A mob of young men believed — incorrectly — that a Good Samaritan had killed their friend. Now they had him backed against a wall.
They were in view of a surveillance camera. But not for long.
They smashed the camera. Then they smashed their victim, over and over again.
That bloody tale emerges from the arrest warrant affidavit for one of four men police have charged with participating in the beating. Two more suspects remain at large.
The tale told in the affidavit, combined with other comments from police, fills in the blanks of a gruesome tale that took place on Norton Street the afternoon of Jan. 11.
A 21-year-old man named Damien Blandina was working on his car that day in a parking lot near his apartment building. That apartment building, at 66 Norton, is known as “New Jack City.” (It’s two blocks from the intersection where this recent shooting took place.)
Blandina had the car on a jack. The jack collapsed. The car fell on Blandina, killing him.
It turns out that a 35-year-old neighbor who knows cars had tried to help him before the accident. The neighbor noticed that the jack was rickety, according to Lt. Ray Hassett, the top Dwight neighborhood cop. The neighbor offered to bring a better jack. Blandina said no thanks, but he could use a screwdriver. The neighbor went to retrieve one; while he was gone, the jack collapsed and the man died.
The neighbor returned to the scene. Police took him away for questioning, then released him. The neighborhood heard rumors that the dead man’s friends were blaming him for the accident. He wanted to explain to them what happened.
They weren’t having it.
Later that afternoon two of them followed the neighbor into the hallway of New Jack City, where he lived, at 4:48 p.m. He would later remember two approaching him. He remembered nothing else until he woke up later in a room at the Hospital of St. Raphael trauma unit with swelling to his head, a fractured nose, cuts and bruises to his face and left eye.
The arrest warrant affidavit, written by Detective Lynn Meekins, reconstructed what happened in between those two events and offered this account:
A rumor had spread that police had arrested the neighbor, then released him.
After police released him from questioning, the Good Samaritan neighbor walked up to Blandin’s friends at a makeshift memorial at the site of the death. He tried to explain what had happened. They warned him to leave.
Blandin’s widow followed the neighbor into the hallways of New Jack City.
A video inside the New Jack City hallway shows Blandin’s widow stopping the neighbor. “Seconds later, a mob” of nine men “ran into the apartment building into the stairwell … one in possession of a gun.” The soon-to-be attackers were black; the victim, white. (The warrant is for the arrest of the man with the gun on burglary, assault, and weapons charges.)
“The group of males backed” the victim “against the wall.” He “appeared to surrender by raising both hands above his shoulders.” Three men grabbed him. They pushed him to the second floor, “out of view of the mounted surveillance camera. The angry group of males immediately followed.
One of the men who confronted the victim “repeatedly struck the mounted surveillance camera with his hand to avoid the assault from being recorded and successfully did so. The camera was also damaged.”
A beating proceeded. Through an apartment-door peephole, one tenant saw two of the men punching and kicking the victim.
“No! No! Stop! Stop!” someone was heard yelling.
“Approximately less than a minute later, surveillance footage captured the group of males running from the second floor, down the stairs to the first floor lobby area.”
The victim’s stepson was in their second-floor apartment. He heard the ruckus. He opened the door; he saw his stepfather “physically assaulted and bleeding.”
Detective Meekins and Lt. Hassett later spoke with the widow, according to the affidavit.
“I inquired why she did not attempt to stop the attack,” Meekins wrote. The answer: “They would not have listened to me.”
The widow “claimed she did not know the individuals responsible for the attack.”
But those individuals had been captured on the surveillance camera right before the attack. Hassett’s beat cops spent time watching the video. They knew many of the faces. Officer Carlos Conceicao identified six of the nine people involved in the attack. Officer Milton DeJesus made an identification of three of them.
The police then spent weeks trying to find and capture those six. (Three others remain unidentified.) As of this past week, four were in custody.
Meanwhile, the attack victim moved to another neighborhood. According to the affidavit, two men, one with a gun, were found trying to find him there.
Since then, according to police, the victim has left town.
Guns and fists, instead of pitch forks and torches: it still is the peasant mob.