By Celia Bernhardt | cbernhardt@queensledger.com

A 19-year-old Bengali Ozone Park resident named Win Rozario called 911 on Wednesday, March 27 seeking help while suffering from mental distress. He was fatally shot by the police officers who responded to the call. 

The NYPD alleges that Rozario threatened those police officers with scissors. 

Rozario’s death has sparked mourning and urgent calls for change across the Bengali and Bangladeshi community in Queens. 

The NYPD’s description of the circumstances that led to the 19-year-old’s fatal shooting have a key difference with the recollection provided by Rozario’s 17-year-old brother, Ushto. NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell, at a press conference, said that officers were attempting to take Rozario “into custody to get him help” when he began to approach them wielding a pair of scissors. The officers deployed Tasers in response before Rozario’s mother “came to the aid of her son in order to help him,” according to Chell, and “accidentally knocked the Tasers out of his body.” 

What happened next is where accounts differ. 

In an interview with the New York Times, Ushto Rozario said that his mother was still hugging and effectively restraining Rozario when the officers shot him. Ushto told the Times that Rozario “couldn’t really do anything” while his mother was holding him, and said that the shooting was unnecessary. Chell, in contrast, said that Rozario “came at” the officers again with scissors. “They had no choice but to defend themselves, discharging their firearms,” Chell said at the press conference. 

Ushto said that officers shot Rozario six times; the NYPD has not made any statements regarding the number of shots. 

“Everything I described to you is on a body-worn camera,” Chell said. 

As of Wednesday, the NYPD has not yet released the body camera footage.

Signs from a vigil for Win Rozario.

The New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigations announced on Tuesday that it had opened an investigation into Rozario’s death.

“OSI assesses every incident reported to it where a police officer or a peace officer, including a corrections officer, may have caused the death of a person by an act or omission,” the Attorney General’s website stated. “If OSI’s assessment indicates an officer may have caused the death, OSI proceeds to conduct a full investigation of the incident.”

Rozario’s death has reignited calls from some elected officials and community organizations for a change in how the city responds to mental health emergencies. 

“Win Rozario made a call for help and it cost him his life,” Council Member Lynn Schulman wrote in a public statement. “Our system failed him.”

Schulman highlighted the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division Program (commonly called B-Heard) as one of multiple “life saving initiatives that enable mental health clinicans to respond to emergency mental health situations,” rather than police officers, arguing that the program is in need of additional funding in order to prevent fatal situations like Rozario’s. 

Cityline Ozone Park Civilian Patrol, a community volunteer organization, released a statement which also included calls for additional B-HEARD funding. 

“We need a stronger partnership between law enforcement, mental health professionals, and community organizations,” COPCP’s statement read.

Lal Morich led one of two vigils in Diversity Plaza.

On Friday at 5 p.m., two competing vigils took place in Jackson Heights’ Diversity Plaza. 

The event was spearheaded by Lal Morich, an organization which describes itself on Instagram as “a Bangladeshi anti imperialist diaspora org in support of the New Democratic Movement in Bangladesh.” The group’s flier for the vigil spread on social media platforms.

Two groups clustered at the event. One, led by Lal Morich organizers, carried a hand-painted banner depicting Rozario’s image, a candle, and a pair of scissors behind the words “Say His Name: Win Rozario.” The other group’s members carried a printed banner for the Probashi Bengali Christian Association, a social organization serving Bengali Christians in the tri-state region. They held up posters of Rozario with the words “we want justice” and arrived with their own sound system.

“I left my country to have a better life here,” one speaker with the PBCA said to the crowd. “We all are very angry, very sad. We just want justice. We’re not here to criticize against anyone. Who knows? I don’t want… my family to be the next one, you don’t want your family to be the next one.”

Another speaker, Pastor James Roy of the United Bengali Lutheran Church, encouraged the crowd to pray for the Rozario family.  

PBCA at the vigil.

The PBCA’s cluster delivered speeches for approximately twenty minutes before Lal Morich activists began booing when one speaker described the NYPD, as an organization, as “brave.” 

“He got killed by the police! He got killed by the NYPD!” one organizer shouted at the PBCA. 

Both groups alternately chanted “we want justice” at each other. Lal Morich-led attendees then began drumming and leading new chants before delivering their own speeches. PCBA members continued speaking, the two groups battling for volume beside each other.  

“[The NYPD doesn’t] care about mental health. Win needed mental health help. He got brutalized. He got shot and killed by cowards,” one Lal Morich organizer said in a speech. “They do this to countless other teenagers, countless other elders, young people. We don’t stand for this. We cannot tell lies to our community, we cannot tell lies to the next generation that the NYPD are brave.”

The vigil continued for over an hour after that as the crowd mourned Rozario. 

Pastor Roy later told the Ledger that Rozario and his family were parishoners of his at the United Bengali Lutheran Church. 33-year-old Steve Roy, a member of the church, said the same.

“Since they’ve been here, they’ve been going to our church. I know their family, I know him, his brother, mother, everybody,” Roy said. 

“NYPD’s been doing this for decades,” Roy continued. “Killing people because they feel like it, or maybe they’re scared. I don’t know if a scissor warrants six bullets in somebody. This is not the first time — this happens everywhere, in every state…It comes from the infrastructure, right? If you have a corrupt infrastructure, this is the reality of your system.”

As for the tension between the groups at the Plaza, Roy said that the entire ordeal was “not the perfect response” to Rozario’s death. 

“There should’ve been a vigil that was orchestrated by the people who are intimately close with the family,” he said.  

A Lal Morich organizer declined to speak with the Ledger.

Attendees of both vigils mourned Rozario’s passing.

By Ed Wendell

On March 28, 1994, Engine Company 24/Hook & Ladder 5 raced to the scene of a fire at 62 Watts Street in Manhattan. It is hard to comprehend the courage it takes to run into a burning building. All of our instincts scream at us to run away from danger, yet there are those that not only face it, they stand up to it. They run towards it.

They put their lives at risk to save and rescue people they do not know.

We lost three brave souls as a result of that fire. Captain John J. Drennan, Firefighter Christopher J. Siedenburg, and Firefighter James F. Young.

Jimmy had just turned 31 that January and was a true son of Woodhaven. He was baptized and confirmed at St. Thomas the Apostle, where he also went to school. He used to deliver the Leader/Observer and even wrote for this paper for a while, delivering recaps for the neighborhood softball league.

“I didn’t have one day’s problem with Jimmy, he was close to perfection,” his mother Virginia says. “He got along with everyone. He never smoked, never drank. I can’t tell you how many of my friends wanted him to marry their daughters.”

Jimmy Young was not only a delivery boy for the newspaper you are reading, but also wrote columns for the Leader on the Woodhaven Softball League while waiting to join the FDNY.

Virginia Young says that everything happens for a reason, that life’s tragedies must be part of a larger plan. “We almost lost Jimmy in a car accident, almost 10 years to the day before the fire,” she recalls.

And to illustrate this point, Virginia Young reminds us that this accident happened at Atlantic and 87th, the street that would one day bear her son’s name. “It was touch and go, but we prayed and he survived and he made a vow to live his life to the fullest,” she said. “And he did.”

Jimmy’s sister Maureen says that her brother touched so many lives, that she hears stories about him from people she never knew. “He must have had 500 close personal friends,” she said. “He knew everybody and everybody knew him.”

She reflects on the last time she saw Jimmy at a birthday party for their brother Michael. “He was leaving to take his girlfriend home, and we said ‘See you later’ to each other, and that was it,” she remembers. “The fire was a few days later.”

Shortly after a funeral during which the streets of Woodhaven were flooded with more than 10,000 firefighters, Maureen gave birth to her daughter.

“I really wish that he’d gotten to know my kids; his nieces and nephews,” she said. “I wish they had been able to know him.”

Residents and firefighters gather for a memorial to Firefighter Jimmy Young back in 2010.

“He was so generous and outgoing, he made friends with everybody,” she said. “He touched so many people’s lives and made an impact on them.”

She finds comfort in the words of the Facebook memorial page, especially every year as the anniversary approaches. “Time heals all wounds,” she says. “It gets easier, but it never gets easy.”

And now 30 years have gone by. That’s three entire decades that have passed. And the world is a much different world than the one Jimmy left behind. It’s a much different Woodhaven now than the one that paid such a loving tribute to Jimmy in 1994.

Many of the people that paid tribute to Jimmy Young back then have gone on to their reward themselves. And many of Jimmy’s young contemporaries from 1994 have grown old and gone grey. It seems hard to believe, but Jimmy himself would have turned 61 this year.

Back in March, 2010 we held a memorial for Jimmy here in Woodhaven and the late Maria Thomson read from the statement she made at City Hall the day that the bill renaming 87th Street in Jimmy Young’s honor was signed.

The family of Jimmy Young on the day that 87th Street was officially renamed Jimmy Young Place.

“Jimmy, you were taken too soon, and we miss you,” Thomson said. “But with your name proudly displayed on Jimmy Young Place, the legacy of your winning life and your heroic death will always live on.”

And so, if you weren’t familiar with the man behind the name on the sign that has hung over 87th Street these past 30 years, you now know a little more about him and the sacrifice he made.

And we hope you will join us in honoring his memory by remembering Jimmy Young not just for how he died, but for how he lived.