“She died of a broken heart,” reported the New York Daily News, a bit of poetic license that felt just about right. Venida Browder, 63, the mother of a young man whose Dickensian ordeal drew shocked attention to New York’s justice system, died last Friday from complications of a heart attack. Her son Kalief, age 16, was accused of stealing a backpack, arrested and, unable to make $3,000 bail, spent three years confined on Rikers Island, enduring beatings and more than 700 days in solitary. He hanged himself in June, 2015, two years after charges were dropped.
The Marshall Project interviewed Venida Browder last March as part of an upcoming video series called We Are Witnesses — short encounters with Americans whose lives have been entangled with the criminal justice system.
You can read the infuriating New Yorker magazine account of Kalief’s ordeal. And here is The Marshall Project’s previous coverage of the case, including an interview in which Venida Browder recounts her family’s pain and her hope for the future of Rikers Island.
