2015: Community Mourns Kalief Browder

On June 6th, Venida Browder finds her son, Kalief, dead outside her home just minutes after his suicide. He had been released from Rikers two years earlier, after being detained for three years (including 800 days in solitary confinement) for a grand larceny charge that would eventually be dropped. After Rikers, Browder went public with his story. He detailed the psychological trauma he experienced to Jennifer Gonnerman of The New Yorker. He told her he was still “feeling the side effects of what happened there.” Exactly eight months after Gonnerman’s article was published, Browder would take his own life.