Trap

Timur Person (Trap)

Just two weeks after Sean Bell’s murder, another young black man named Timur Person (known as Trap) was shot and killed by the police in the entrance to his building in the Concourse/Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx. According to the police, on the night of December 13th, Trap was with three friends, hanging out on the street when they “caught the attention” of four uniformed police officers who were on the lookout for graffiti vandals in the neighborhood. When the officers approached, the men scattered and Trap was followed into his building’s entrance. There, the police tackled Trap and one of the officers felt a gun barrel pressing through Trap’s jacket into his stomach, when which he ordered the other officers to shoot. Trap was killed by five bullets to the chest.

Although a loaded gun was found was on the scene, no one was willing to say that it was found in Trap’s pocket. Furthermore, when Trap’s friends recounted the story to me, they stressed that Trap was attempting to surrender the entire time. He was shot on the ground while being held down by two officers.

Trap's murder and memorial site.

At the site of Trap’s murder his friends, puffy-eyed and wearing t-shirts, hats, and bandanas covered in tags of his street name, told me that they remember all of the people who have been shot on the block. Sixteen year old girls pointed to different places on the sidewalk where they saw their friends and family go down. Trap’s godfather asked one of the younger mourners how she was doing and her answer was a resigned, “just another day.”

I arrived on the site of Trap’s murder only hours afterwards. As people began waking up and coming downstairs, they saw the scene in the lobby. Almost immediately, an impromptu memorial wall sprung up.

The memorial wall for Trap, hours after his death.

Trap’s friends spray painted the entryway, put up pictures of him, wrote on the wall, and lit candles at its base. The facade of the building as well as the bricks around Trap’s window on the third flood were also spray painted. Soon enough, a large crowd gathered. On the street outside the building, cardboard boxes filled with candles.

Boxes full of candles could be found around the entire neighborhood.

Not long after the spray paint dried, the police arrived to clean it off. This aroused outrage among Trap’s friends who put it up. They yelled, “we’re going to put that right back up again! This is about freedom of speech and we’re going to write whatever the fuck we want!”

The police scattered the crowd and used chemical cleaners to erase the graffiti. One teenager on scene told me that this is what happens when “they prepare for the white people”-press.

As it turned out, Trap’s shooting got very little press. Only weeks after Sean Bell’s tragedy, no one was interested in the death of a potentially armed black teenager in the Bronx. People muttered amongst the crowd, “who gives a fuck about the black people?” “Do you see any white people getting shot? It’s all black men.” Consciously or unconsciously referencing Amadou Diallo’s case and apartheid South Africa, “you go for your ID, they shoot you.”
As the press began to hound the mourners, snapping pictures of them as they cried and rapped on their knees in front of Trap’s wall, I took a walk around the neighborhood. It became clear that the people of Highbridge, Melrose, and the Concourse were fed up with the their treatment from the city. Within several blocks I passed four memorial walls and numerous “fuck the po po” tags, otherwise known at F.T.P.P.

Trap’s neighborhood: signs of the city’s disinvestment and the people’s discontent.

I felt like I had traveled in time and found myself in the South Bronx in the late eighties—a place full of shattered glass, boarded-up windows, abandoned cars, empty lots, and stripped playgrounds. We are told that these neighborhoods do not exist today, that Giuliani and economic growth picked New York City up by its bootstraps. Tragically, these streets have not gone anywhere and even more tragically Trap’s murder by the police really was “just another day” in the Concourse.

About a month after Trap’s shooting, I revisited the site. The police did an extraordinarily thorough job cleaning up signs of the makeshift memorial wall.

The site of Trap’s shooting and makeshift memorial-- cleaned and covered with paint. Apparently, the papers, pictures, candles, and tags were taken down completely within a week of the Trap’s death. When I spoke to residents in Trap’s building they seemed surprised that I would assume it stayed up any longer.