Crown Heights: 20 years later, Part two

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Three hours after the tragic crash, 29-year-old Australian Jewish scholar Yankel Rosenbaum was attacked by a gang of black teens. He was stabbed four times. Cops quickly arrested Lemrick Nelson, who was identified by Rosenbaum as his attacker.
Rosenbaum was expected to recover. Mayor Dinkins visited Rosenbaum at the hospital. But Yankel died at 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday because the hospital staff missed one of his knife wounds.
The next evening, according to the sworn testimony of Efraim Lipkind, a former Hasidic resident of Crown Heights, Sharpton started agitating the crowd. “Then we had a famous man, Al Sharpton, who came down, and he said Tuesday night, kill the Jews, two times. I heard him, and he started to lead a charge across the street to Utica [Avenue]”
With each passing hour the violence worsened, Jewish leaders began to desperately complain about the lack of protection to the authorities. They said that the rioters were being allowed to rampage unchecked, too little force was being brought to bear, and too few arrests were being made. Area Jews felt the police were under orders by the city’s first black mayor to hold back, that the police were not allowed to fight against the black rioters, who continued to grow bolder in their anti-Semitic attack as they sensed the appeasement.
The fact is that Mayor David Dinkins responded to the riot immediately by deploying 2,000 police officers and making a personal visit to the troubled neighborhood under a hail of rocks and epithets hurled at him by fellow blacks.
Dinkins has spoken of his own mishandling of the riots. Admitting he “screwed up Crown Heights.”
“I regret not saying to the police brass sooner ‘whatever you guys are doing is not working,’ It was then they altered their behavior and they were able to contain the ravaging young blacks who were attacking Jews… I will forever be accused of holding back the police and permitted blacks to attack Jews, however that did not happen. It is just inaccurate.”

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