Five black and Latino teenagers were wrongly convicted of the brutal rape of a jogging woman in Central Park in 1989. Yusef Salaam, now a candidate for New York City Council, was 15 when Donald J. Trump demanded his execution for a wrongfully convicted crime.
Trump went so far as to run a full-page ad in four of the city’s newspapers that cost $85,000 to call for the boys’ execution.
“Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police! the ad read above the signature, Trump wrote: ‘I want to hate these abusers and murderers. They should be made to suffer and when they kill they should be executed for their crimes. They are to serve as examples for others to think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence”.
“He was the firestarter,” Salaam said The Guardian of Trump, in his first extended interview just after Trump announced his candidacy for president. “Ordinary citizens were manipulated into believing that we were guilty.”
“I knew this famous person calling us to die was very serious,” he recalled to the outlet. “We were all scared. Our families were scared. Our loved ones were scared. For us to walk around like we had a target on our backs, that’s how it is.”
Once at the White House, Trump refused to apologize.
Well, now that Trump is indicted, facing 34 counts, Dr. Salaam replied, “KARMA.”
Karma, indeed. And more is to come.