The making of Madison Cawthorn

 

The making of Madison Cawthorn: How falsehoods helped propel the career of a new pro-Trump star of the far right 

Cawthorn has emerged as one of the most visible figures among newly arrived House Republicans, who have promoted baseless assertions and pushed a radicalized ideology that has become a driving force in the GOP 

By Michael Kranish Washington Post  

 

Madison Cawthorn was a 21-year-old freshman at a conservative Christian college when he spoke at chapel, testifying about his relationship with God. He talked emotionally about the day a car accident left him partially paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair.

Cawthorn said a close friend had crashed the car in which he was a passenger and fled the scene, leaving him to die “in a fiery tomb.” Cawthorn was “declared dead,” he said in the 2017 speech at Patrick Henry College. He said he told doctors that he expected to recover and that he would “be at the Naval Academy by Christmas.”

Key parts of Cawthorn’s talk, however, were not true. The friend, Bradley Ledford, who has not previously spoken publicly about the chapel speech, said in an interview that Cawthorn’s account was false and that he pulled Cawthorn from the wreckage. An accident report obtained by The Washington Post said Cawthorn was “incapacitated,” not that he was declared dead. Cawthorn himself said in a lawsuit deposition, first reported by the news outlet AVL Watchdog, that he had been rejected by the Naval Academy before the crash.

Shortly after the speech, Cawthorn dropped out of the college after a single semester of mostly D’s, he said in the deposition, which was taken as part of a court case regarding insurance. Later, more than 150 former students signed a letter accusing him of being a sexual predator, which Cawthorn has denied.

Yet four years after Cawthorn spoke at the chapel, the portrait he sketched of his life provided the framework for his election in November as the youngest member of the U.S. House at the minimum age of 25 years old. A campaign video ad repeated his false claim that the car wreck had derailed his plans to attend the Naval Academy.

He promptly used his newfound fame to push baseless allegations about voting fraud on Twitter in a video viewed 4 million times, which President Donald Trump retweeted, saying, “Thank you Madison!” Then Cawthorn spoke at the Jan. 6 rally where a mob was incited to storm the U.S. Capitol, again alleging fraud and extolling the crowd’s courage in comparison with the “cowards” in Congress. He returned to the Capitol, where he falsely claimed that insurrectionists had been “paid by the Democratic machine.”

Trump supporters make their way to the Capitol after the rally that featured Cawthorn as a speaker. (Gabriella Demczuk)

Today, less than two months after being sworn in, Cawthorn has emerged as one of the most visible figures among newly arrived publicity-hungry House Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who have promoted baseless assertions and pushed a radicalized ideology that has become a driving force in the GOP.

The story of Cawthorn’s rise is, by any measure, an extraordinary accomplishment at a young age by a man who suffered a horrific injury. But an examination by The Post of how he ascended so quickly shows how even one of the most neophyte elected Republicans is adopting the Trump playbook, making false statements about his background, issuing baseless allegations about voter fraud and demonizing his political opponents.

Cawthorn won his campaign with a brief résumé that included working at a Chick-fil-A, a part-time role in a congressional office, the single semester of college and fledgling work as a real estate investor. He was boosted by a last-minute $500,000 blitz by a political action committee that trashed his primary opponent as a “Never Trumper,” which the opponent said was false. Cawthorn’s campaign website said Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who is Black, wanted to “ruin” White males running for office, an assertion Booker denounced as “rank racism.”

Cawthorn’s election also came despite an extraordinary effort by former classmates and other alumni of Patrick Henry College urging that the voters of North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District reject him on grounds of alleged sexual misconduct. Three women told The Post in on-the-record interviews that they objected to Cawthorn’s behavior, with one saying he tried forcibly to kiss her after she rejected his advance.

Cawthorn declined an interview request. His press secretary, Micah Bock, who went to college with him, declined to respond directly to a list of questions that he had asked The Post to send to the congressman. Instead, Bock said that voters responded to such questions by electing Cawthorn, although some of the events — such as his speech before the storming of the U.S. Capitol — happened after the election.

The young North Carolinian now presents himself as the future of his party, brashly proclaiming that “I will put the Republican establishment on my shoulders and drag them kicking and screaming back to the Constitution.” Cawthorn was a featured speaker Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, attacking “vicious” opponents who are “trying to take away all of our rights” and “are trying to turn this country into a communist ash heap.”

A crash in Florida

By his account, Cawthorn led a charmed life growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Handsome and athletic, he was home-schooled and played high school football. He sought admission to the U.S. Naval Academy under a process that enables a local member of Congress to recommend candidates.

That led Cawthorn to seek help from then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C), a conservative co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus. As it happened, Cawthorn was friends with Meadows’s son, Blake. The senior Meadows agreed in December 2013 to nominate Cawthorn to the Naval Academy, but Cawthorn’s acceptance depended on his grades, test scores and other measures.

After the Naval Academy rejected Cawthorn’s application, he said in the deposition, he went on a spring break trip in Florida with his friend Ledford.

During the 2014 trip, Cawthorn, then 18, and Ledford, then 17, traded positions between the driver and passenger seats while the vehicle was moving on the highway, Cawthorn said in his deposition. At the time, Cawthorn said, he thought he was invincible, “didn’t see any danger in it” and did it to save time.

The two were traveling back to North Carolina when Ledford nodded off while driving on Interstate 4 in Florida and crashed into a concrete construction barrier, Ledford said in a deposition. Ledford said Cawthorn, while wearing a seat belt harness, had been sleeping in a “laid back position” in a manner that the harness did not touch Cawthorn’s body, and with “his feet being on the dash[board].”

Ledford said in his deposition that when the van crashed, he saw Cawthorn was unconscious. The doors were jammed, and the vehicle began to be enveloped in flames. Ledford said he exited through a window, “unbuckled Madison and proceeded to pull him out while a bystander came in and helped me.”

Cawthorn heads to the joint session of Congress. During his speech earlier in the day, the lawmaker alleged election fraud. (Gabriella Demczuk)

In his chapel address, however, Cawthorn told it this way: “He was my brother, my best friend. And he leaves me in a car to die in a fiery tomb. He runs to safety deep in the woods and just leaves me in a burning car as the flames start to lick my legs and curl up and burn my left side. Fortunately, there was several bystanders who come by and they break the window open that they pulled me out to safety and they sat me down. The paramedics arrive and decided that I’m gone and I have no pulse, I have no breath. And I was, I was declared dead on the scene. For whatever reason, may it be adrenaline or divine intervention, I definitely believe it’s the latter, I had a deep inhale of breath."

Ledford said in an interview with The Post that he raced to save his friend’s life.

“That statement he made was false,” Ledford said. “It hurt very badly that he would say something as false as that. That is not at all what happened. I pulled him out of the car the second that I was able to get out of the car.”

Ledford said the two didn’t talk for a couple of years. He said pressure regarding insurance claims caused Cawthorn to say “crazy things.” Ledford said he has reconnected with Cawthorn, and “he told me that he didn’t believe those things anymore.”

In his deposition, Cawthorn did not say his friend left him for dead. Instead, he said, “I have no memory from the accident.” An accident report and other records from the Florida Highway Patrol say Cawthorn was incapacitated and in critical condition, not that he was declared dead.

As a result of the accident, Cawthorn has limited use of his legs, uses a wheelchair, and received a $3 million settlement from an insurance company, as well as other payments, and is seeking $30 million more, according to court records from several lawsuits related to the case.

Cawthorn attributed his poor grades in college to “suffering from a brain injury after the accident definitely — I think it slowed my brain down a little bit,” he said in the deposition. “Made me less intelligent. And the pain also made reading and studying very difficult.”

At 25 years old, Cawthorn is the youngest member of the U.S. House. (Gabriella Demczuk)

‘I told him no’

Cawthorn underwent multiple surgeries. Eventually, with a modified car, he was able to drive again, and he soon began asking young women to go on what they say he called “fun drives.”

Katrina Krulikas, who was part of a home-schooling network that included Cawthorn, said she was 17 years old and he was 19 when they agreed to go on a date. She said in an interview that she got into his car and he drove to a “deserted part of town and he took me to the woods.”

They got out of the car and Cawthorn talked about sex, which made her feel uncomfortable. “All these very intimate, pressing questions that at the time, for someone that grew up in a very conservative community and hadn’t really talked about sex, I didn’t really know anyone having sex. … It was a very religious community.”

Cawthorn then made his move from his wheelchair, Krulikas said.

“He tries to kiss me and I say no and I don’t let him kiss me,” she said. “We talk for like a little bit longer, like a few minutes. And then suddenly” he moved forward “as if to try to kiss me so quickly that I wouldn’t have a choice to say no or push him away. And at this point, I’m so startled that I fall back. My hair gets stuck in his chair. I’m ripping my hair out, trying to get out of the situation.”

Returning home, Krulikas said she texted a friend that she would never feel comfortable being alone with Cawthorn again. At the time, she didn’t complain because she felt she had “put myself in that situation.” But as she grew older, she said, she believed Cawthorn deserved blame, and “I definitely would classify it as sexual assault because he knew I said no.”

Krulikas first told of the encounter last August in World Magazine, a publication based in Asheville, N.C., that describes itself as “grounded in facts and biblical truth.”

Cawthorn, whose work experience had mainly been at a Chick-fil-A, got a part-time job working at the district office of then-Rep. Meadows.

Cawthorn told the Asheville Citizen-Times that he had worked “full time” for Meadows in 2015 and 2016. Congressional records show Cawthorn was listed as a part-time employee in 2015 and was paid about $15,000. In 2016, he received about $3,000 for part-time work.

Cawthorn said in an earlier deposition he was accepted to Princeton and an online program at Harvard, along with other universities. He later revised his statements to say that he had not been admitted to Princeton and Harvard and that some of his statements about college admissions were “not accurate.”

Cawthorn eventually followed his friend Blake Meadows to become a student at Patrick Henry College, where the motto is “For Christ and Liberty.” In this conservative environment in Purcellville, Va., some female students said Cawthorn asked them to go on drives in his Dodge Challenger.

“He asked me to go on a ‘fun drive,’ ” said one classmate, Leah Petree. When she asked what that meant, Cawthorn “insinuated some sexual activity.” Petree said, “I had a boyfriend so I was not going in the car with him. I told him no.”

Nonetheless, Cawthorn continued to “pressure me and badger me.” One day in October 2016, she said, she was in the cafeteria with other students when Cawthorn arrived with some of his friends. Petree said Cawthorn began asking another female student questions about sex that Petree deemed inappropriate, and she tried to defuse the situation.

“He got really angry and looked at me and screamed at me with a lot of anger,” Petree said. She recalled he said she was "'just a little blonde, slutty American girl.’ And I remember that quote very well. … I remember at the time my eyes stinging with tears, the whole table going quiet.”

Petree sent The Post a screenshot of a text conversation she later had with Cawthorn in which he complained that a man approached him and “said I called you a slut.” She texted back that she didn’t know the person’s identity, and he responded that “I have some old friends who would love to meet him.”

Some former students said in interviews that they were advised by classmates not to go on a drive with Cawthorn. But a student named Caitlin Coulter said in an interview that she was not aware of those concerns when Cawthorn asked her to ride with him in that fall semester of 2016. She accepted.

Cawthorn took Coulter to “somewhere very rural,” she said.

“There was a specific point in which he grew frustrated and I shut him down, basically — by not responding to some of the advances he was making. And he got upset and he turned the car around and drove very, like, violently is the best way I can think of to describe it. Violently back to campus. It was very scary. … It seemed it was very clearly because he was upset that I had turned him down or refused his advances.”

After hurtling down back roads at speeds she said reached 70 or 80 miles an hour, they returned to campus and she never heard from him again.

Cawthorn addressed the allegations this way during the campaign: “If I have a daughter, I want her to grow up in a world where people know to explicitly ask before touching her. If I had a son, I want him to be able to grow up in a world where he would not be called a sexual predator for trying to kiss someone.”

It was shortly after Coulter went on the ride with Cawthorn that he testified at chapel about his relationship with God. The semester was over. Cawthorn never returned and did not attend college elsewhere.

Before Cawthorn was elected, a group of his former college classmates urged voters to reject him on several grounds, including alleged sexual misconduct. (Gabriella Demczuk)

Running for Congress

Three years after Cawthorn dropped out of Patrick Henry College, Cawthorn learned Meadows planned to resign his seat to become chief of staff for President Donald Trump. Meadows and his wife, Debra, who was executive director of a political action committee called Women Right, backed their friend, Lynda Bennett, a real estate agent, in the Republican primary.

Cawthorn announced his candidacy. The 24-year-old was given little chance because of his youth and short résumé.

A campaign video ad said Cawthorn had planned to serve in the Navy “with a nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. But all that changed in the spring of 2014 when tragedy struck.” His campaign website made a similar statement.

By his own admission, however, that was not true. He had been asked in his deposition whether the rejection by the Naval Academy “was before the accident?”

“It was, sir,” Cawthorn replied. That acknowledgment was not publicly known until after Cawthorn became the Republican nominee.

Campaign ad falsely claims a car wreck upset Cawthorn's plans to attend U.S. Naval Academy

An excerpt of the deposition in which Cawthorn admits he had been rejected by the Naval Academy before he was injured in a car crash. (Auto-Owners Insurance Company)

Bennett seemed the prohibitive favorite, given her backing by Mark and Debra Meadows. But Cawthorn said in a Facebook post in February 2020 that his campaign was thriving thanks to their son. He thanked “one of my closest friends, Blake Meadows,” for helping with the campaign. Blake Meadows did not respond to a request for comment.

Cawthorn also received crucial help from George Erwin Jr., a former sheriff of Henderson County and former executive director of the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police. Erwin helped the candidate gain endorsements from key law enforcement and political figures. He wrote on Facebook in February 2020 that “Congressman Cawthorn just has a sweet sound to it. I will do whatever I need to do to make this happen.”

Then came an extraordinary moment that turned the campaign in Cawthorn’s favor. Someone released an edited audio clip of Bennett saying forcefully, “I’m a Never Trump person. I don’t want Trump. I’m Never Trump, not going to vote for him.”

Bennett promptly denied that she was a Never Trumper, and soon a fuller audio clip was released that seemed to back her assertion that she had been mimicking someone who would never vote for Trump. She led the primary field but state law required that she exceed 30 percent of the vote. That led to a runoff between her and the runner-up, Cawthorn.

Bennett again was the favorite. But Cawthorn got an extraordinary boost from an outside group, a Georgia-based political action committee called Protect Freedom that sought to elect candidates in the mold of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). The group’s largest contributor is Jeff Yass, a co-founder of the Pennsylvania-based investment company Susquehanna International Group, who gave the PAC a total of $8.5 million in 2019 and 2020, according to federal election records. Yass declined to comment.

The committee poured $500,000 into the race to support Cawthorn in the days before the runoff. The money was mainly spent on mailers and television ads that renewed the charge that Bennett was a Never Trumper.

Bennett said in an interview that the last-minute spending on what she called a “lie” devastated her campaign, and she ran an ad blaming “Madison Cawthorn’s DC friends.” She said it proved impossible to convince many people that she had been mocking a Never Trumper, even when Trump endorsed her just before the election.

Michael Biundo, a spokesman for Protect Freedom, said in an interview that he believed the committee’s advertising “played a big role in the race.” He said the committee was aware that an audio clip had been released in which Bennett said she was not a Never Trumper but nonetheless decided to air that charge.

“We stand by what we put out there,” he said.

With the committee’s help, Cawthorn beat Bennett by 31 points. He vowed to be the most pro-Trump member of Congress, and the president soon backed him effusively, saying he’s “a terrific young man. … He’s going to be one of the greats.”

Embraced by Trump

After Cawthorn became the Republican nominee for the 11th District seat, his background was scrutinized by a local news outlet called AVL Watchdog, which first reported on the deposition in which Cawthorn acknowledged that he was rejected by the Naval Academy before the accident.

Cawthorn attacked one of the outlet’s reporters, Tom Fiedler, who previously had been editor in chief of the Miami Herald and dean of Boston University’s College of Communication. Fiedler, who had a home in Asheville, had volunteered for Booker’s 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.

Cawthorn responded to Fiedler’s reporting by attacking his association with Booker. Fiedler “quit his academia job in Boston to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office,” a Cawthorn campaign website alleged, as first reported by the Bulwark. Booker denounced the comment.

Cawthorn responded by saying, “The syntax of our language was unclear and unfairly implied I was criticizing Cory Booker.”

As Cawthorn headed to the general election, former classmates and other alumni at Patrick Henry College circulated the letter that leveled accusations against him.

“Cawthorn’s time at PHC was marked by gross misconduct towards our female peers, public misrepresentation of his past, disorderly conduct that was against the school’s student honor code, and self-admitted academic failings,” the letter said. “During his brief time at the college, Cawthorn established a reputation for predatory behavior. … We urge the voters of North Carolina to seriously reevaluate Madison Cawthorn’s candidacy in light of who he really is.”

After more than 150 alumni signed the letter, the organizers hoped it would lead to Cawthorn’s defeat in the general election. He faced Democrat Moe Davis, a former director of the Air Force Judiciary.

Cawthorn, meanwhile, traveled to the Texas border on July 30 and, echoing the views of a radicalized, far-right ideology, alleged that there was “a large group of cartels, kidnapping our American children and then taking them to sell them on a slave market, a sex slave market.” He said that “tens of thousands of our children” were taken in what he called “one of the greatest atrocities I can imagine,” blaming the media for failing to focus on the matter.

There’s no evidence that cartels have kidnapped large numbers of U.S. children and sold them on a slave market.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, saw Cawthorn as a star and gave him a coveted slot speaking on the third night of its national convention. Seeking to combat questions about his youth, Cawthorn said that if viewers didn’t think young people could change the world, “you don’t know American history.” He said that “my personal favorite, James Madison, was just 25 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence.”

In fact, Madison never signed the Declaration of Independence. He was known as the Father of the Constitution, which he signed.

‘It’s time to fight’

Running in a heavily Republican district, Cawthorn won by a 12-point margin against Davis, who said in an interview that his opponent “has got to be the least qualified member of Congress.”

Cawthorn became one of the most loyal defenders of Trump, who claimed falsely that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. In a six-minute video posted to Twitter on Dec. 31, Cawthorn said, “My first act as a member of Congress will be to object to the electoral college certification of the 2020 election.”

To justify his decision, he repeated a host of false and misleading claims about the election, accusing various state election officials of violating the law even though courts across the country and Trump’s own attorney general, William P. Barr, rejected these allegations.

“Voter fraud is common in America. Those who tell you otherwise are lying,” Cawthorn said in the video.

Cawthorn alleged that a number of states had violated the Constitution and their own laws. Cawthorn said “ballots were shoved into duffel bags and left in parks and gas stations.” He said Nevada “allowed dead people and out-of-state voters to flood the electoral system,” a baseless assertion. He said mail-in ballots “are wildly susceptible to fraud.”

“Fact-check that,” Cawthorn said, adding, “Do not let your vote be canceled by these bastards.”

In fact, voter fraud is rare, mail-in ballots have been almost entirely free of fraud for decades, no widespread fraud was found in the fall election, and courts across the country dismissed more than 60 legal challenges filed by the Trump campaign.

Cawthorn’s video, however, made an impression on one person in particular. Trump gleefully retweeted it on Jan. 1. (The Post asked Twitter whether Cawthorn’s tweet met its civic integrity standards. After the inquiry on Feb. 11, Twitter attached the following statement to Cawthorn’s tweet: “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence.”)

Cawthorn was sworn in on Jan. 3 and he amped up his rhetoric, tweeting the following day that “the future of this Republic hinges on the actions of a solitary few. … It’s time to fight.” He was invited to speak at the Jan. 6 rally and derided members of both parties.

“The Democrats, with all the fraud they have done in this election, the Republicans, hiding and not fighting, they are trying to silence your voice,” Cawthorn said, castigating members of his own party who “have no backbone” and deriding “the cowards of Washington, D.C., that I serve with.”

He urged the crowd to be part of a new Republican Party “that will go and fight. … Make your voice heard, because, do we love Donald Trump? But my friends, we’re not just doing this for Donald Trump, we are doing this for the Constitution. Our Constitution was violated.”

Cawthorn then went to the Capitol and, after taking refuge from some of the same people who had listened to his address, called into the Charlie Kirk radio show and made an incendiary, baseless claim that Democrats were behind the insurrection.

“I believe this was agitators strategically placed inside of this group,” Cawthorn said. “You can call them ‘antifa,’ you can call them people paid by the Democratic machine, but to make the Trump campaign, the Trump movement, look bad and to make this look like it was a violent outrage when really the battle is being fought by people like myself and other great patriots who were standing up against the establishment, standing up against this tyranny in our country.” He said the storming of the Capitol was “disgusting, impermissible.”

No evidence has emerged that Democrats or antifa, the anti-fascist protest movement, were behind the insurrection.

Cawthorn was among the 139 House Republicans who voted to object to the certification of some presidential election results. The Democratic Party of North Carolina’s 11th District, which covers western parts of the state, has called for an investigation into what it calls Cawthorn’s “seditious behavior.”

As the blowback mounted, Cawthorn defended his actions but changed his tone. Asked about his rally speech during an interview on OZY, he said: “If I could go back, I wouldn’t have changed any words that I did say, but I probably would have added some lines. I probably would have encouraged more peace.”

Without any mention of his video baselessly alleging massive voting irregularities, he said that he hadn’t promoted theories about fraudulent voting machines or “U-Hauls being backed up with tons of ballots and they were fraudulently marked. I couldn’t have personally proved that … so I definitely didn’t try and feed into that narrative.”

Erwin, the former sheriff who helped Cawthorn get endorsements, said in an interview that he increasingly is regretful for playing a crucial role in the election.

Erwin went on Facebook after the Capitol riot and wrote: “I apologize to all of my law enforcement friends, other politicians, family and friends — I was wrong, I misled you. When I saw [Cawthorn’s] speech to the crowd in Washington I thought this is not good. … Your words can incite or calm. I saw no calming words and people died and were injured.”

Erwin confirmed that he wrote the post and expressed profound remorse. “I was filled with hope for him,” Erwin said. “And that hope was dashed and it was crushed. And that’s on me. That’s why I had to apologize to folks.”

Republican House leaders, meanwhile, rewarded Cawthorn with assignments that belied his background of a single college semester of mostly D’s and rejection by the Naval Academy. He now serves on the Education Committee and the Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

After the rally and the riot at the Capitol that followed, Cawthorn falsely claimed that insurrectionists had been “paid by the Democratic machine.” (Gabriella Demczuk)

Editing by John Drescher. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Design by Tara McCarty. Copy editing by Gilbert Dunkley and Frances Moody.

Alice Crites and Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report.

 

Elijah McClain death: Aurora police didn’t have legal basis to stop,

 Elijah McClain death: Aurora police didn’t have legal basis to stop, frisk or choke 23-year-old, investigation finds.

Outside consultants hired to review death delivered findings on Monday morning

 

A mural of Elijah McClain, painted by Thomas “Detour” Evans, is seen on the back side of the Epic Brewing building in Denver on Thursday, June 25, 2020. Gov. Jared Polis said his office will examine what the state can do regarding the investigation into the death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old killed by Aurora police 2019 in a case that has drawn national attention amid the movement to hold law enforcement responsible for their treatment of people of color.

ByELISESCHMELZER The Denver Post

Aurora police officers did not have a legal basis to force Elijah McClain to stop walking, to frisk him or to use a chokehold on him, an independent investigation commissioned by the city found.

The initial investigation into the incident led by the department’s detectives in the Major Crimes Unit was also deeply flawed, the investigators found. The detectives failed to ask basic, critical questions of the officers involved in McClain’s death and instead “the questions frequently appeared designed to elicit specific exonerating ‘magic language’ found in court rulings,” the report states.

The report from the detectives was relied upon by the department’s force review board as well as the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, both of which cleared the officers of wrongdoing.

“In addition, the report of the Major Crime Unit stretched the record to exonerate the officers rather than present a neutral version of the facts,” the investigators wrote.

“It is hard to imagine any other persons involved in a fatal incident being interviewed as these officers were,” the investigators continued.

Aurora city officials on Monday morning released the 157-page report on the death of McClain at the hands of city police and paramedics. The city hired a panel of investigators to examine the officers’ and paramedics’ decision and make policy recommendations “to lessen the chance of another tragedy like this one from happening again,” the report states.

McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, “is relieved that the truth surrounding the death of her son is finally coming to light,” according to a statement issued by her attorneys.

“The Aurora officials who contributed to Elijah’s death must be immediately terminated,” according to the statement from the Rathod Mohamedbhai law firm. “Ms. McClain continues to call for the criminal prosecution of those responsible for Elijah’s death. Elijah committed no crime on the day of his death, but those who are responsible for Elijah’s death certainly did.”

Recommendations from the panel include overhauling the police department’s accountability system and review policy, training and practice regarding arrest standards and use of force.

“The body worn camera audio, limited video, and Major Crime’s interviews with the officers tell two contrasting stories,” the report states. “The officers’ statements on the scene and in subsequent recorded interviews suggest a violent and relentless struggle. The limited video, and the audio from the body worn cameras, reveal Mr. McClain surrounded by officers, all larger than he, crying out in pain, apologizing, explaining himself, and pleading with the officers.”

The investigators also found that Aurora paramedics failed to properly examine McClain before injecting him with 500 milligrams of the sedative ketamine — a dose based on a “grossly inaccurate” estimation of McClain’s weight. Paramedics estimated he weighed 190 pounds but he actually weighed closer to 140 pounds.

“Aurora Fire appears to have accepted the officers’ impression that Mr. McClain had excited delirium without corroborating that impression through meaningful observation or diagnostic examination of Mr. McClain,” the investigators wrote.

The external consultants hired to conduct the investigation delivered their findings to Aurora’s city government on Monday morning — the first findings made public from several ongoing investigations into the incident that are taking place at every level of government.

Aurora government leaders commissioned the investigation on July 20 as McClain’s 2019 death drew international attention. Widespread protests of police brutality against Black people exploded in the summer of 2020 following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and dozens of protests and vigils have been held in McClain’s name.

“The report notes that the failures of Aurora’s own investigation were the engine of a culture of brutality and lack of accountability in the city’s police department, and discusses the department’s lengthy, well-documented history of racist brutality,” Mari Newman, the attorney representing McClain’s father, said Monday in a statement.

The investigators’ report said exactly what Aurora residents and McClain’s family have said and known over the past year-and-a-half, said Candice Bailey, a friend of Sheneen McClain, a member of the city’s Community Police Task Force and a community organizer.

“It was a damn waste of money,” she said.

The investigation included a review of the city’s relevant policies, procedures and practices, including how police and fire personnel interact with people, their use of force, their use of the sedative ketamine and how the city reviews incidents. The investigators’ request to interview the officers and paramedics involved was declined, however.

The investigation was led by Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. Smith previously led the section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division that conducted the investigation into the Ferguson, Missouri, police department following the death of Michael Brown. The other members of the team were Roberto Villaseñor, a former police chief and founding partner of policing consulting firm 21CP Solutions, and Dr. Melissa Costello, an emergency medicine physician and EMS medical director based in Mobile, Alabama.

The Aurora City Council is scheduled to discuss the report’s findings at a special meeting at 5 p.m. Monday. The public can watch the meeting at AuroraTV.org or on Comcast Channels 8/880 in Aurora. A city spokesman said city officials will not answer questions from the press until after the City Council meeting. A news conference is scheduled for Tuesday morning.

The results of the city-initiated investigation are the first to be made public out of several ongoing investigations into McClain’s death. The Colorado Attorney General’s Office has asked a grand jury to look at the case and see if any criminal charges are warranted and the U.S. Department of Justice is also investigating whether officers violated McClain’s civil rights.

McClain’s family also has filed a federal lawsuit against Aurora.

Three Aurora police officers detained McClain on Aug. 24, 2019, after receiving a 911 call about a suspicious person. When McClain refused to stop walking, the officers took him to the ground, choked him and handcuffed him before a paramedic injected McClain with ketamine, a powerful sedative.

McClain suffered cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital, where he was later declared brain dead. He was taken off life support on Aug. 30, 2019. McClain wasn’t suspected of a crime.

The Adams County coroner ruled the cause of McClain’s death to be undetermined and the district attorney for the 17th Judicial District found the three police officers who violently detained him were not criminally liable. A review of the incident by the police department found the three officers did not violate any policies and they were not disciplined. Both the police chief and the district attorney who made those decisions have since left their positions.

One of the officers involved in McClain’s death, Jason Rosenblatt, was later fired by the department’s next chief for replying “haha” to a texted photo showing other Aurora police officers re-enacting one of the chokeholds used on McClain at his memorial site.

The other two officers remained employed by the department, though in jobs that are not public-facing. Officer Randy Roedema is assigned to the forensic services unit and Officer Nathan Woodyard is assigned to the electronic support section, a department spokesman said.

Smith is the second person commissioned by the city to investigate McClain’s death. City Manager Jim Twombly first hired a former police officer turned lawyer to complete the review, but the city canceled the contract after city councilmembers raised concerns that the lawyer’s investigation would be biased by his past law enforcement experience.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

 

Can Biden Save Americans Like My Old Pal Mike?

Can Biden Save Americans Like My Old Pal Mike?

A childhood friend’s deadly mistakes prompt reflection on our country’s — and my own.

Mike Stepp in McMinnville, Ore., in 2018.Credit...Lynsey Addario

By Nicholas Kristof

YAMHILL, Ore. — Joe Biden’s father struggled financially, at one point commuting long distances to clean boilers and later working for a time as a used-car salesman. The owner of the used-car dealership amused himself at a Christmas party by tossing out silver dollars to watch his employees scramble for them on the floor. Biden Sr. was repulsed: He and his wife walked out of the party, and away from his job.

President Biden tells that story to highlight his appreciation of the importance of the dignity of work. It’s a tale my old pal Mike Stepp would have relished, because Mike spent his life scrambling on America’s floor for coins — and not liking it one bit. Yet Mike, too, sustained his dignity and humor, which is an impressive feat when you’re homeless, wrestling with addictions and sleeping in a city park.

Mike was a good man whom America left behind, and one measure of Biden’s presidency — and of America’s resilience — will be whether he can offer some kind of a Rooseveltian New Deal to millions of struggling Americans like Mike. As I see it, the nation’s greatest challenge is to restore opportunity and dignity for the bottom third of Americans, not so much the middle class as the working class: white, Black and brown alike.

Biden’s initial moves suggest he is taking that challenge seriously, pursuing an “American Rescue Plan” that includes the most serious antipoverty program, especially for children, in at least half a century. But the burden is not just on the new president, but on all of us.

It is easy for Democrats to blame Republicans for failings like America’s lack of universal health care. But that lets too many of us off the hook. Mike was the kind of person that both political parties claim to speak up for, yet whom both parties betrayed over the decades.

Witnessing the torment of people I grew up with, like Mike, has led me to conclude that I was wrong in many of my own views. Like many liberals with a university education and a reliable paycheck, I was too scornful of labor unions, too unreservedly enthusiastic about international trade, too glib about “creative destruction,” too heartless about its toll.

Mike’s dad had a union job at a sawmill at a time when the timber industry offered well-paying work, and Mike had expected to get a job like that and ride it into a middle-class life. But those jobs disappeared, in part because of an environmental movement that ended logging in old-growth forests by championing a threatened species called the spotted owl.

I am an environmentalist and I love old-growth forests. Thank God we saved them. But we didn’t focus enough on the human price and didn’t try hard enough to mitigate it: I wish that we had shown as much concern for Mike as we did for spotted owls.

Mike and his brother, Bobby, were my closest neighbors in the 1970s. They lived in the house just down the road from our family farm here.

Each morning, Mike, Bobby and I would walk to the school bus stop together, and then amble home from the bus in the afternoon. Mike was six years younger than me, exuberant, good-natured, a ham. Bobby was three years older than me, and equally good-natured.

That was a time when capitalism worked for many blue-collar Americans. My dad had worked in the woods in the 1950s, as a logger in Valsetz, Ore., after arriving in the United States as a refugee from Eastern Europe. He earned enough through logging to work his way through college. Today that would be impossible.

For the Stepps, even back then life had shadows. Their home was often violent, for Mike’s father drank too much and then became abusive. “Dad beat him,” Bobby recalled. “Hand, belt or switch, whatever Dad could get his hands on in a drunken stupor.”

The family wasn’t into education, and I don’t remember a single book in their home. Mike and Bobby both dropped out of high school, figuring that they could get good jobs just as their dad had.

Good jobs were disappearing, however. That’s partly because of the environmentalists’ successes — indignant T-shirts back then urged, “Save a Logger, Eat an Owl.”

But the owls were a scapegoat: Well-paying jobs were also lost because of mechanization, the decline of unions and other trends undermining blue-collar jobs generally. Successive American administrations also didn’t do much to help. Average weekly wages for production workers in America were actually lower two months ago ($860) than they had been, after adjusting for inflation, in December 1972 ($902 in today’s money), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Many of us didn’t appreciate how devastating the loss of good jobs would be to the social fabric, and we had no idea that it would lead to family breakdown and a tide of alcoholism, addiction and early death. The economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson found that when trade cost men good manufacturing jobs, the result was more unwed mothers, more children living in poverty, more people dying early and more “male idleness.”

“Male idleness” is one way to describe Mike Stepp. He bounced among unsatisfying low-wage jobs, and he and his buddies escaped their frustrations by turning to alcohol and drugs, periodically tangling with the law. His wife, Stephanie Ross, who had gone out with him when she was 14, kicked Mike out of the house when he began leaving needles where their two young children might find them. They divorced in 2003, and he eventually landed in the streets of the nearby town of McMinnville.

“I like it out here,” he told me one time when we chatted in the park where he slept, and then he said with a laugh, “This is the great outdoors!” But it was just a line. He was often lonely, cold and wet. Previously, he had lived under cover in a county parking garage, and when he was forced out, he broke down and wept on the street.

In his shopping cart, which he took everywhere, Mike carried a couple of my books that I had signed for him. We would catch up when I visited McMinnville, and I would also fill him in on Bobby, who was serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison and whom I corresponded with.

I introduced my wife and children to Mike, and he charmed them with his easy humor. As he walked the streets, picking returnable cans out of garbage cans to make a few dollars, he had cheery greetings for everyone who passed.

“Mike always greeted me with, ‘How you doin’, kid?’ and a big smile,” recalled Casey Kulla, a county commissioner. My mother told me to be nice to Mike in writing this article, because “he never asked for anything.” That was the thing about Mike: He was homeless but rich in friends.

So what went wrong with Mike?

“He didn’t want to work,” Stephanie told me. She is angry at Mike for abandoning his kids and failing to pay $68,000 in child support, but then the anger passes and she wistfully refers to him as “the love of my life.”

Perhaps Mike was lazy, but there’s more to the story. Everyone agrees that Mike had mental illnesses that were never treated, and in any case, this wasn’t one person’s stumble but a crisis for an entire generation of low-education workers. Mike and his cohort weren’t dumber or lazier than their parents or grandparents, but their outcomes worsened.

So, sure, we can have a conversation about personal responsibility. But let’s also talk about our collective responsibility: If the federal minimum wage of 1968 had kept pace with inflation and productivity, it would now be more than $22 an hour, rather than $7.25. We also underinvested in our human capital, so high school graduation rates stagnated beginning in the 1970s along with blue-collar incomes, even as substance abuse soared and family structure for low-education workers collapsed.

One consequence is that an American dies a “death of despair” — from drugs, alcohol or suicide — every two and a half minutes. Long after the coronavirus has retreated, we will still be grappling with a pandemic of despair.

The United States has a mental health crisis that is largely untreated and arises in part from high levels of inequality. Researchers find that poverty causes mental illness, and mental illness in turn exacerbates poverty. It’s a vicious cycle, and 20 million Americans, mostly poorly educated, describe every one of the last 30 days as “bad mental health days,” according to David G. Blanchflower, a Dartmouth economist.

I also know this: Taxpayers spent large sums jailing Mike, whose arrest record runs 14 pages (mostly for drug offenses). That money would have been better spent at the front end, with early childhood programs and mentoring to support Mike and help him finish high school and get a job.

Yet politicians have mostly been AWOL. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, the presidential candidates had healthy discussions about increasing college access but largely ignored the reality that one in seven American children don’t even graduate from high school. The term “working class” is rarely mentioned by politicians, who prefer to appeal to people a notch higher, in the middle class. And many government programs that are nominally for the benefit of the middle class — such as the mortgage interest deduction, 529 college savings plans, state and local tax deductions and “middle-class tax cuts” — actually primarily benefit the rich.

We fret about competitive challenges from China, but the best way to meet them is to elevate our capabilities at home. China built new universities at the rate of one a week, while the number of colleges in the United States is now shrinking — and as many Americans have criminal records as have college degrees. “Holding hands, Americans with arrest records could circle the earth three times,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

America cannot succeed when so many Americans are failing.

Joe Biden has a fighting chance to make progress on these issues. Partly that’s because he’s impossible to mock as a wild-eyed socialist, partly because he and his team understand that we have a better chance of making progress if we frame the issue less as one of “inequality” — a liberal word — and more as one of “opportunity” and “dignity.”

That comes naturally to Biden. He intuitively understands working-class angst and mental health crises, having himself contemplated both suicide and an escape into alcohol after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972. Biden also has spoken candidly and lovingly about his son Hunter’s struggles with addiction.

Biden's American Rescue Plan includes a $15 federal minimum wage, initiatives to expand medical care and reduce homelessness and, most striking, a historic plan to reduce child poverty by about half.

When I’ve previously written about Americans falling behind, readers have challenged me to say what would make a difference. So here are five policies to create opportunity:

1. A national high-quality early childhood and day care program, modeled on the one provided by the United States military for service members.

2. A higher minimum wage and broader effort to train people for well-paying jobs by scaling up proven initiatives like Year Up and Career Academies.

3. Huge expansion of drug treatment programs. It’s scandalous that only 20 percent of Americans with addictions get treatment.

4. A child allowance, the heart of Biden’s plan to fight child poverty.

5. “Bandwidth for all” to expand high-speed internet access, modeled on rural electrification from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Rural electrification was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the New Deal is a model for what we need in the 2020s. Is that feasible?

Some liberal initiatives (“defund the police,” banning ICE) are unpopular, but the kinds of populist programs I just listed poll well and have some Republican support. Seventy percent of voters support expanding early childhood programs. The Republican senators Mitt Romney of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah are among those who have endorsed serious initiatives to address child poverty. And nothing would do more to expand opportunity and build a better future for America than to slash child poverty.

Mike struggled in the last couple of years. He had a bad bicycle accident, circulation problems, gangrene and a toe amputation.

“I’m doing well,” he told me, typically ebullient, the last time we spoke, in late November. “But it’s a little hard to balance without a toe. I never thought it would matter.”

Mike was found on a sidewalk one night in December after suffering a heart attack, and he died soon after in a hospital at the age of 55. Even in a pandemic, people came together to mourn him. A remembrance at a bus shelter where Mike had sometimes stayed drew 30 people who recalled Mike’s generosity and good cheer.

“He would give you anything,” said one man, showing off a cap that Mike had handed him. The headline in the local newspaper, The News-Register, declared, “Beloved Downtown Homeless Man Dies.”

Mike was a good man who had endured a painful life, and he knew he had inflicted pain on his wife and children.

“It’s strange to me that people remember Mike fondly,” his daughter, Brandie Stepp, 29, told me. She said she had mourned losing him not now but two decades ago when he left his family. But she also believes that his failures were complicated, originating with neglect as a child and compounded by mental illness.

I liked Mike. I respected him. I miss him. I hear constantly from wealthy Americans griping about some setback or pleading for special consideration, and he was a homeless man who sought nothing and would joke about the upside of sleeping in a city park.

There are many complicated Americans like him, struggling in a miasma of addiction, despair or mental illness, suffering unbearable pain and also inflicting it on their loved ones.

Can Biden and all of us rise to the occasion today, as Roosevelt’s generation responded to the Great Depression with the New Deal? Surely we can come together to offer struggling Americans better options than scrambling for coins on the nation’s floor until they die.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF’S NEWSLETTER: Get a behind-the-scenes look at Nick’s gritty journalism as he travels around the United States and the world.

Living in New York’s Unloved Neighborhood

A nameless section of Manhattan resembles the nineteen-seventies city that’s been romanticized in the movies. But do we really want to live in “Taxi Driver”?

By Rivka Galchen The New Yorker

For ten years, I have lived in a neighborhood defined by the Port Authority Bus Station to the north, Penn Station to the south, the Lincoln Tunnel to the west, and, to the east, a thirty-one-foot stainless-steel sculpture of a needle threaded through a fourteen-foot button. Though there are many, many people here, the neighborhood is not a people place. It is better suited to the picking up and dropping off of large pallets. Within this homey quadrilateral are a methadone clinic, a parole office, liquor shops with cashiers behind thick plastic screens, a fancy Japanese clothing store, plenty of pawnshops, the Times Building, drumming studios, seven subway lines, and at least four places to get your sewing machine repaired. A young runaway, emerging from one of the many transit hubs, might find herself—after maybe buying a coffee-cart doughnut and being shouted at for hesitating at a crosswalk, and being nearly hit by a bus—sheepishly deciding to give it one more go back home. There is, though, a lot of office space here. To walk north on Eighth Avenue in order to get to the subway entrance on Fortieth Street is to know what it is to be a migrating lemming.

This is where I have raised my daughter, from birth to her current age of seven. I moved here for pragmatic reasons. I do wonder at times what it means that when my daughter sees someone passed out on the sidewalk, or walking erratically and maybe threatening people with a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup, she neither panics nor thinks to ask if that person needs help—she just holds my hand a smidge tighter and keeps walking. There aren’t a lot of young children in this neighborhood. She seems at ease with her exceptional state, and will one day be confused, I suspect, to live somewhere with many people her same-ish size.

I realize that it sounds like I’m bragging about my neighborhood. I am never sure where my bragging and my complaining meet up for coffee to agree about their views on the world. Arguably, these blocks resemble the nineteen-seventies New York romanticized in film and on TV. But do we really want ourselves or anyone we love to live in “Taxi Driver”? Until recently, there were dusty and tattered pennant banners announcing the “Grand Opening” of the Big Apple Meat Market on Ninth Avenue, a market that had been open for at least twenty years. I used to see very good-looking, well-dressed people getting professional photos taken there. Also sometimes at an abandoned lot nearby. The photographers have had to location-scout again, however, as the market was torn down not long ago and replaced with a tall and as yet unoccupied glass building. The community complained about the loss of the Big Apple market, where you could buy a gallon of mayonnaise and cheap hot food, so a new, affordable home has been found for the store, a couple of blocks south, though there are no banners or “Grand Opening” sign. I am what I am: I have grown into an adult who likes pumpernickel bread and red cabbage, but there were years when my partner’s young sons longed for Eggo waffles and bacon and Campbell’s chicken soup, and Big Apple was there for us.

I was born, somewhat randomly, in Toronto, and between the first and twelfth grades I lived in Norman, Oklahoma, and after that I moved East. I have lived in New York since 1998. I’ve long held the belief that being a fan or a cheerleader of New York is ethically and aesthetically dubious. Like the Yankees and, for that matter, the Mets, New York needs no more fans. This place is dense with wealth, with cultural capital, with anecdote; it is the setting for too many movies, books, and television shows. To be a vocal fan of New York is like hanging out with the popular kids. Norman, Oklahoma, where so many people I love and admire live—now there’s a place that could use a fan club. Loving New York, which I do, has often made me feel morally compromised, even alien to myself. Moving to the neighborhood, for pragmatic reasons, solved that emotional tangle for me. Almost no one likes this neighborhood or wants to live here. It would be O.K. to cheer for it, if I could learn how to.

At first, we kept our windows open for fresh air, but soon we noticed a pervasive black soot. It turned up on our dishware, our shelving. It was unimpressed with Palmolive and a scratch-free sponge. Was this substance, which was likely lining our alveoli, the kind of character-producing grit for which people move to the city? I have almost never chosen the neighborhood I lived in—it was always determined by external factors, often institutional housing. So I’m accustomed to a time of getting to know a neighborhood, of trying to convince oneself of its unelected virtues.

I went on walks, amid the soot. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, an obese detective who never leaves his apartment and raises orchids, lives on Thirty-fifth Street, according to a plaque there. Bob’s Park is nearby. Bob, I learned, had a pet boa constrictor, wore Scottish kilts and an Indian headdress, and was an adopted member of the Blackfoot tribe. He did a lot of good work for tenants’ rights in his building. In 1992, he was found stabbed to death in his apartment; the crime was never solved. One afternoon, I see Baryshnikov at a bagel place. This neighborhood is full of dancers, I notice. The Trisha Brown Dance Company has an office here. There are also many strip clubs. Now and again, I’ll see a velvet rope I have no interest in being invited to cross. I keep thinking that at any moment I’ll find the durably gentle side of this neighborhood. Instead, I find a stable where livery horses are kept, on levels, like parked cars. The DHL building is kind of cheery, as parts of it are painted yellow.

Our favorite twenty-four-hour deli, on the corner of Thirty-seventh Street and Ninth Avenue, is owned by a Yemeni immigrant who has been running it for nearly forty years. It has never been closed for even a day. Not through 9/11, not through the blackouts, not through Hurricane Sandy, not through the pandemic. The owner tells me he slept on a cot in the basement during the first six years of the business. Our neighborhood is home for many homeless people, and I’ve seen him give food and drinks to people who don’t pay and I’ve also seen him ask people who are causing a problem to leave. He’s at the register less often these days; instead, we see his children and grandchildren. When I’m tired or overwhelmed, my partner orders me a special treat: an egg-white-and-bacon breakfast sandwich on a toasted English muffin. It arrives home wrapped in thin foil, and tastes like someone taking care of you.

Our apartment overlooks the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, which I estimate to be the source of at least two-thirds of the soot. The traffic is particularly heavy one night. My daughter looks out the window, noticing the long line of red brake lights that distinguishes the outgoing traffic from the long line of white headlights that characterizes the incoming. It’s a beautiful view, she says. A memory comes to me, of a friend telling me how her grandmother, when she visited from New Delhi, used to describe a night scene like this as “a necklace of rubies and a necklace of diamonds.”

The Two Bros pizza at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street sells a fresh, hot slice of cheese pizza for a dollar. There are other Two Bros in the city—there are other Two Bros in the neighborhood—but this one is the best. It is nearly always busy, and it has a fast-moving and efficient line. I fell in love with Two Bros when I was pregnant. I would sometimes step out to have a slice there an hour or two after dinner. You could eat the slice at a table in the back and feel companioned and alone at once. The lighting is like that of a surgical theatre. The Mexican pop music is a reliable endorphin generator. And though the ingredients that go into a dollar slice of pizza do not come from a family farm in the Hudson Valley, these slices are supreme. The clientele, those evenings, was a mix of transgender prostitutes, thin young men, and quiet immigrant families, often with suitcases, headed I have no idea where.

After my daughter was born, I would still get a slice now and again, and, as soon as she was old enough, a slice was a special treat, better than a balloon. By the time she was two or so, she liked holding the dollar and paying for her slice herself. When she was three, she could proudly hold the paper plate with the hot slice on it, and now she can even take that hesitant first bite, where you gauge how hot the slice is and how much of a triangle you can bite off.

Because there are so few babies or children in this neighborhood, when you travel with a baby or a child you and the child are treated like a majestic presence, almost like tigers. My daughter is celebrated at the grocery store, at the pizza place, at the deli, and even on the street. In this neighborhood, crowded with mentally unwell people, and with drug dealers and panhandlers, and with tired office workers and sex workers and fruit venders and psychics and police officers—all these people, nearly to a one, say something tender to a child, whether you want them to or not. I remember once journeying to the idyllic family neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn, where there were more babies and children than pigeons, and no one seemed interested in my baby at all, and I felt like a pigeon.

I have lived in other New York neighborhoods. For a time, I lived near the Mount Sinai Hospital Complex, on Ninety-eighth Street, right near where the Metro-North northbound train changes its path from underground to aboveground. All conversation would pause when a train went by, as in a running gag in a sitcom. Later, I lived in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, a neighborhood that some find boring, and none find cool, but, as the city changes and changes and changes, Morningside Heights has a permanent population of thousands of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds. They reside, forever young, alongside a mysteriously eternal elderly community. Time does not pass in Morningside Heights. In my seven years there, I never changed age. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine will always be partially under renovation. The Hungarian Pastry Shop, now owned by a Greek family, will always be crowded and will never have Internet service or music; the outdoor seating is in use even now. I lived briefly in two Brooklyn neighborhoods: Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights. Both were so pleasant as to make me feel uncomfortable. Maybe because I grew up the daughter of Israeli immigrants in Oklahoma, a neighborhood feels “right” to me only when it suits me in no particular way—when it seems unlikely that I’ll run into another household like my own. If I wear the clothing that might earn me compliments in Fort Greene or Brooklyn Heights, here, near the Lincoln Tunnel, those same clothes make me look as if I’m demented.

When my yearning for a sense of softness and sanity in the neighborhood really soars, I go to Esposito’s butcher shop on Thirty-eighth Street. A handful of businesses have been in this neighborhood for decades, and the butcher shop has been here since 1932. When I go in there, the staff ask me about my kids. They ask everyone about their kids, or their dogs, or their parents, or whatever there is to ask about. In the ten years I’ve lived here, the owner has been there every operating day, six days a week, working alongside his staff. One of the butchers is strikingly handsome. He always smiles and says it’s nice to see me. He says that to everyone and gives everyone that smile. Still, it retains its power. It took me years to realize that the floor on the butchers’ side of the glass display case is elevated by about six inches; the butchers look like gods on that side.

Esposito’s has a take-a-number ticket dispenser. The slips of paper come out like interlocking Escher frog tiles. Of course, my daughter loves to pull those numbered papers. When your number gets called, it’s heraldic. With that take-a-number ticket in hand, I get something I very rarely get—a felt connection to my childhood. I pulled this same kind of numbered ticket at the Skaggs Alpha Beta, in Norman. I would wait, with my mother, to be called on. My mom would ask for Muenster cheese “very thinly sliced, please.” Sometimes the deli-counter worker had trouble with my mom’s accent. You could measure the deli person’s character by how thin he sliced the Muenster. That was my mother’s thinking, and I guess it’s mine, too. To this day, a thick slice of Muenster signals an uncaring soul. These Thirty-eighth Street butcher guys would slice the Muenster very thin, I’m sure of it, even if I no longer like Muenster, and recently for the first time heard it called the children’s cheese.

It was my daughter’s reaching toddler age that began to alter my relationship to this neighborhood. For the first years, my heart had been open to it. I had been proud of its lack of charm, as if this were a consequence of its integrity. I had gone so far as to mildly dislike the perfectly clean and inoffensive “short-term luxury-rental” building that went up on this otherwise rough block—the Emerald Green. The complex planted ginkgo trees all along the block’s sidewalk. The trees were thin and pathetic and nearly leafless at first. In winter, the building’s staff lit up the trunks of the trees by wrapping them with white Christmas lights. In summer, they planted tulips in the enclosures in front of the entrance. As it grew cold, they planted some sort of hearty kale. We don’t need this! I remember thinking. This is even less charming than the lack of charm! Now I worship that building. My daughter and I both wait with anticipation for the November day when they wrap the ginkgo trees in those white lights. In fall, the ginkgo leaves tumble down as elegant yellow fans. The Emerald Green employee who hoses down the sidewalks every single morning, always pausing as we approach—he has my heart.

A recent pandemic afternoon, in socially distanced line yet again with my daughter for two dollars’ worth of Two Bros pizza, the normal sonic atmosphere of honking and Mexican pop music is augmented by more shouting than usual. I can’t make out what’s going on. Two fashionably dressed Japanese teen-agers start singing Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” There’s a fight going on. We cross the street. One of the shouting protagonists tells us that he’s glad we crossed the street, that there’s a guy with a wrench over there and he’s crazy. It’s unclear who provoked whom, and in the end the only violence involves thrown soda bottles—though, another recent night, someone was stabbed to death on this corner.

It’s not the violence in the neighborhood that makes me, at times, really hate living here. If anything, it’s clearer than ever how safe my family and I are, relatively, except from maybe being hit by a car or dying of lung disease. But the neighborhood used to feel to me like a rough part of a softer place, and nowadays the roughness feels more general, and this makes it harder to cheer for a neighborhood that is so loud and dirty and uninterested in or unfit for human life. It feels fit for delivery trucks and construction dust and as a postcard of man’s inhumanity to man. Years ago, under the Port Authority crossway, there was some sort of shelter—or at least meal, phone, and shower service—provided, and there is no such thing there anymore, only lots of people with substance-abuse and mental-health problems wandering around with a memory of this being a place where one could find help. There’s also a ubiquitous day-and-night smell of pot. Some people love that smell. I don’t. I complain about it to my partner one day, on the sidewalk. My daughter says, What smell? Of skunk, her dad says. What does skunk smell like? she asks. Do you mean that smell that is like burnt mushrooms with lots of spices? I don’t like spicy food, she concludes.

Twelve years ago—before my time!—the fifth floor of our building was often lit up with red lights. The street at night was crowded with limousines and S.U.V.s. This was the side effect of an improvised and lucrative business run by a man known as Big Daddy Lou. He and his wife made nearly a million dollars in ten months running a sex club favored by bankers and lawyers. For building-code purposes, certain small rooms were designated for recording books on tape. Big Daddy Lou paid at least two hundred and sixty thousand dollars in a no-jail-time plea deal that barred him from strip clubs and similar businesses. He could recently be seen on Twitter, posting about voter suppression in Georgia. A custodian on the second floor said that he hadn’t known about the club, but that he had “seen many pretty girls coming through, and no one caused a problem.” Judging by the movies and TV shows I see advertised on posters, this is precisely the kind of caper that millions of Americans dream of being near. I am living the dream, or almost.

Oh, I know your neighborhood, a man I was interviewing for a journalism piece once said. He was a scientist who was working on robotics that could land, and then rove, on the moon. He said he had worked in a space not far from Penn Station. He loved it, he said. He said that the company used a fine red Mars simulant dust, and that the dust had caused troubles, as it sifted down onto the silk-tie-manufacturing business that was one floor below. The problem had been resolved, and the two businesses had mutually admired each other’s work.

For my daughter, this neighborhood is dense with magic and love. This is her childhood. I will give you an example, one that involves the Lot-Less store that we pass on the way to the subway. In this memory, she is three years old, and we are headed to her preschool. My daughter is supposed to bring in her blankie from home, to be used for nap time for the rest of the year. My daughter has always been very interested in fulfilling these sorts of expectations.

On the sidewalk that day, I realize that I’ve forgotten the blankie. I suggest that we go into this Lot-Less store, that maybe we’ll find something. “I want a Minnie Mouse blanket,” my daughter says, in probably the most clearly enunciated sentence of her life up to that moment. She used to watch “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” every time she stayed with my mother, and her love for Minnie Mouse mirrored the depth of love between a grandmother and a granddaughter. I try to say that we may not find a Minnie Mouse blanket, but that we shouldn’t cry or panic or worry, etc. As it turns out, there is only one blanket on sale in the Lot-Less. It is a Minnie Mouse blanket.

I know the neighborhood so well—know the old Hartford Courant building, the countless vape shops, the Hamed Fabric, with its clearance sale, the Money Change/Weed World/NY Gift & Luggage, and Daytona Trimming, with its boas—on account of the carrying, and then the strollering, and then the very slow walking, and then the normal-paced walking of these same streets year and again with this child of mine. When she was a baby, the only way to reliably get her to fall asleep was to push her round and round these blocks in her stroller. Amid the honking, shouting, and backfiring, and the music coming from the Wakamba bar, her eyes would close, then stay closed.

She began walking. I was made aware that every tree enclosure and every concrete border was an irresistible balance-beam challenge. To get from our door to the corner took twenty minutes. Each challenge needed to be met, step by careful step, whether coming home or leaving. Some of the enclosures were flat brick. Some were curved metal. What a playground. She knew she could run up to the barrier near the parking garage but then had to wait to pass by it. In any month on any day, she might ask when the ginkgo leaves would turn yellow, when the Christmas lights would go up, when the illuminated snowflake would be hung over the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street. When we neared the corner butcher shop, she would sing a little made-up tune about the butcher, Bobby Esposito (though he goes by, and we always call him, Robert). The tune has a nineteen-forties cadence that I think she picked up from her Irish grandfather.

One afternoon, when we were on a tree-lined, picturesque block of Brooklyn Heights, near where I had once lived, with clean sidewalks and elegant buildings and gaslit lamps and no smell of garbage, my daughter turned to me very seriously and said, “This place is spoooooo-ky.”

“It is?”

“It would be terrible—terrible!—to live here.”

I do my best to adopt her view of our not beautiful neighborhood. After all, what is the Staples store but the enchanted red place that had a sequin notebook in the window for sale? Here is the 7-Eleven, with its bounty of stuffed animals and key chains, where on her birthday she got to pick out, after long deliberation, an owl Beanie Baby. The fruit man, whom I find slightly “off” but who is cheerful and always gives her an extra banana whenever we buy anything—where has he been since March? The hat-and-glove sidewalk vender called her Madam President when he gave her that double-bobbled hat which was pretty but itchy. Near that large sculpture of a needle going through a button, there appeared, in a plant enclosure, a metal sculpture of the head of a woman. It looked odd, unlabelled, just that head. I told my daughter that I thought it was someone named Emma Goldman, maybe, but the next time we passed by the sculpture was mysteriously gone.

One day, I have my own experience of magic in the neighborhood. A rack of plastic-wrapped dresses is being wheeled across the street. Its bars are wrapped in tape labelled “Hjelm, Hjelm, Hjelm.” That is very near to the name of the family who lived across the street from me as a child, who were a second family to me. There are so many stories there, but that is not where my mind goes. I realize in that moment that I have been walking, all these years, on the same streets I walked as a seven-year-old girl. These fabric shops, these button emporiums, these sewing-machine-repair shops, even the sparsely populated Ben’s Kosher Delicatessen, which is so large and hard for me to believe in: is it possible that this was exactly where I was once or twice or three times before? With my aunt ordering cheesecake for dessert and taking only a bite and leaving me with the burden of trying to eat the rest out of politeness?

My aunt, who lives in Sydney, Australia, used to come to New York—to these same streets—to buy fabric for her line of clothing for young women. She used to give me leopard-print jeans and crop tops and clingy polyester dresses that no other kid in Oklahoma had. When my aunt went to New York, sometimes my mother and I would fly out to see her.

We are in the back rooms of the third and fourth floors of these buildings. These are my earliest memories of seeing the suits and hats of Orthodox Jewish men. We are being shown bolts of fabric. We are told that they are very special prints, and that not everyone gets to see these. My aunt has introduced my mother as her “assistant,” and my mother holds a notebook and pen—not something that I have ever seen her do. Usually she holds large stacks of computer code printed on that old dot-matrix computer paper with those side strips you can tear off. My aunt tells the men that she has seen better prices, and that the fabric pills, or tears, or something. We leave, maybe we return, I don’t remember. Later, there is matzo-ball soup with matzo balls of unfathomable scale and fluffiness. These trips are also marked by the marvel of my aunt, her four-inch red fingernails and her resemblance to Tina Turner. It makes the most sense to meet her in New York, or sometimes Los Angeles, since why would she fly all the way out to the Will Rogers World Airport, in Oklahoma City?

I’ve lived my adult life so far away from my childhood, away from whatever madeleines might return it to me, and yet here I am, in some sense having never left this neighborhood. Time has and hasn’t wrought its transformational power. Now it’s my aunt’s children who shop for fabric. They don’t come to these streets; they go to Guangzhou. There are still fabric stores here, but there’s something nostalgic and aspirational about calling the area the garment district. If you look up, there are magnificent Art Deco buildings, one after the other, but in the windows you see dusty stacks, sometimes mannequins, and very little that looks as if it had been moved in years. These are a thousand Miss Havisham stage sets, though before the pandemic there was some trend of expensive, often “organic,” “Made in NYC” brands settling in the area. Here and there, one would see a beautiful person. Café Grumpy, of trendy Greenpoint, had opened a branch here. And Pacific Trimming had recently remodelled, so that if you walked by on Thirty-ninth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, even the least crafty among us might be filled with a desire for rickrack, for zippers in thirty-six colors, for shank buttons. Shortly before the pandemic made itself credible to New Yorkers, in early March, a fancy food court was opening across the way from Pacific Trimming, the kind of place where one could pay as much for a cup of coffee as you might ever dream of, where three soft tacos could be sixteen dollars. I wonder what will happen to that food court.

So much has closed, and now there are no crowds to navigate up Eighth Avenue in the morning. The pandemic has revealed that, apart from all my grousing, this neighborhood was working very well. It lacked sweetness, sure, and hygiene, but it had office space, and it had office workers, and it had breakfast carts and restaurants, and it even had—I saw this three times—unremarkable-looking pedestrians who, seeing someone slumped over in a crosswalk, in the line of traffic, would pick that person up and help him onto the sidewalk. There may be little or no sunny side to the prostitution in this neighborhood, but there’s something cheering about walking by the Holiday Inn park benches at 7:30 a.m., and seeing the tall, long-limbed sex workers in leggings and false eyelashes, sitting together over a coffee, chatting, laughing, adjusting their bras, their hair.

I know it would be wrong to get romantic about it, just as I know that the people on the sidewalk near Fortieth Street who shout at me that they love my hair and where do I get it done are just hawking their salon on the second floor, but what can I say? It sometimes feels as if these chaotic crowds were here because we were all inside the velvet rope to the one club that would interest me, the one where we all belong.

I used to wonder about people who were born in New York and who still lived here. Did it not annoy them that any block they walked down, any business they passed, was liable to bring up a ghoulish or irritating memory? Even good memories can be exhausting. Maybe especially good memories. For this reason, I pitied the New York natives. And envied them, naturally. Lately, I find myself awake in the middle of the night in a panic, wondering, Why am I here? Where are all the people I have known? My mother lives only two miles away, but I still sometimes think, Where is my mom? Where is my black-sheep stuffed animal? Now my child is a native New Yorker. The pandemic will be over one day. She will again make her way up a very crowded Eighth Avenue. New businesses will open. Maybe, years from now, she will wonder what happened to these irreplaceable days