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• 1 2023-06-14T14:47:27+00:00 Patrolman John McInerney in the grand jury (April 10) 39 plain 2024-02-15T18:37:00+00:00 On April 8, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Samuel Pitts went to the DA's office. ADA Price questioned them. Two days later, he presented the case to a grand jury entirely made up of white men, who decided not to indict Patrolman McInerney. Brief mentions of the decision in the white press featured McInerney's account that he had seen Lloyd Hobbs looting, and had shot him after he refused to halt. Additional justifications appeared in several stories. McInerney saw Hobbs "carrying some of the loot" in the New York Times. McInerney uttered not one but "several commands to stop," the New York Post reported. The New York Times added that he "fired as some of the rioters were hurling stones at him, not intending to kill him.” "He intended to frighten the boy, not kill him,” according to the Home News. Only the Afro-American mentioned any of the evidence against McInerney. “Several eye-witnesses disputed the officer’s assertion that he called on the youth to halt,” a story published over two weeks after the verdict noted. One of those eyewitnesses, Howard Malloy, later told Hays and then a MCCH hearing, that what he described as his arrests for "whiskey and misdemeanor" were brought up in the grand jury to try to disqualify him as a witness. No other details of the closed hearing were made public.
  
  To his evident frustration, Arthur Garfield Hays learned of the grand jury's decision from those newspaper stories. On April 11 he wrote to District Attorney Dodge asking if the men who had testified at the MCCH hearing were called before the grand jury and for the identity of the other witnesses. Hays granted that he had heard "only one side of this case," and presented himself as anxious to have other witnesses appear in a MCCH hearing to publicly present all the evidence "so that if there was any justification for the shooting, the public may know it." His phrasing indicated that he been persuaded by the eye-witnesses' testimony that the shooting was not justified. Dodge replied the next day that "the District Attorney's office called every witness who knew anything with reference to this case against McInerney." The list he provided included the three eyewitnesses, Russell Hobbs and his family, Louis Eisenberg, Patrolman Watterson, McInerney's partner, Detective McCormick, the stenographer, Detective O'Brien, and the medical examiner, Dr. Halpern. Patrolman McInerney had also waived his immunity and offered to appear. The grand jury declined to hear from him.
  
  In addition to Eisenberg, three of the grand jury witnesses identified in Dodge's letter had not testified in a MCCH hearing, Patrolmen McInerney and Watterson and Detective O'Brien. Having them give their evidence in public, as Hays' letter indicated was the MCCH's next step, was possible now as the end of the legal proceedings freed them from Dodge's restriction on police testifying. As Hays extended the MCCH investigation, Detective O'Brien closed the police investigation, recording that McInerney had been exonerated. That outcome would have been as dishearteningly familiar to residents of Harlem as it was frustrating to Hays.