Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [303]
Tragically, barely a year after Qubilah’s legal ordeal, her disturbed twelve-year-old son, called “Little Malcolm” by the family, set fire one night to his grandmother’s apartment. Betty, sleeping in her bedroom, was horrifically burned. She struggled in the hospital for more than three weeks, with severe burns covering more than 80 percent of her body. Physicians took aggressive action, operating five times to remove layers of charred skin and replacing it with artificial skin. But the damage was too great and Betty Shabazz died on June 23, 1997. President William Jefferson Clinton noted her passing, applauding her for her commitments to “education and to uplifting women and children.” Like Malcolm X, noted District of Columbia representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shabazz “will be remembered not for her death, but for the principled life she lived and the tower of strength she became.” Her public memorial gathering, held at the prestigious Riverside Church in Manhattan, included testimonials by Republican governor George Pataki of New York and New York City’s Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. The mayor, widely unpopular among many working-class and poor black New Yorkers, was roundly booed when he began to address the audience. It was significant that the eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, rushed to the podium in defense of Giuliani, praising the conservative mayor’s gestures of kindness toward her mother and criticizing the mostly black crowd for its rudeness. Her defense of Giuliani may have reflected Betty’s black bourgeois politics, but not those of her father.
From the beginning of the criminal investigation following Malcolm’s murder, BOSS detective Gerry Fulcher had been troubled by what he considered major mistakes. The problems began at the crime scene. The first priority, Fulcher later recounted, should have been to “protect the whole area. You get rid of everybody who’s not going to be a witness.” Any evidence must be preserved. “You don’t want people finding things. . . .” In Fulcher’s judgment, the NYPD’s treatment of the murder scene was “totally contrary to what should be standard operating procedure. That thing should have been covered all night long.” In high-profile cases, it is not unusual to find “crime scenes stay[ing] locked up for days.” Fulcher expressed his misgivings to his police colleagues at the time of the assassination. Perhaps as a consequence, he found himself shut out of the investigation. Fulcher recalled:
I should have been an indispensable part of finding out what went on and so on, because they should have been grilling me. . . . I was flat out told, you know, “Stay out, you’re not involved.” Made me think that they could have been getting their stories straight, so to speak, without the interference of this young guy who didn’t know anything. . . . All they wanted to know is “Did you hear anything on the phone?” To me that was just a show. They knew I wouldn’t hear anything on the phone, because there’d be nobody there [at the Hotel Theresa office]. They knew the schedule. . . . So I think they were playing their roles. I think that was all bullshit. And when I went up and tried to join them, you know—“No, no, this is where we get our stories straight. You’re out, kid.”
Several months after the assassination, Fulcher was transferred from BOSS headquarters to one of the city’s most dangerous precincts, Fort Apache in the Bronx. He lasted there less than three years, before resigning from the force.
In early 1978, radical attorney William Kunstler took up the cases of Thomas 15X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler, petitioning to the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court for a new trial. His principal new evidence was a signed affidavit by Talmadge Hayer that identified four other men, “torpedoes from New Jersey,” who had been responsible for the killing of Malcolm X. Kunstler informed