I grieve for Kalief Browder.
Trapped in a state of despair and paranoia, Kalief committed suicide this past Saturday, leaping from a second-floor window of his family’s Bronx home with an air-conditioner cord wrapped around his neck. He was a lost young man whom, ordinarily, I would never have heard about, much less cared about. Collateral damage in the grand opera of New York City.
He was 22 years old.
But I know one thing as certainly as I know that death will one day consume me, too: Kalief Browder did not deserve to die.