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Black officer involved with Central Park Five comes out swinging with facts of case to refute Netflix lies

June 29, 2019 | | Print Article

It’s only been roughly a week since the far-left began pummeling President Donald Trump with criticism for refusing to apologize for having once demanded that members of the Central Park Five be executed, and already it appears he’s been proven right.

About a week ago CNN political analyst and American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan questioned the president about his past comments regarding the four black teens and one Latino teen who were convicted for their involvement in the 1989 assault and rape of a white jogger named Trisha Meili.

Her question was inspired by the recent release of “When They See Us,” a Netflix special that purported to document the true events of the case. Except instead of telling the real story, the series besmirched those involved in prosecuting the teens and made the teens out to be innocent, gentle giants.

In an interview, this week with the Daily Mail, the New York Police Department officer who made the first arrests in the Central Park Five case described Netflix’s total as “total nonsense.”

“Eric Reynolds, who as a plainclothes officer arrested Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson, tells DailyMailTV that the four-part television adaptation is so filled with errors that it is ‘malicious recreation,'” the Daily Mail reported. “He described the miniseries, produced by Robert De Niro and Oprah Winfrey and directed by Ava DuVernay, as ‘total nonsense‘ that left him ‘flabbergasted.'”

Listen to some of that interview below:

His frustration stems from Netflix’s downplaying of the teens’ other crimes. While it’s true they were eventually acquitted of raping Meili, that didn’t make them wholly innocent.

When then-New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau sought to throw out all of the five’s convictions in 2002, both the original prosecutor on the case, Linda Fairstein, and several of the lead detectives that oversaw the investigation, including Reynolds, pushed back.

To this day, Fairstein remains convinced that justice hasn’t really been served.

“That a sociopath named Matias Reyes confessed in 2002 to the rape of Ms. Meili, and that the district attorney consequently vacated the charges against the five after they had served their sentences, has led some of these reporters and filmmakers to assume the prosecution had no basis on which to charge the five suspects in 1989,” she wrote in a recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

“The facts of the original case are documented in a 117-page decision by New York State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Galligan, in sworn testimony given in two trials and affirmed by two appellate courts, and in sworn depositions of more than 95 witnesses—including the five themselves.”

These facts show that the Central Park Five were certainly not “innocent of all charges against them.” The evidence shows, for instance, that some of the Central Park Five boys “held the jogger down and felt her breasts while others attacked her.”

“There were blood stains and dirt on clothing of some of the five,” Fairstein wrote. “And then there are the statements of more than a dozen of the other kids who participated in the park rampage. Although none of the others admitted joining in the rape of Trisha Meili, they admitted attacking male victims and a couple on a tandem bike, and each of them named some or all of the five as joining them.”

In his interview with the Daily Mail, Reynolds confirmed this account and contrasted it with the watered-down version that appears in Netflix’s series.

“In one scene a man, most likely a depiction of teacher John Loughlin, is shown being felled by a single punch while three of the five look on,” the Mail reported.

But according to Reynolds, “It did not happen that way.”

“They were beating him with a pipe. They beat him so savagely that both of his eyes were shut and he had a cracked skull,” he said.

HERE’S WHAT YOU’RE MISSING …

Another scene in the “Netflix” series reportedly showed the teenage thugs “halfheartedly” harassing a couple on a two-person bike. But according to Reynolds, that too was “total fiction.”

“The group lay in wait,” he said. “They stretched out across the roadway and held hands to knock them off their bike. It was a couple on the [two-person bike] and the woman said she was scared for her life. Her boyfriend just told her, ‘Put your head down and pedal as hard as you can.’ And they rode through them as they were grabbing at her clothes and by the grace of God they got away.”

It was this sort of violence that ought to matter, but instead, the Central Park Five case has become bogged by the left’s factually inaccurate and politically correct racial narrative.

“I don’t understand how that’s a race issue if you’re in the middle of a park riding on a bike in the middle of the night and a group of males, whether they’re black, white or whatever, you know are standing on the road with the express purpose of knocking you off the bike,” Reynolds said.

It was because this case has become about race that Ryan, a known race-baiter, brought up the Central Five case to the president last week. She’d been hoping to cajole a potentially “offensive” reply from the president. And just as she’d expected, the president delivered.

“You have people on both sides of that,” he said. “They admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein, and you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case. So we’ll leave it at that.”

The left responded by accusing him of being a racist (*LANGUAGE ALERT):

But as Fairstein’s op-ed and Reynolds’ testimony to the Daily Mail makes clear, the president wasn’t wrong. The Central Park Five aren’t and have never been innocent. The evidence says they were thugs who willingly took part in a rash of sick, vicious behaviors, including rape. Yes, they didn’t commit the rape themselves, but according to mountains of evidence, they sure as hell didn’t stop it either.

HERE’S WHAT YOU’RE MISSING …

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Vivek Saxena
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