The Central Park Five:
A Chronicle of a City Wilding
By Sarah Burns
Knopf, 256 pages

Say the words “Central Park jogger” and most New Yorkers of a certain vintage get a queasy feeling and want to change the subject. The rape and horrific beating of a young woman on April 19, 1989, was so sickening that it stands out even from the violent crime wave of that era. A city living in fear of murderous drug addicts and street-corner muggings was nonetheless stunned by the wanton brutality against the defenseless jogger, especially because the oldest of those charged was 16 years old and two were only 14.

Police sources told reporters the boys joked about their night of “wilding,” and within hours the main suspects signed written confessions and repeated those statements on videotape. Most blamed their friends for beating and raping the jogger while minimizing their own role. Yet one boy, in his statement, said, “this is my first rape.” Another insisted his friends raped her, saying, “all I did was touch her t-ts.”

Other joggers, bicyclists, and a hobo unlucky enough to be in the park came forward to report that they, too, had been assaulted and robbed by a gang of about 30 black and Latino boys that night.

The image quickly took hold of a “wolf pack” marauding through Central Park on a pleasant spring evening and committing despicable attacks for sport. The sheer madness of it felt like a dagger aimed at the heart of civilization, as though the forces of hell had been unleashed.

The jogger, a 28-year-old white woman named Trisha Meili, miraculously survived despite losing 75 percent of her blood and suffering a fractured skull and brain damage. About 15 months after the attack, three boys—Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, and Yusef Salaam—were convicted of rape, assault, and robbery; two others, Kevin Richardson and Korey Wise, were convicted in a separate trial of similar charges.

They claimed they were innocent and were forced or tricked into falsely confessing, but neither the multiracial juries nor the judge bought it. Indeed, the police work was exemplary, with none of the boys known to be younger than 16 questioned until their parents arrived at the precinct, and parents were present during some confessions and signed off on them.

With maximum sentences stretching to 20 years, that should have been the end of the case. But in 2002, five years or so after most of the culprits had been released, a state prisoner named Matias Reyes, already convicted of four Manhattan rapes and a murder, told a fellow inmate he had in fact raped the jogger. When the report reached Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, whose office had prosecuted the case, he dispatched a team to investigate. The breakthrough came when semen found on the jogger’s sock, which had not matched the DNA of any of the convicted boys, proved a match for Reyes. He also described details of the rape that fit the crime scene.

Morgenthau, believing he had convicted the wrong people, went to court with defense attorneys and agreed to vacate the convictions. The boys, now young men after serving as much as eight years for their actions that night, were released and filed a federal civil rights lawsuit charging the city and many individuals involved with malicious prosecution and racial discrimination. They and their families demanded $50 million each.

That case is still pending because the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and the New York Police Department maintain the confessions were not coerced and that there was no misconduct in the investigations and convictions. Just recently, the mayor’s office issued a long statement noting that “the charges against the plaintiffs and other youths were based on abundant probable cause, including confessions that withstood intense scrutiny, in full and fair pretrial hearings and at two lengthy public trials. Nothing unearthed since the trials, including Matias Reyes’s connection to the attack on the jogger, changes that fact.”

The statement also notes that the convictions were vacated, and that such an action is not the same as an acquittal. The men could have been retried, but that would have been useless, as they had already served as much time as they might get for a new conviction.

I have recounted this long tale to demonstrate how tangled the case was and still is. Reasonable people across two generations continue to disagree about what happened. Unfortunately, Sarah Burns, whose first book is a study of the case, is not among them. All is simple, and simplistic, in her version. The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding replays the same story with a very different soundtrack.

To Burns, the case boils down to one thing: racism. The use of “wilding” in the subtitle reflects her conclusion that New York, from the police to the media to the public, went race-crazy on those black and Latino teens.

Up to a point, her fixation on race merely detracts from what is otherwise a dogged and readable presentation of the drama. Of particular note is her recounting of the random assaults on the other victims that night and her methodical description of events as the bound and bloodied jogger was found by passersby. She skillfully skewers defense lawyers and the boys’ most rabid supporters, who called the jogger a “whore” and claimed she was in the park to buy drugs.

Ultimately, however, Burns spoils her good work by relentlessly insisting that racism is the single explanation for what did or didn’t happen. It is a broadside that exempts virtually no one. The city’s black mayor during the trials, David Dinkins, fails the author because he “equivocated” after the first verdict, as though he should have denounced it in racial solidarity with the defendants. Black-owned newspapers and black journalists, not to mention the entire New York Post, the Daily News, and the New York Times, are guilty of whipping up a civic frenzy that led to unfair convictions.

Burns’s evidence for this smear is largely a matter of her own sensibility. Her “facts” hang on language she finds objectionable and on irrelevant comparisons to other cases. She calls the teens a “roving gang” but declares that media usage of the words “wolf pack” and “wilding” are animal references and therefore proof of racism. That the rape of a black woman at about the same time got far less attention weighs heavily in her calculation. She blasts the papers for failing to call the defendants “alleged” participants. Technically, she has a point, I suppose, but the confessions understandably removed the presumption of innocence in the court of public opinion.

She accuses the police—including, by inference, the black and Latino officers involved in the interrogations—of stereotyping minority young men as predators. She believes prosecutors were too quick to accept the police narrative, while the trial judge allowed the confessions to be used because otherwise he would have been attacked by the media. On and on she goes, dragging in Willie Horton and the 1980s vigilante Bernhard Goetz for cameo appearances, as though piling up past cases with racial overtones would convict New York in this one.

More subtle signs of her bias include her descriptions of Trisha Meili, who is introduced as a cardboard-cutout investment banker workaholic who jogs in Central Park. Meanwhile, the boys charged with attacking her are alternately “shy” and “popular” and “talented.” One was “a practicing Muslim and followed the tenets of his religion closely,” even though he had been kicked out of school for having a knife and carried a foot-long metal bar in his coat that night. “At some point,” Burns writes, “the metal bar…was used to beat” a man in the park. Who used the bar? She doesn’t say, as if the bar swung itself. And she conveniently ignores the gaping hole in her racial calculation: to wit, Reyes is Puerto Rican, so her argument about police being eager to unfairly charge minorities collapses.

Those flaws are more than sufficient to cast doubt on the author’s judgment. But Burns was only getting warmed up on that racial rant. As the book progresses, her argument grows larger and louder and more inflammatory. She invokes slavery, the KKK, racial lynchings, and cases in the old South of white mobs killing and mutilating blacks. From there, her clumsy segue back to her ostensible subject marks the book’s low point: “The calls for the death penalty in the Central Park Jogger case prove that this fear, planted as a seed in the late nineteenth century, was alive and well in New York City in the spring and summer of 1989.”

Burns’s views are worn clichés these days, but she is consistent. In response to my questions, a publicist at her publishing house forwarded me an e-mail from Burns that spells out her long relationship with the law firm representing most of the men in the civil suit—a link that is not made clear in the book or in her public statements urging the city to pay damages and settle the suit. “I interned for them for the summer of 2003, which is the only time I did anything related to the jogger case for them, which was a little research,” Burns writes in the e-mail. “I returned in 2004 after I graduated and worked there for two more years, but exclusively on two other completely unrelated cases.”

Unfortunately, the book will not be her final word. Sarah Burns has persuaded her father, the celebrated documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, to give the jogger case his patented treatment, with her book as important source material. And so her account might soon become the revised standard version of a fiendishly complex incident, simplified and distorted beyond recognition for the pleasure of PBS viewers.