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John O'Brien, Supplementary Complaint Report, Complaint #523, March 28, 1935, "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 25, Folder 19, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University)
1 2020-11-21T20:40:10+00:00 Anonymous 1 8 plain 2023-06-16T00:24:47+00:00 AnonymousThis page is referenced by:
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2023-06-14T14:50:08+00:00
The police investigation
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2023-06-21T19:43:16+00:00
At 1:20 AM On March 20, Detective John O'Brien was assigned to investigate the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs. A detective based at the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street, he was at the station at Lenox Avenue and West 118th Street at the time. Even though Harlem was still in disorder, the police department was following its procedure of investigating shootings. O'Brien immediately went to Harlem Hospital with his partner, Detective Foley. He found a stenographer from the Homicide squad who had already recorded a statement Hobbs gave to two detectives from that squad. Those officers were at the hospital when the boy arrived and, having been told someone had been shot, took the statement because the boy was seriously injured and might have died. Detective Martin's questioning of Hobbs had taken place in the x-ray room, while an attendant set up the x-ray machine. Patrolman McInerney was not present, according to the stenographer. Asked what happened, Hobbs said "Some one threw a brick into a window and I was shot by a cop." After asking about other details, the detective repeated the question. "I was standing in the street and someone threw a brick and I ran," Hobbs responded. Even though that statement had been taken, O'Brien also questioned the boy, telling a hearing of the MCCH that he thought he "would get something additional."
O'Brien also talked with Patrolman McInerney, but did not write down his statement. In the Complaint Report he completed later that day, O'Brien summarized what he had been told: McInerney had seen Hobbs break a window in the automobile supply shop, take merchandise and run north on 7th Avenue. The patrolman pursued the boy, called on him to stop, and when he did not, shot him. O'Brien did not ask about the automobile accessories Hobbs had allegedly taken, which McInerney did not have with him at the time. He was more concerned with getting to the scene of the shooting. Around fifteen minutes after he arrived, O'Brien left Harlem Hospital. Although the Hobbs family were at the hospital around that time, the detective never crossed paths with them.
Arriving at 7th Avenue and 128th Street around 1:45 AM, O'Brien found bits of glass in the street, together with bricks, stones and other heavy objects. At the automobile supply store four of the display windows were broken, as well as one of the windows in the door. What O'Brien did not find were what he was looking for, witnesses to the shooting. It seems unlikely he found no one on the street, as many in the crowd on the corner when Hobbs was shot had been there for several hours at that time. However, the detective kept no record of who he spoke to. After about thirty minutes, O'Brien called the station. At that time he was assigned another case to investigate: August Miller, a white man injured during the disorder, at Joint Disease Hospital. He should not have been investigating two cases at the same time, O'Brien later told a hearing of the MCCH. Nonetheless, that was what he had been told to do, so he and Foley went to that hospital.
The next day, O'Brien returned to the scene of the shooting to again seek witnesses. He spoke to those he found in the stores and to residents, again without success. (He had equally little success finding witnesses to what had happened to August Miller, at West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue). With those efforts, O'Brien apparently decided that if there any witnesses they would "show up at the police station."
By March 28, O'Brien had taken statements from McInerney and his partner Patrolman Watterson. A Supplementary Complaint Report he filed on that date quoted more detailed narratives of the shooting. McInerney stated that he had been in a patrol car when the noise of smashing glass drew his attention to the automobile supply store. After Hobbs failed to stop, the patrolman said he fired one shot only, which caused Hobbs to fall. The boy also "held in his hands objects which were later found near where he fell." Watterson's testimony put Hobbs inside the window, passing out items, when the officers' attention was drawn to the store. What Watterson did after McInerney jumped out of the car to pursue those outside the store was not included in the report. However. O'Brien did add that both officers stated that "unknown colored persons were throwing bricks and other objects at them" as Hobbs was being chased.
Sometime in the following days O'Brien interviewed Louis Eisenberg, the owner of the automobile supply store. He had had to wait to speak to him; McInerney had not. Eisenberg told the detective that the patrolman had talked to him on March 20 and had him identify items that the officer claimed he found on the ground by Hobbs. That O'Brien was asked in a hearing of the MCCH, "Did McInerey get any articles or automobile accessories from the store the next morning?," indicated that others thought the patrolman had gone to Eisenberg seeking items he could use to defend himself. What O'Brien learned from Eisenberg was that when a brick had been thrown through the store window around 10:00 PM, he and three employees had fled out the rear of the store, and remained in the rear yard for some time before flagging down a taxi to escape the crowds. They were gone long before McInerney shot Hobbs. Eisenberg also gave O'Brien "a long list of stuff taken," which he included in the Supplementary Complaint Report quoting the storeowner's statement. Although unrecorded in that report, the detective told an MCCH hearing that he had asked shopkeepers when other windows were broken, and was told none were damaged at 10:00 PM (which is not what they later told the MCCH's investigator).
The death of Lloyd Hobbs on the evening of March 30 prompted O'Brien to put the case in the hands of the District Attorney's office. When he called with the news, an ADA told him to have "all witnesses" at their office on April 1. O'Brien arranged for McInerney, Watterson and Eisenberg to appear. After hearing from them, ADA Saul Price had O'Brien deliver subpeonas to Russell Hobbs and his father to appear on April 3. Price told James Tartar, the MCCH investigator, that he delayed their hearing until after Lloyd's funeral on April 2. Delivering the subpeonas was Detective O'Brien's first contact with the Hobbs family, which he later explained to the MCCH was because he was unaware that Russell had been with Lloyd and thus a witness. When Russell and Lawyer Hobbs gave their statements to the ADA, the police investigation intersected with the MCCH investigation. Lawyer Hobbs said he knew of five eye-witnesses to the shooting but that he did not know their addresses. He must also have told Price that the men would be testifying at the MCCH hearing three days later. The ADA gave O'Brien subpoenas for the witnesses and told him to go to the hearing to serve them. -
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2020-02-25T18:03:35+00:00
Lloyd Hobbs killed
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2023-06-19T21:56:59+00:00
Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager, was shot and killed by Officer John McInerney, who claimed Hobbs had been looting an auto supply store.
Around 7:30 PM, Hobbs and his fifteen-year-old brother Russell had made the short trip from their home on St Nicholas Ave to the Apollo Theater on 125th Street for a show, not emerging until 12.30 AM. When they stepped back onto 125th St, they saw crowds down the block at the intersection with 7th Ave, and went to investigate. They followed as police pushed the crowd north on 7th Ave. As people milled in front of a damaged auto parts store at 2150 7th Avenue near 128th Street, a police radio car pulled up, and one of the officers inside, Patrolman John McInerney got out. Here the accounts of the boys and seven Black eye-witnesses and those of the two white patrolmen diverged. Fearing that they would be beaten by the police, the boys and the others in front of the store ran up 7th Ave. When they got to 128th Street, Lloyd broke away from the group and turned west on to 128th Street. Officer John McInerney then drew his gun and shot Lloyd. McInerney claimed that the officers had seen Hobbs throw a stone through the window of an auto supply store and steal goods, and that he called on him to halt before opening fire.
Several witnesses watching events from the corner of 128th and 7th Ave testified to seeing the crowd moving up the avenue, and Hobbs rush from the crowd as police pulled up, but not any looting, any goods on Hobbs, or any call for him to halt before McInerey shot him. The storeowner's complaint to police described the store window as having been broken, and looting starting, several hours earlier, at 10 PM. After the shooting, the officers loaded Hobbs into their car and drove him to Harlem Hospital.
Russell Hobbs reported what happened to their father, <add parents at hospital> & police at hospital
Lawyer Hobbs tried several times to identify and make a complaint against the officer who had shot his son. He also appears to have gone to the MCCH: an undated statement by Hobbs in the Commission's files describes Lloyd's shooting and his failed efforts to get police to investigate the case. According to a story in the New York Amsterdam News, after enlisting Fred Moore, the former alderman and editor of the New York Age, Hobbs succeeded in getting the police to agree "they would look into the case."
Hobbs did not die until the evening of March 30, so he does not feature in the initial newspaper reports of those killed during the disorder, but instead in all seven lists of the injured, published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Hobbs was the fourth of those killed in the disorder to die. A few hours earlier, his brother Russell testified before the first hearing of the Mayor’s Commission. While the New York Times, Daily News, New York Age, New York Amsterdam News and Afro-American referred to that testimony in reporting Hobbs' death, the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, Home News, Daily Mirror, New York American and Chicago Defender reported the death in their stories on the hearing without mentioning Russell. <<The next week
The Grand Jury twice heard the case against McInerney. The first hearing took place on April 10, after the Mayor's Commission hearings. Russell Hobbs, both his parents, and the three eye-witnesses who testified at the MCCH hearing on April 6 testified, together with McInerney's partner, the police stenographer who recorded Lloyd's statement at the hospital, and the detective who investigated the shooting, John O'Brien and the owner of the automobile supply store. Patrolman McInerney also offered to testify, but the grand jury opted not to hear him. They dismissed the charges. The MCCH nonetheless continued to gather evidence, hearing testimony from McInerney's partner, Patrolman Watterson and Detective O'Brien, who investigated the shooting, at a hearing on April 20 marked by angry interjections from the audience, and from four additional witnesses to the shooting at a hearing on May 18. As a result of the evidence gathered by the MCCH investigation, the Assistant District Attorney presented the case to the grand jury for a second time on June 10. After hearing from the four new eye-witnesses, and from MCCH investigator James Tartar about the absence of the allegedly stolen items from police records and the Police Property Department until April 8, the grand jury again dismissed the charges without hearing from McInerney.
Notwithstanding that outcome, the MCCH gave a central place to McInerney killing Hobbs in its report on the events of the disorder, first released on August 10, 1935.
Police Commissioner Valentine's written response to the draft report on April 30 covered six typewritten pages, including sections on six cases of police brutality. He devoted only six and a half lines to the "Case of Lloyd Hobbs," significantly less than any of the other five. The killing was simply "the outcome of Hobbs burglarizing premises 2150 7th Avenue," an interpretation confirmed by the Grand Jury who, after hearing from McInerney, "exonerated him."
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2021-04-28T15:57:46+00:00
Greenfield Auto Equipment store looted
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2023-08-01T23:26:44+00:00
Around 9.00 PM, Louis Eisenberg and three of his staff finished up putting new merchandise and sign cards in the store windows of Greenfield Auto Equipment, at 2150 7th Avenue, and began cleaning up inside the store. They "heard a terrific crash at the front door and saw angry crowd surging into the store," he told the MCCH in a private interview. Eisenberg and his staff fled out the rear of the store, and on to the street, where they hailed a cab to take them away from the crowd. The timing of that escape varied in different sources. In police records, Eisenberg and his staff fled out a rear window, into the back yard of the store, where they remained until around 11.30 PM. Only then did they avoid the "mob" on the street by jumping in a passing taxi. In his interview with the MCCH, Eisenberg described going from the yard to the neighboring "tailor shop" (actually a cleaning store) and hailing a cab from there. There was no mention of spending time in the yard in the interview, and from the cab he saw only one broken window, which suggested that he and his staff left soon after fleeing the store. That statement contradicted Eisenberg's statements to James Tartar, an investigator for the MCCH, that five windows were broken between 8.30 PM and 9.00PM. Tartar also recorded information from the white owners of four of the six other occupied stores on this block of 7th Avenue, between West 127th Street and West 128th Street, who reported windows broken sometime between 8.45 PM and 11.00 PM. The owner of the cleaning store neighboring Eisenberg's store specified that the windows in the auto equipment store were broken before those in his store, four of which were targeted between 8.45 PM and 9.30 PM.
The time that the windows were broken was early enough in the evening that most of the neighboring stores would still have been open for business, or at least still staffed, as Greenfield Auto Equipment had been. That all the neighboring storeowners interviewed by Tartar could give a time when people threw objects that broke their store windows indicates they were present. The Black-owned Cozy Shoppe at 2154 7th Avenue, on the corner of 128th Street, was undamaged; someone from that store had written "Colored Shoppe" on the store window. Tartar included the "Cozy Shop" on his drawing of the block, together with a Black-owned beauty parlor to the left of the auto equipment store, but neither appear in his list of looted businesses, suggesting the beauty parlor may also have been undamaged.
The storeowners also provided the value of the stock stolen from their stores. Eisenberg put the value of stock stolen from his store at $850; when he reported the theft to police he provided a two-page list of merchandise without information on its value. While Eisenberg's account of men rushing into his store implied that goods were stolen as soon as the window was broken, the more fragmentary responses Tartar recorded from the other store owners suggested that looting may have happened later, as more general narratives in the press related. The owner of the saloon on the corner of West 127th Street, the Harlem Grill, reported one window broken around 9.00PM, and two more at least an hour later. Crowds smashed windows in stores on the opposite side of the street apparently without looting them around 9.45 PM, when a police officer arrested Leroy Brown for urging a group of people to follow his lead after he threw a tailor's dummy through a window. Whenever the looting started, by around 11.00 PM, when Howard Malloy passed the store, all the goods in the display window had been taken, he told Tartar in an interview on April 5. On March 20, Detective O'Brien visited the store and reported that he found "five (5) windows of the store broken and merchandise strewn about the floor and window. Also noted that the street in the immediate vicinity was littered with broken glass, bricks, stones and other heavy objects."
Information on the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, and those store neighboring it, appeared in the records of the MCCH because of what happened after the looting, or at least after the looting had started. Around 12.55 AM, two police officers in a squad car traveling south on 7th Avenue reported hearing smashing glass, and seeing Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black student standing in the store window passing merchandise to a crowd of people on the street. They stopped their car and Patrolman McInerney chased after the crowd. As Hobbs ran across west across 128th Street McInery shot the boy in the back. Although the officers transported him to Harlem Hospital, Hobbs died on March 30. He and his younger brother had been at a show at the Apollo Theater until 12.30 AM, when they emerged to find "general disorder and many broken windows." Russell told Tartar that they wanted to "see and hear what was going on," so walked along 125th Street and up 7th Avenue, passing a crowd in front of Eisenberg's store at the time the police car arrived. Both boys denied Lloyd had looted the store; they had simply joined the crowd in running when the police car stopped, and McInerny had shot Lloyd without warning when he split from the group and turned west on 128th Street, back in the direction of the family home. Three Black eye-witnesses, including Howard Malloy, confirmed that account. Police insisted Hobbs had stolen goods from the store, but they did not produce the items they claimed to have found on him - a horn and socket set - until several weeks after the shooting. The grand jury twice declined to indict McInnery for shooting Hobbs, accepting his claim that it was a justifiable homicide. The MCCH did not agree, and Hobbs became a central part of their report on the events of the disorder.
No other people were arrested or charged with looting the Greenfield Auto Equipment store, or the other stores on this block of 7th Avenue. Eisenberg "was on the point of closing after the riot but was persuaded to stay on," he told a MCCH investigator who visited the store on June 25. He had been in business for sixteen years, with a staff of four, two of whom were Black men. A white-owned auto supply store was recorded in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 (mistakenly located at 2152 7th Avenue rather than 2150 7th Avenue). By 1939, however, the store was gone, with a billiard parlor in its place in the Tax Department photograph. -
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2023-06-14T20:51:00+00:00
Detective John O'Brien's investigation of the killing of Lloyd Hobbs
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The records of Detective John O'Brien's investigation of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs are in the files of Arthur Garfield Hays. He chaired the subcommittee of the MCCH which investigated the death, and had requested copies of all police records related to the boy's case. O'Brien also twice testified about his investigation in public hearings held by the subcommittee, on April 20 and May 18.
The Complaint Report O'Brien filed on March 20 included only a summary of what Patrolman McInerney told him at the hospital. O'Brien filed a Supplementary Complaint Report on March 28 in which he included statements by Hobbs and a more detailed statement by McInerney and a brief statement by his partner, Patrolman Watterson. The report also briefly mentioned O'Brien's visit to the site of the shooting and inquiries in the area that failed to locate any witnesses. A Supplementary Complaint Report date April 1 recorded O'Brien's interview with Eisenberg and a detailed list of the property stolen from the shop that he gave to the detective. The detective did not file another report until April 7. That Supplementary Complaint Report recorded activities precipitated by Hobbs' death on March 30. O'Brien informed the DA's office of the death and was told to have McInerney and all witnesses at office on April 1. McInerney, Watterson and Eisenberg were questioned by ADA Saul Price on April 1st. He then adjourned the hearing until April 3, subpoenaing Russell Hobbs and his father Lawyer to appear then. O'Brien recorded that Lawyer Hobbs mentioned five witnesses. The ADA sent O'Brien to the MCCH hearing on April 6 to subpeona those witnesses, adjourning the hearing until April 8.
O'Brien filed the final Supplementary Complaint report on April 11. It recorded the appearance of Howard Malloy, John Moore and Samuel Pitts before ADA Price on April 8. Two days later Price presented the case to the Grand Jury. The report included a list of those who testified. O'Brien was among them, as was Detective Thomas McCormick, the stenographer, Patrolman Watterson, Russell Hobbs and both his parents, Malloy, Moore and Pitts, and Eisenberg. Defendants were not required to testify, but McInerney waived his immunity and offered to appear. The grand jury declined to hear his testimony. They dismissed the charges - O'Brien recorded that "exonerated" McInerney -- and O'Brien closed the case.
Detective O'Brien testified about his investigation before a public hearing of the MCCH first on April 20. Arthur Garfield Hays asked him about the statement he took from Eisenberg, his work for the DA's office, and what evidence he found that objects had been thrown at McInerney and Watterson. He was also questioned about the absence of any mention of the stolen items in the entry for Hobbs' arrest in the police blotter seen by the MCCH investigatro. ILD lawyers then asked more hostile questions about what he did at the hospital and scene, including the failure to fingerprint the stolen items, presenting his investigation as inadequate. O'Brien attracted some of the anger from the audience that marked the testimony of Patrolman Watterson immediately before and led Hays to adjourn the hearing for ten minutes to restore order. Someone in the audience interjected, "He is trying to speak low because he is afraid." O'Brien retorted, "I am not afraid of anything, lady."
O'Brien testified again on May 18. He brought the items police alleged that Hobbs had taken from the automobile supply store and dropped when McInerney shot him. He was questioned extensively about where those objects had been: O'Brien said he saw them for the first time on April 1, when McInerney appeared at the DA's office, but for the first time said that they had been recorded on the arrest report. The MCCH investigator had not seen that record. Questioned about when the items were handed into the Property Department, he said he did not know. It was not until April 8, the MCCH investigator had found, a week after O'Brien first saw them. ILD lawyers then questioned him again about his investigation, drawing out his failure to speak to the Hobbs fmaily and that he had not seen the allegedly stolen items when he questioned McInerney at Harlem Hospital. Marshall Phifer, a witness who had just testified that he had seen nothing in Hobbs' hands when McInerney shot him, interjected to insist on what he had seen. O'Brien also testified that no fingerprints had been found on the items, only "smudges." At the end of the detectives testimony, someone in the audience called out, "I would like to request, in view of the ignorance of this man, in view of the lack of investigation, that he be recommended for dismissal."
<Newspaper stories about this testimony?>