Follow-up to my previous post:
A life gone and friends ask why
By Sarah Lyall The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 25, 2005
LONDON He was an electrician. He was 27 years old. He had lived in London, away from his Brazilian homeland, for more than three years - legally, a cousin said - and was rattled enough by the first wave of bombs in London to consider forgoing the subway and buying a motorbike.
But on Friday morning, Jean Charles de Menezes became another innocent casualty of London's terrorist wars, shot and killed on the London Underground by police officers who mistook him for a would-be suicide bomber.
The police have apologized profusely for what they called a tragedy, but the incident brought fresh horror to spooked Londoners who look at Menezes and see their sons, their brothers - or themselves.
"Now I think it could happen to me, to anyone, to someone who was just visiting," said Menezes' cousin Alex Pereira, a student in London who has emerged as a spokesman for the shocked family. "We are not safe here."
A friend, Edmar Lopes, said in an interview that Menezes "was like a talk machine, talking and talking and talking and excited about everything." [told you so: Menezes was a blabbermouth....]
Pereira described his cousin as friendly, fluent in English, hopeful about life in London and busy with work.
"If you could speak to him for five minutes you could see he was a good person," Pereira said. "He would never have done anything to anyone."
The son of a bricklayer, Menezes grew up near Gonzaga in the state of Minas Gerais, which in recent years has sent many migrants to the United States and Europe. He moved to São Paolo at the age of 14 to live with an uncle, his family said, graduated from high school and became a qualified electrician.
The place where he lived in London, a housing project on Scotia Road in Tulse Hill, south of Brixton, is unusually quiet and unusually pretty. Set around a children's playground, it is free of litter and graffiti and full of blooming flowers and neatly painted front doors. It is also full of different races and ethnicities: blacks, Indians, a few Muslims from the Middle East, some south Americans. Menezes shared an apartment there with two other cousins, Patricia and Vivian.
The police were watching an apartment - possibly another one in Menezes' small building - in connection with the bombings last Thursday. Disastrously, they thought that Menezes had emerged from the apartment in question on Friday, when he left to go to a job in Wilsden Green. Wearing plain clothes, they trailed him up the road and onto the No. 2 bus, bound for the Stockwell Underground stop, a little more than 10 minutes away.
That is when it all unraveled. When Menezes began to enter the station, witnesses said, he was surrounded by police officers who shouted at him to stop. But he ran instead. He jumped over the turnstile and ran down an escalator, stumbling terrified into the Underground car, where he fell face down. Witnesses said that the police then shot him five times in the head and neck, killing him instantly.
In trying to answer the question of why his cousin did not immediately stop when ordered to, Pereira argued that Menezes would never have run from the police. In fact, he had been confronted by them several times before - once in Brixton, when an officer with a dog asked him to open his bag - and had always cooperated, Pereira said.
"They shot him from behind in the back of the neck," said Pereira, who identified his cousin's body. "Can you imagine a worse thing? They could have shot him in the leg, and he would have survived."
Fausto Soares, another Brazilian friend who lives in London, said that perhaps Menezes ran because a confrontation with a gang of English thugs several weeks earlier had made him especially worried about being chased. [as all XTC dealers, Menezes ran afoul of (rival) thugs every now and then....]
This would be particularly true if all the police officers at the station - or at least the ones he was aware of - were wearing plain clothes, Soares said.
"He was a calm guy and stayed out of trouble," Soares said in an interview with O Globo, the newspaper in Rio de Janeiro. "He was attacked by some English guys and because of that probably was afraid and ran."
Making some lunchtime empanadas in her house, just around the corner from Menezes' apartment, Yudith Villarreal said the incident had been doubly frightening. First, the thought that terrorists making bombs were living nearby - the feeling in the neighborhood was that the police had correctly identified a terrorism-connected apartment but mistakenly assumed that Menezes lived in it - and second, the knowledge that there was one more thing to worry about on the subway.
Villarreal, who moved to London from Argentina 14 years ago, said that her teenage son, dark-skinned and dark-haired, carries a backpack on the Underground as he travels to his job, as a trainee hairdresser, in Blackfriars.
Everyone is so on edge now, she added, that it is easy to see why Menezes might have run from the authorities.
"I feel it's unfair if a person is nervous and feels unsafe and sees so many police with guns and stuff," she said. "Something can happen just because you're in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Jonathan Allen contributed reporting from London for this article, and Larry Rohter from Rio de Janeiro.
iht.com |
