THE MAN NOBODY KILLED

A Black man dies after the police brutally beat him in public, but no one is held accountable.

This smart, no-stone-unturned investigation into the horrific encounter between police and a young man of color doubles as a perceptive portrait of 1980s New York City, where, then as now, cynicism and corruption so often ran roughshod over the relatively powerless. Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old artist whose social circles overlapped with a who’s who of downtown bohemia, was arrested on Sept. 15, 1983, for allegedly writing on a subway station wall. Police say he resisted, requiring numerous officers to control him. Stewart was unconscious, with “bruises all over,” Green writes, when police took him to Bellevue Hospital, where he died later that month. Green, a dogged journalist and the author of Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, uses court documents and news accounts, along with his own interviews, to craft a damning portrait of violence without consequences. Twelve witnesses testified that “multiple officers kicked or beat” Stewart, Green writes, and doctors found choke marks on his neck. But against a backdrop that suggested city officials didn’t care—police brutality, Mayor Ed Koch said, was “a phony, false issue”—the six officers facing charges were found not guilty. Perversely, they seem to have beaten the charges in part because with more than one officer hitting Stewart, it was impossible to determine who inflicted which injuries. Those who knew Stewart remember him as a sensitive soul, and Green’s reporting places him in a fertile creative milieu, an acquaintance of graffiti artist Keith Haring, a crowd-scene reveler in an early Madonna video, and one of the inspirations for a character murdered by police in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

Incisively probing the violent death of a Black artist in police custody.