Michael Wilson

His hospital bed was far from any parade, but the nation’s recognition of his service was no different from that of his fellow officers marching beneath flying flags. It was an honor hard fought, one that had taken the 85-year-old man’s entire adult life to arrive.

He had been a paratrooper in the Army, among the first black soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after the military was desegregated. He had an exemplary record for more than two years. It all ended in a bar fight in 1955.

Mayes was dismissed from the Army with a dishonorable discharge. The punishment was disproportionately harsh and one in which race may have played a part, his supporters said.

He moved to Brooklyn, where he started over with a career in social work and therapy, a leader in the borough’s poorest communities. But as he grew old and his body weakened, he looked back at his service and sought to have his discharge upgraded to an honorable status.

His condition worsened in September and, at last, the Army granted his appeal. Two months later, Veterans Day found him quiet and still, unable to speak and propped on pillows as the profound significance of the day set in among those who knew him best.

Shortly before 4 p.m., doctors called his daughter Nathalie Pilgrim and said her father had gone into cardiac arrest. They were unable to revive him.

“He died on Veterans Day,” she said. “That’s too much for me.”

Mayes was a Southern transplant who arrived in New York City a young and broken man in the late 1950s, harboring a secret about his discharge, and the day that brought it about.

He was 21 and stationed at Fort Bragg, where, on July 30, 1955, he walked into a bar on the base to meet a friend.

Trouble started right away: The bar was reserved for officers, and Mayes was only a private. He was not there long when a sergeant, who had been celebrating his promotion with friends and cold beers, rose from a table to confront the lower-ranking man.

The two began fighting. Mayes’ friend and others tried to break them up. Then, a gunshot rang out. A bullet struck the sergeant, James W. Emery, in his leg. Mayes was holding a pistol. He was swiftly arrested.

He told investigators that he did not know whether he had pulled the trigger. But in 1956, he was dismissed from the service with a dishonorable discharge. “I wanted to remain in the Army,” he wrote in an affidavit in 2017, “but I was denied rehabilitation or restoration.”

He made his way to Brooklyn, still carrying the stigma of his discharge. He said he had tried to kill himself three times. “I struggled with depression, alcohol abuse and the shame of my dishonorable discharge,” he wrote.

He eventually pulled himself up and started over, graduating from Adelphi University and going on to earn a master’s degree.

“I found stability,” he wrote, “and dedicated my life to helping others.”

He became a leader and an advocate in Brooklyn’s poorer neighborhoods, promoting mental health awareness and guiding those seeking help for drug addiction. He urged young men to register to vote and worked to raise awareness of HIV prevention and treatment.

He did not speak of his discharge from the Army, not even to his three daughters. His was one of some 260,000 so-called bad paper discharges of Korean War-era service members. They were handed down to black service members in disproportionate numbers, according to later government studies.

Around 2014, with his health beginning to fail him, Mayes sought to petition the military to reconsider his discharge. The change was more than just words on paper: An upgrade in status would make him eligible to receive benefits available to veterans, including health care and burial in a military cemetery.

“I feel that dedication to making positive changes in my own life empowered me to assist others in creating a successful life,” Mayes wrote.

He worked with Steve Lessard, a lawyer and president of the New York County Lawyers Association, which takes on discharge upgrade cases free of charge; and Rob Cuthbert, a former coordinator for the Veteran Advocacy Project’s Discharge Upgrade Clinic at the Urban Justice Center.

The request was denied. Mayes continued to decline. He lost his hearing and, in September, he stopped eating and was admitted to Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn. His team renewed their efforts, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York reached out to the acting secretary of the Army.

The new appeal was a success. Sixty-three years after leaving the Army, Mayes’ discharge was upgraded from dishonorable to honorable. His daughter shouted the good news into his ear and showed him printed signs explaining what had happened.

“We even played a recording” made by one of his advocates, Pilgrim said Tuesday. “He would kind of follow us and look at us.”

He was unable to speak but sometimes squeezed a hand on command, giving others hope that he understood the good news. His daughter likes to believe he knew.

“He worked hard for all these years to prove his case,” she said. “He would have been ecstatic.”

Plans were already underway to grant her father a wish he once feared was forever out of reach, one he pleaded for in his own words in 2017:

“To be buried in a national cemetery,” he wrote, “with my comrades-in-arms.”

This article originally appeared in

A Black Paratrooper's First Veterans Day, and His Last

NEW YORK — On Monday, for the first time in his life, Needham Mayes was a veteran on Veterans Day.

But something else was left at the sites. Fresh boxes of hot pizza were stacked at each memorial. And with them, a note. “I wish with all my heart,” it read, “that I could have been there at that very moment to protect all of you guys.”

The author added, “you know me as the pizza guy.” Then he revealed something from his own past: “As a former homeless man, I know the struggle that all of you guys went through every day.”

The pizzas and notes came from Hakki Akdeniz, a 39-year-old immigrant who has built a small chain of pizza shops in the city and, with it, something of an unofficial, but solid, support network for the homeless in Manhattan. His visits to the memorials this week, each time lugging a stack of pizzas that reached his chin, follow a remarkable journey even in a city built on rags-to-riches tales.

Akdeniz is Kurdish, was raised in Turkey and emigrated to Canada as a young man. Back in Turkey, he had worked in cafes making lahmacun, flattened dough topped with spiced meat, and he aspired to make its Western cousin, pizza, in the United States.

He arrived by bus in New York in 2001 with $240 in his pocket and a promise of a bed at a friend’s apartment. When the friend changed his mind, Akdeniz moved into a dingy motel on 42nd Street and watched his meager savings dribble away at $30 a night.

Broke, he spent a few nights huddled with his bags in Grand Central Terminal. Someone pointed him to the Bowery Mission, one of the city’s most well-known homeless shelters, in the heart of the city’s skid row.

“I stayed there for 96 nights,” Akdeniz said. He busied himself in the kitchen, chopping onions and washing dishes, and he looked for work making pizza. His English was poor. He noticed a woman at the mission reading a Turkish language newspaper, and she helped him find a listing for a job at a Mediterranean pizza shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, near the PATH station.

He showed up in New Jersey in unwashed clothes. The owner was skeptical. “He thought I was so dirty, unclean,” recalled Akdeniz. Desperate, he asked, “Can I make a pizza?”

“I was shaking, so nervous,” he said. “It came out no good. I said, ‘Can I make another one?’ ”

After a few failed attempts, the owner hired him — to wash dishes. That night Akdeniz slept on a bench across from the restaurant, returning early the next day. The next night, he slept in the basement of the pizza shop’s building.

Later that week, the cook gave him a tip. There was a building in Sunnyside, Queens, where the super had an assistant who did odd jobs and lived rent-free in the basement. The assistant was looking for an assistant — same perks. “The boiler room, you can sleep in the corner,” Akdeniz was told.

A year later, he had saved enough to move into an apartment with a roommate. He got a new job in early 2003 washing dishes at a restaurant on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. On St. Patrick’s Day, the regular pizza maker didn’t show up to work, and Akdeniz was promoted on the spot.

He spent five years there, improving his skills. In 2009, he found a tiny pizza shop in the Lower East Side that was for sale. He had saved up $40,000 by then, and the shop — just an oven with a counter in front of it — cost twice that, but the owner agreed to sell, setting up monthly payments.

Akdeniz immediately fell behind in his first month, then his second and third. The man he owed told him, “Pay me, or I’ll put you in the oven.” Little did the man know that, to save money, Akdeniz was already sleeping under that oven, locked inside the shop every night until another worker opened a padlocked gate the next day.

Then, a breakthrough. Akdeniz entered a pizza-making contest in 2010 at the Javits Center. To stand out, he threw and spun his pizza dough after setting it on fire. He won first place.

He was featured in a cover article in PMQ Pizza Magazine, which gave him thousands of copies that he handed out outside schools in the neighborhood near his shop. The teenagers laughed and called him “Champ,” but they bought slices, too.

“It became just busy — busy, busy, busy,” he said.

He paid off the shop. He heard of another one for sale nearby, on Rivington Street, and he made an offer that was accepted. Now with two places, he figured he needed a brand name, and he thought of the nickname the teenagers had given him. He named his two shops Champion Pizza.

He bought a third place, then a fourth. He improved his ingredients, making his dough extra light and importing organic sauce from Naples. He bought a fifth place, then a sixth, stretching out to Soho, Union Square and Columbus Circle. His seventh, which opened last year, is near the building in Queens and his old corner in the basement.

Along the way, he became something of a pizza celebrity, known for his flashy acrobatics in tossing and twirling dough, flaming or otherwise, and for building giant pizzas. He has won international pizza making competitions, and his Instagram account has 3.5 million followers.

While building this small pizza empire, Akdeniz never forgot his time among the homeless. He passed out free slices to street people who came around asking. Eventually he started a weekly food and clothing handout on a stretch of sidewalk on West 34th Street.

His outreach extended beyond pizza. He found a nearby barbershop that agreed to cut homeless men’s hair, and a gymnasium that was willing to let them use its showers. He paid both for their services. He also regularly distributed pizzas to the homeless in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, becoming known among them as the “pizza guy.”

Last weekend, he was having a meal with friends when he learned that four men had been bludgeoned to death in Chinatown and that the police believed the killer was another homeless man. Deeply shaken, he had to excuse himself.

“How could you?” he asked in the interview. He pointed to a man sleeping on the sidewalk nearby. “That guy over there, how could you kill him?”

On Wednesday, Akdeniz and one of his employees carried 16 small boxes of pizza to a waiting Uber, and placed them in the trunk, before making the short journey to 2 Bowery, where one of the victims, Chuen Kwoc, 83, was killed.

He placed several boxes on the ground next to a row of candles, removing the empty ones from his previous visits. A passing man pushing a shopping cart stopped, and Akdeniz handed him a pizza box.

In large letters, its cover read “Champion Pizza,” and below, in smaller print, “Made in New York With Love.”

'I Know the Struggle': Why a Pizza Mogul Left Pies at Memorials to 4 Homeless Men

NEW YORK — Candles, flowers and handwritten tributes flow onto the sidewalk like surf filling a void in the sand, replacing the body just taken away. Memorials in Chinatown this week marked the spots where four homeless men were killed Saturday, their heads smashed while they slept by an attacker wielding a metal bar.

The paratrooper, Needham Mayes, was among the first black servicemen on the base since the executive order to desegregate the armed forces was signed seven years earlier. But here in this club, in July 1955, he was just a 21-year-old private, and privates weren’t allowed.

The sergeant and the private exchanged heated words, then blows. Other sergeants tried to break them up. From the chaos emerged a gunshot. The sergeant lay wounded, and the private was led away in irons.

He was swiftly court-martialed and expelled from the Army with a dishonorable discharge. He maintained his innocence, but his appeal was denied. He then moved to Brooklyn to start a new life, one filled with public service in the borough’s poorest black neighborhoods.

Now, 64 years later, a new and urgent level of attention has returned to his discharge: Mayes, 85, is nearing the end of his life, unable to hear or eat, his thin frame curled in a bed at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center.

His lawyers are seeking to have the discharge upgraded so that Mayes can be granted a final wish to be buried among veterans at a national cemetery.

The race against the clock is playing out in legal filings to the acting Secretary of the Army, Ryan D. McCarthy, with letters of support from friends and family — even one from the sergeant who was wounded in the fight.

The case is the latest in what many consider a period of reckoning for the military and what are known as “bad paper” discharges, which force separation under less than fully honorable conditions under the military’s interpretation of misconduct or poor performance.

Nearly 260,000 Korean War-era service members were separated with less than fully honorable discharges, according to statistics provided by the Department of Defense to Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco-based veterans advocacy group.

Some of the disciplinary actions, which cover various offenses, have been successfully contested in recent years, especially ones involving homosexual acts. A 2011 Obama administration policy has generally granted an honorable discharge to veterans who were ousted for homosexuality unless there were aggravating factors like misconduct.

In the Jim Crow South, black service members were administratively separated or court-martialed in disproportionate numbers, according to government studies dating back to the 1970s — and relatively few of those servicemen have sought reconsideration.

These discharges can result in the lifelong denial of certain veteran benefits, including access to health care, subsidized education and many government jobs, as well as burial in national cemeteries.

“Needham isn’t alone,” said Rob Cuthbert, a former coordinator for the Veteran Advocacy Project’s Discharge Upgrade Clinic at the Urban Justice Center. “Going public with his discharge is a brave and final act of service.”

Mayes was born in 1934 in New Bern, North Carolina, to a laborer and a mother of seven. He was born Needham Maye, but changed his last name to Mayes years later. He enlisted in 1953 after he graduated from high school.

“He was very excited,” said his brother, Derry Maye, 81. “When he came home the first time, with them boots shining like new money — he was looking good.”

Mayes volunteered for paratrooper training and joined the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg. It was there that the incident that reshaped his life took place, on July 30, 1955.

Mayes ran into a friend, Sgt. Henry C. Saunders, who told Mayes that he was heading to town from the base shortly, and invited him to come. Mayes said he would change clothes and join him.

Saunders said he had a particular reason to go to town: He was carrying a gun, a personal weapon not issued by the Army, and he wanted to get rid of it.

The sergeant tucked the small pistol, a .22-caliber revolver, into the inside pocket of his sport coat and entered the base club for noncommissioned officers like himself — known as the NCO Club — for a cheeseburger. He was sitting with other sergeants, including one who had been promoted that very day, Sgt. James W. Emery, 21.

Emery was celebrating. (“You won’t deny that you had eight or 10 beers, do you?” he was asked later, to which he replied, “I may have had.”) It was 7:30 p.m.

Mayes entered the club and found Saunders. Emery noticed the private in a place where privates weren’t welcome, and, goaded by the older sergeants around him, rose to tell him as much.

The scuffle that followed would be hazily recalled later among its three or four principals, the details lost to the heat of the moment and to the beer. Emery and Mayes exchanged words and began shoving one another. Saunders and another sergeant broke them up, but the two resumed wresting.

Saunders said later he only then realized that his pistol was gone from his pocket. A round had been fired, wounding Emery in the thigh. Military police officers arrived and arrested Mayes.

He stood trial for general court-martial two months later. The other men in or near the fracas testified to what they saw and heard — Emery rising to confront the man of a lower rank, Saunders hearing a shot and realizing his gun was missing.

Mayes at first admitted to taking the gun: “I reached with my hand into the inside of Sergeant Saunders’ pocket and pulled it out,” he testified, according to a transcript of the hearing. But he said he only meant to show it to the sergeant. “I don’t think I pulled the trigger,” he wrote in an affidavit, and he said he did not know who did.

He was found guilty and handed a dishonorable discharge and a sentence of one year of hard labor. Emery was back to work soon after; his wound was minor.

Mayes moved to Brooklyn a troubled man.

“I struggled with depression, alcohol abuse and the shame of my dishonorable discharge,” he wrote decades later, in 2017, in an affidavit. He recanted his testimony about grabbing the gun, saying Saunders pulled out his own gun: “Several people grabbed for the pistol at the same time, and the pistol went off.”

He turned his life around. In 1978, he earned a bachelor’s degree at Adelphi University, the first of his seven siblings to finish college. He earned a master’s degree and became a social worker and therapist. He had three daughters.

He worked at organizations that fought drug abuse and promoted mental health awareness. He sought to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS, handing out condoms at events. And in 2009, when Mayes was 75, he joined the NAACP’s Brooklyn branch. On its Civic Engagement Committee he became a regular presence in poor, black neighborhoods, urging young men to register to vote with the verve of a preacher seeking converts. He visited homes and jails, but he was particularly drawn to large events, where the crowds were greater.

“All over Brooklyn, basketball tournaments,” said Onida Mayers, 54, who worked at Mayes’ side until, in his late 70s, his health began to decline. “He always wanted to be sure that young black men knew their rights and had a future. That they had the tools they needed.”

Mayers would later write a letter to the Army supporting Mayes’ appeal for a new discharge status: “Mr. Mayes utilized all his resources to assist people trapped in these negative cycles: monetary, physical and mental.”

He was in the early stages of declining health when he approached lawyers in New York in 2016 who specialize in applying for upgrades in military discharges. He was among the very oldest of former servicemen to seek an upgrade — generally, the clients on the older end of the spectrum were from the Vietnam era.

In Mayes’ case, an upgrade from dishonorable to honorable or general discharge, besides possibly providing him with a pension and other veteran benefits, would make him eligible for burial in a national cemetery.

“I am a rehabilitated man,” he wrote in 2017, “and I hope to have the right to be buried in a national cemetery with my comrades-in-arms.”

The Secretary of the Army has the authority to upgrade a discharge immediately. In 2017, that office denied Mayes’ request. His lawyers filed a new application on Friday, and the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has requested a meeting with the acting Army secretary and has urged that the case be considered quickly.

Mayes also found another, unlikely ally: Emery, the injured man from 1955.

“Mistakes were made on both our parts that evening,” Emery, now retired and living in South Dakota, wrote in 2017. “Chalk it up to youthful brashness, boisterousness, and stupidity. I hold absolutely no animosity toward Mr. Mayes, and am pleased to hear that he spent his life helping others.”

In his hospital bed, Mayes seems largely unaware of his surroundings, and his doctors have told his daughter, Nathalie Pilgrim, 54, that they are mainly trying to make him comfortable.

On Sunday, Mayers, his friend and partner in registering voters, visited his bedside.

“There are people who are working for you, and people who care about you and love you,” Mayers told him. “You are not forgotten.”

On His Deathbed, an Ex-Soldier Makes a Final Plea to Clear His Name

The young Army paratrooper had barely set foot in the club for noncommissioned officers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he was confronted by a sergeant.

It was a winter night in 1971 in Dunne’s Bar and Grill at the Brooklyn foot of the Manhattan Bridge, a Friday so slow that the bartender decided it was time to close. He asked the police officer, a friend of his who was not in uniform, to tell the man in the booth it was time to go.

In the chaotic seconds that followed, gunfire tore through Dunne’s, leaving bullets lodged in the bar and the officer, Robert Bolden, dead on floor. He was 46 years old, a father of three. His killer was never identified.

There are thousands of cold cases in New York City, needling reminders of unfinished business. But the murder at Dunne’s 48 years ago burdens detectives more than many.

His murder is the oldest unsolved case of an officer killed in the city. In July, detectives announced a new push to solve the crime, offering a $111,500 reward, raised by police unions around the country, for any information. Coming so long after the murder, the reward and renewed investigation are measures of the depth of resolve in the New York Police Department when one of its own has been slain.

The obstacles investigators face are many, starting with the passage of time.

“Most of the people at that time are either 80 or dead,” said Detective Martin Herb, a Brooklyn homicide investigator assigned to the case. “The crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, that’s a lot to go through.”

Still, investigators hope an infusion of cash to the long-standing reward will pry loose some leads. “We’re going to take this case and treat it like it happened a month ago, and use money and forensics,” Herb said.

To revisit the death of Bolden is to travel back to a starker time. He would become the first of 10 officers murdered in New York City in 1971, far more than in any year in the previous decade. The killings came amid a national wave of attacks on officers. Police chiefs and members of Congress urged for investigations into a possible conspiracy.

The police killings added to a general sense that New York City was in decline. Heroin use was rampant, the murder rate was rising fast and the city’s finances were shaky. Radical politics seemed to be in the air. Two officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini, were ambushed and gunned down later that year in Harlem by members of the Black Liberation Army.

Bolden lived only a couple of blocks away from Dunne’s, in the Farragut Houses, a public-housing project. He was a transplant from the South by way of wartime Europe. He had been born and raised in South Carolina, and his family members were once sharecroppers on a plantation owned by the Pratt family called Good Hope, his brother, George Bolden, said.

He enlisted in the Navy after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. He was only 16 but lied about his age.

“When the war broke out, a lot of the young men his age and older enlisted in the armed forces,” George Bolden said. “I think he felt the world was moving on without him. He cajoled my mom to go down to the naval enlisting place with him.”

When he came home from the war, he settled in New York City. “He married a lady who lived in Brooklyn,” his brother said. He first found work with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s police unit before joining the Police Department in 1955.

“Always right where you needed him,” said a fellow officer from the 1960s, George Hanley, 75. “Gentleman of a cop. Nothing more you could ask from a man. A real swell guy.”

Bolden relished the work. “He loved being in uniform,” George Bolden said. When he was occasionally assigned to a plainclothes unit, “he absolutely hated it.” He worked in the 75th Precinct in East Brooklyn, but was a familiar presence in his own neighborhood.

“He made it a point, whenever he could, he’d stop in places,” George Bolden said. A luncheonette, a Carvel ice cream shop, a dry cleaner — “He would actually stop in on his way home. He would get in to see those people. They knew him and knew he was a cop. He’d say, ‘I’m thinking about you. How are things going?’”

It may have been in this spirit that he began going to Dunne’s Bar and Grill on Gold Street near the bridge. The night of Jan. 22, 1971, was unusual only in how empty the bar was: just him; his friend the bartender, John Gallagher, 62; and the third man in the phone booth. Gallagher asked Bolden to tell the man the bar was closing, and he did.

When he returned to the bar, the man emerged with a shotgun. He fired and wounded Bolden, who returned fire with his service revolver, his bullets missing their mark and slamming into the wood bar. The man fired again, this time killing Bolden where he stood. He fell to the floor.

The gunman ran out of the bar. Moments later, two other men ran in, grabbed the officer’s revolver, and ran back out. Witnesses told the police the men fled in a different direction than the first man.

Behind the bar, Gallagher blacked out.

With so few eyewitnesses, the case grew cold within hours and stayed that way. A police helicopter searched in vain for the shooter. Officers contacted people who had received calls from the pay phone that night, but none were believed to have spoken to him.

The bartender was interrogated and passed a lie-detector test, leaving detectives convinced that he had nothing to do with the crime. He died a few years later.

The lack of clues created a void that filled with theories. Maybe the shooter was pretending to be on the phone, but actually was waiting for Bolden to leave so he could rob the bartender. Maybe the two men who ran in after were his accomplices, or maybe they were not.

“We’re treating it separately,” Herb said, viewing the gun theft as a crime of opportunity by two men who heard the shots. The gun would never surface again; it has not been used in another reported crime and has not been sold in the open market.

In the days after the murder, the police thought they were close to an arrest. Two people outside the bar that night had said they saw a man leaving Dunne’s near the time of the shooting. But the man came forward to the police when he learned detectives were looking for him and brought five witnesses who said he was with them that night, nowhere near Dunne’s. A grand jury declined to indict him.

Herb and Sgt. Dan Brennan, both from Brooklyn North’s homicide division, are running the new investigation. They are gathering the old physical evidence for DNA testing and tracking down witnesses — the ones outside the bar and others. They are re-examining crime scene photographs with image-mapping software.

“Our twist is, we’re going to take today’s technology and put it to use as if it’s a new homicide,” Herb said.

Bolden was laid to rest the week after his death. “A biting cold wind whipped at the faces of the 500 policemen standing at attention outside the church in the Fort Green section,” a New York Times article said. “As six men in uniform picked up the flag-draped coffin, hundreds of white-gloved hands shot up in sharp salute.”

A school in East New York, near the precinct where he had worked, was renamed the Patrolman Robert Bolden School. But the officer’s legacy took form in a different way within his family.

In 1987, after hearing about his slain uncle for most of his life, Gregory W. Bolden of Providence, Rhode Island, joined his local police department. One of his motivations was to “avenge his uncle’s death,” his father, George Bolden, said.

Gregory Bolden died in 2005 of a rare illness. That same year, one of Robert Bolden’s grandchildren, John Bolden, joined the New York Police Department, starting at the same precinct where the grandfather he never met lived and lost his life. Now a detective, John Bolden said he thinks often about his grandfather’s killer.

“It’s always been in my mind,” John Bolden said. “Hoping that one day, you’d be able to bring the case to a positive ending.”

48 Years Later, a Cold Case Mystery: Who Killed Officer Bolden?

NEW YORK — Three people were in the bar that night — the bartender, an off-duty police officer he was chatting with over the polished wood, and, in the back of the place, a man in a phone booth.

But in firing the police officer whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner, O’Neill instead delivered a sprawling examination of the case and spoke about the perils and valor of policing, openly displaying anguish over the choice he faced.

It is one he had been criticized for not making sooner, allowing the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, to remain on desk duty for five years as a federal investigation proceeded.

And yet the speech Monday instantly became a signature moment in O’Neill’s tenure, announcing the conclusion of a case that had been heavily scrutinized by all sides of the political spectrum — in neighborhoods that have long complained of police aggression, in City Hall and on the presidential campaign trail.

The commissioner, who has been praised by officers as a “cop’s cop,” clearly saw that this day could threaten the trust that had been placed in him, and his address showed how he had agonized over that potential breach. He recalled his early days in the department, and seemed at times to consider how that version of himself might have been disappointed with his decision to dismiss the 34-year-old officer.

“I served for nearly 34 years as a uniformed New York City cop before becoming police commissioner,” he said. “I can tell you that, had I been in Officer Pantaleo’s situation, I may have made similar mistakes.”

O’Neill’s decision came after a judge in a departmental trial recommended this month that Pantaleo be fired, saying she believed he had been “untruthful” in his explanation on what happened on July 17, 2014, after he had tackled Garner and pressed him to the pavement.

Garner’s pleas before his death — “I can’t breathe,” repeated 11 times — helped to galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement, which itself led to a counteroffensive from the police, who believed the criticism interfered with their ability to do their jobs.

O’Neill said he strove to make a decision “unaffected by public opinions demanding one outcome over another.” Anticipating blowback from all sides, he got personal, similar to what he’s done in the recent past, whether in eulogies for fallen officers or in his pointed apology for the police conduct that led to the Stonewall Riots.

He spoke of his visceral reaction to the video depicting the struggle between Garner and Pantaleo, even after watching it countless times.

“Every time I watched the video, I say to myself, as probably all of you do, to Mr. Garner: ‘Don’t do it. Comply,’” O’Neill said. “To Officer Pantaleo: ‘Don’t do it.’ I said that about the decisions made by both Officer Pantaleo and Mr. Garner.”

It was a speech steeped in context, one that sought to turn the discussion from hashtags on social media back to the original scene. O’Neill described in detail the undesirable conditions near that corner of Staten Island the day Garner died.

“Neighborhood residents purposely avoided the area in and directly around Tompkinsville Park,” he said. “Drug dealers worked the edges of the park, and across the street, selling narcotics. A handful of men regularly sold loose cigarettes made cheaper by the fact that New York state taxes had not been paid on them. A liquor store nearby sold alcohol to people who would drink that alcohol in the park — people who would sometimes use drugs, urinate and pass out on benches there.”

Pantaleo arrived at that park and found Garner selling loose cigarettes. O’Neill described the struggle between the two men after Garner refused to show identification. Pantaleo grabbed Garner’s wrist, and then Garner twisted away.

“What happened next is the matter we must address,” O’Neill said.

During a struggle that threatened to send both men crashing through a glass window, Pantaleo pressed his forearm against Garner’s neck. The chokehold, although not the preferred maneuver, was acceptable in the first brief moments of the struggle, O’Neill explained. But the officer maintained the hold after he had the opportunity to use a “less lethal alternative,” O’Neill said.

He said he himself might have done the same thing.

“And had I made those mistakes, I would have wished I had used the arrival of backup officers to give the situation more time to make the arrest,” he said. “And I would have wished that I had released my grip before it became a chokehold.”

In firing Pantaleo, he also praised the rest of the department.

“Being a police officer is one of the hardest jobs in the world,” he said. “That is not a statement to elicit sympathy from those we serve. It is a fact. Cops have to make choices, sometimes very quickly, every single day. Some are split-second, life-and-death choices.”

Many of those decisions face scrutiny later, “both fairly and unfairly,” O’Neill said.

“We must move forward together as one city, determined to secure safety for all — safety for all New Yorkers and safety for every police officer working daily to protect all of us,” he said.

Even after the lengthy speech and questions from reporters, O’Neill took to social media to send some final thoughts.

“We recruit from the human race,” he said on Twitter. “We’re not perfect. But, the next time you’re walking down the street and you feel safe, thank the NYPD.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/nyregion/nypd-police-commissioner-pantaleo.html" id="c3c566f3-11f4-3329-a948-b50f279a9c2f">The New York Times</a>.

How the NYPD Commissioner Grappled With the Eric Garner Decision

NEW YORK — James P. O’Neill, the New York City police commissioner, could have dispensed with a decision five years in the making with a terse official statement.

Then came a booming crackle Tuesday night that sounded like gunfire and sent hundreds of people fleeing down side streets, huddling under neon storefronts and pounding on the doors for help outside crowded theaters, including the Shubert.

Police quickly said a backfiring dirt bike was the source of the noise. But the scene of fear and chaos suggested a new level of national anxiety days after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, left 31 people dead.

“I imagine, you know, the Baby Boomer era, they knew what to do when there was a bomb siren. And people in California know to stand under a door if there’s an earthquake,” said Jamie Pillet, of Long Island, who was knocked down during the stampede. Now there is a new danger and an ingrained response: “I think that we all, as Americans, sort of know the drill.”

In Times Square on Wednesday morning, Tania Lundh, of Michigan, described what to her felt like a new normal: “It isn’t a heightened sense of fear, but of reality.”

In the commotion during Tuesday night’s scare, police said, at least 12 people were injured, ranging in age from a 12-year-old girl to a 79-year-old woman. One person had broken her wrist; another fractured his kneecap.

But the following day, Chief James R. Waters, who leads the New York City Police Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, said the public’s reaction was understandable and, as fearful as it was, even proper.

“To the untrained civilian, it’s gunshots, and in a 24-hour news cycle and the tragedies of Dayton and El Paso, they’re not wrong,” he said. “We train the public, we ask the public, we implore the public — run, hide, fight. They did what we asked them to do.”

The news of recent events is in the front of people’s minds — and particularly in Times Square, literally in front of their eyes. “It’s on the screens. It’s on their iPhone. It’s in their pocket. You can’t escape it,” he said.

The heightened reaction to a false alarm in New York was one of several around the country in the days since the shootings. In Virginia, a USA Today building was evacuated Wednesday after a mistaken report of a person with a weapon.

In Utah on Tuesday night, the sound of a falling sign at a shopping mall sent people scrambling for cover and hiding in stores. At a fair in Yuba City, California, on Sunday, people were pushing and shoving each other, trying to flee after hearing a loud noise.

News like the mass shootings create lenses through which people interpret their surroundings and, in particular, loud noises, said Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology at New York University.

“If they’re hearing about all these mass shootings in public spaces, they’re more likely to interpret them as a gunshot,” he said. “Once other people start to interpret it that way, it affects your interpretation. No one actually saw the original stimulus.”

Officers posted in Times Square — part of a heavy, everyday police presence — noticed a group of six people with dirt bikes starting and revving their engines. When one of the bikes backfired, officers immediately identified the sound as just that, Waters said, even as the opposite response rolled through the crowd.

“People were screaming to get down, children crying, everybody grabbing hold of loved ones trying to run to safety,” one woman wrote on Twitter.

Workers at Forever 21 were suddenly faced with a stampede of people running into the store, herding them to a lower floor. Diners on a patio of Junior’s Cheesecake dropped their forks and ran inside as a crowd plowed past, knocking over chairs and overturning tables. Glasses shattered, spreading shards on the floor. People lost shoes that were left behind on the streets and in stores.

“It looked like a war scene in that M&amp;M; store,” said Daniel Simmons, a ticket seller from Manhattan. “There were mismatched shoes all over the place.”

Anjalika Sharma, a mother visiting from San Diego with her family, was swept into a Gap store by the surging crowd and cowered in a men’s restroom.

“You know, I’m in the bathroom thinking, if he comes in, how am I going to throw my body?” she said. “Who can I protect? Do I save my daughter or my son?”

Theaters, where workers are trained on how to evacuate in the event of an emergency, were faced with the opposite situation — people trying to get inside.

“We were at ‘Hamilton’ when panicked civilians stormed the theater for safety,” one theatergoer wrote on Twitter. “Which caused the theater to stampede. We were crawling and hiding behind railings.”

On the stage of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Keenan-Bolger, as Scout, looked on in disbelief as the pandemonium arose.

“This was terrifying for the audience who heard screaming &amp; banging on the doors,” she wrote on Twitter, “so they hid or ran &amp; tried to flee. It was terrifying for us because we didn’t know what was happening or what to do.”

An employee at the Imperial Theater said on Twitter that he was locked in a bathroom alongside 10 women, with the lights off: “I accepted it was my time to die.”

Andrew Barth Feldman, star of “Dear Evan Hansen” at the Music Box Theater, said on Twitter that the show’s audience was locked down in the theater while the cast stayed in their dressing rooms.

“People were sobbing, calling their loved ones, hiding behind seats,” he wrote.

Police and the mayor posted messages on Twitter stating that there was no active shooter.

“Times Square is safe and secure, but the panic and fear people felt tonight was all too real,” Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote. “Nobody should have to live in constant fear of gun violence.”

The incident is hardly the first case of mistaken panic and unrest in Times Square or other crowded destinations in the city. In September, the pop of someone stepping on an empty water bottle in Central Park set off a stampede at a crowded concert. But its timing fed into mounting anxieties that seem to have reached a new crescendo since the weekend’s attacks.

As one visitor to the city posted on social media: “The state of fear is insane.”

“This is the world we live in,” said Gideon Glick, who also appears in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” playing Dill Harris. “This cannot be our world.”

Sharma, who hid with her family in the Gap restroom, said her son asked her later if they could move to Canada.

“And we told him no,” she said. “We kept saying, ‘It’s a beautiful country.’ ”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/nyregion/shootings-panic-anxiety.html" id="0c87fc76-2c7a-35ca-a731-e90fe3fab4fc">The New York Times</a>.

A Dirt Bike Pops, and 'Run, Hide, Fight' Comes to Times Square

NEW YORK — It was a teeming summer night typical in Times Square, with tourists strolling beneath the glowing screens over Broadway, vendors hawking souvenirs and audiences sitting in theaters as performances neared their end. Celia Keenan-Bolger, who plays Scout Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” at the Shubert Theater, was giving her final speech of the night.

He seemed sophisticated, with a three-piece suit and a briefcase. His name was Willie Sanchez, and he wasn’t like any other man she knew. They talked and talked, and before he left, he told her aunt, “I’d like to talk to her more.”

She turned 20 years old that day in 1979, with little to celebrate. She was struggling to stay afloat with a toddler son in her own apartment nearby, hiding from the boy’s father, a heroin addict and a thief who would be out of jail soon and looking for her.

But Willie Sanchez promised a new future. Blanche found herself pampered for the first time in her life, fitted for new clothes in nice stores, sampling expensive perfumes in beauty salons. She was swept up by it all.

This captivation would lead, as the months passed, to literal captivity, ending in a 71-day blur of cocaine, guns, terror and, finally, an ambush assassination that put one of them in prison and the other in the ground.

NEW YORK — Even on a night of surprises for Blanche Wright, the man in the suit stood out. She had headed across the Bronx to visit her sick aunt, but when she entered the apartment she found a roomful of people waiting for her: “Happy Birthday!” Then she was introduced to a friend of her aunt’s, an impeccably dressed lawyer from Philadelphia.

Michael Wilson

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