The Rev. Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, head of the Baltimore City National Association for Advancement of Colored People, demanded Wednesday that manslaughter charges be brought against six juvenile-school counselors he blamed for a teenager?s death.
A year ago Wednesday, Isaiah Simmons III, 17, of Baltimore, died after being held down for three hours by counselors at Bowling Brook Preparatory School in Keymar until he stopped breathing, his family says. By the time counselors called 911 ? 41 minutes later, according to police ? it was too late.
Because of the counselors? failure to call 911 sooner, a Carroll County grand jury charged them with reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor, in the death of Simmons, who is black. Five of the six counselors were white.
“You don?t take a life, and that?s ?endangerment,? ” Cheatham shouted. “You killed him.” As he shouted, outrage pervaded among three-dozen supporters huddled around him outside Carroll County District Court.
His fists in black leather gloves sliced through the frigid air as he hammered home his demands.
“No justice,” Cheatham called out. “No peace,” the crowd yelled back.
“Justice denied is justice delayed,” Cheatham said, calling the misdemeanor charges a “blatant disregard for human life.”
The rally began with Simmons? family members and supporters re-enacting what they said was the restraint that led to his death.
“It was cruel ? it was brutal ? it was inhumane,” said Simmons? sister, Danielle Carter. “We wanted to make it real for people.”
But as tough as it is to look back on a brother who had so much of his life in front of him, Carter says it?s essential to help end abuse in juvenile facilities throughout the state.
“This institutionalized neglect and murder ? and I say murder ? must stop,” said the Rev. Heber Brown III, pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church in Baltimore County and a member of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, an influential Baltimore-based clergy group. “There is a God, I believe, who demands justice for Isaiah.”
The family pleaded for people to look past the racial lines in the case of the death of Simmons.
They have asked the FBI to investigate and the U.S. Department of Justice to bring civil rights charges, but they say this could happen to anyone in a juvenile school.
“Anyone who is a mother who has a son” is affected, Carter said.
Court hearings have begun for all the counselors, and the trial for three of them is to start Feb. 4.
