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2:00 AM to 2:30 AM
The bullet that hit Victor Fain’s left ankle while he was around Lenox Avenue and West 128th Street indicated both the presence of police officers and groups of people standing around the businesses in the area. The nineteen-year-old Black man did not tell the medical staff who treated him the circumstances in which he had been shot, so he may have been participating in breaking windows or taking merchandise from damaged stores, or close enough to others involved in violence to have been hit by a stray bullet intended for them. Fain was not a local resident. He lived well south of 125th Street. Coming this far uptown suggested he was more than a casual spectator.
A block to the south, attacks on stores evidently continued as some glass shattered and hit William Brown, a twenty-year-old man of unknown race. His injury indicated that some spectators were still present watching that violence. While many of those on the street were local residents, Brown, like Fain, had come from well below 125th Street.
Still further south, the police stationed at the corner of West 126th Street had enough control of the area to be paying attention to people moving through the intersection. Around 2:15 AM, something about Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer, and John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, attracted the attention of Patrolman Astel. He stopped the men and found a quantity of jewelry in their possession which they admitted they had taken from Benjamin Zelvin’s store at 372 Lenox Avenue. The store was only three blocks to the north. Astel had Leacock and Henry take him there. He found that all the display windows had been broken.
Another man who had been in the crowds on Lenox Avenue attracted the attention of police officers stationed around West 118th Street. James Williams was likely on the way to his home at 153 West 117th Street. There had been no police nearby when the businesses around this intersection were first attacked. The officers the twenty-eight-year-old West Indian cook encountered may have sent in response to that violence. He was carrying four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box, and a cloth lamp. That load was likely what led the officers to arrest him. Later, Herman Young would identify the items as having been taken from his hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue, which had been looted starting around 1:00 AM. While a magistrate and a grand jury would find that evidence compelling, it would not convince a trial jury.
The arrival of the police officers who arrested Williams likely led some of those who had been attacking stores around Lenox Avenue to move further east. Around 2:25 AM, stones were thrown at the front windows of the Mediaville Liquor Store on the northwest corner of West 116th Street and 5th Avenue. Some bottles of liquor were then taken from the display. Unlike to the west on 116th Street, further attacks on the store apparently did not follow, a sign that there were not many people on the street this far east.
Across the neighborhood in an area beyond the reach of the disorder, Officer Eldridge had arrived at Lino Rivera’s home around 2:00 AM. He woke the sleeping boy and told him people thought he was dead. Eldridge then took Rivera to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street. During the half hour Rivera spent there he was questioned by several police officers and a crowd of white journalists and was photographed with Lt. Battle and Officer Eldridge by press photographers. He assured all those who asked that he not been beaten or arrested. Inspector Di Martini took credit for having Battle pose alongside Rivera in a further effort to diffuse the racial conflict in the disorder. After interviewing and photographing Rivera, journalists stopped describing the boy who had been in the Kress store as “Negro” or “colored” in favor of calling him “Puerto Rican.” Some Harlem residents as well as Communist groups were less readily convinced. Questions about whether Rivera was the boy who had been in the store would be raised for several weeks after the disorder was over.