maintain lists of stolen bikes that they know about. And if it was purchased locally, the shop might able to look up the serial number.
Also--those cable locks like the one lying on the ground are all but useless, people. If you want to keep a bicycle, invest in something more durable like a good quality U-lock or a hardened chain.