Yankel [Rosenbaum] Kin Target Hospital
Fourteen tumultuous years have done little to heal the hurt of Fay Rosenbaum, whose son Yankel was stabbed to death in a 1991 race riot that came to symbolize a dark and angry period in the city’s history.
Rosenbaum’s family, including the 71-year-old matriarch, is back in the city from Australia, once again seeking justice in the Hasidic scholar’s death. This time, they want to show that Yankel Rosenbaum got shoddy treatment from city doctors after Lemrick Nelson left him dying on a Crown Heights street.
“I don’t forgive and I don’t forget,” Fay, 71, told the Daily News in an exclusive interview Wednesday, just before the Brooklyn Supreme Court judge hearing the family’s civil case against the city issued a gag order.
“Nobody’s ever been made accountable. This is a scandal.”
It was about 11:30 p.m. on Aug. 19, 1991, when Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, a doctoral student, left his Crown Heights apartment to get a haircut from a neighbor. He had no idea that riots had broken out in the predominantly black neighborhood after a Hasidic driver accidentally struck and killed Gavin Cato, 7, an African-American boy.
When an angry mob rounded a corner and saw Yankel Rosenbaum, his yarmulke made him a target. Shouting, “Kill that Jew!” they chased him down and beat him. Then Nelson, 16 at the time, plunged a knife into Rosenbaum four times. Rosenbaum fingered Nelson as he lay dying.
But his family – which filed the civil suit in 1991 but had to wait for the criminal case to be resolved – believes Yankel did not have to die.
They blame botched medical care at city-run Kings County Hospital. A scathing 1991 state report concluded that Rosenbaum probably wouldn’t have died if he had been treated properly at the hospital, where the staff missed a stab wound.
With the city denying any medical malpractice, the Rosenbaum clan has once again come over from Melbourne.
It’s a familiar story line for the family that refused to forget what happened to one of its own. Yankel’s outspoken older brother, Aussie lawyer Norman Rosenbaum, led the family’s epic and ultimately successful battle to see Nelson jailed.
When Nelson was acquitted of murder in 1992, the Rosenbaums pushed the U.S. attorney to pursue a civil rights case, leading to a 19-year federal prison term in 1997. That conviction was overturned in 2002; a year later another jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to 10 years, most of which he had already served. He was freed last year.
Only in the 2003 retrial did Nelson finally admit he stabbed Yankel, though his lawyers claimed he was motivated by a mob mentality – not by Rosenbaum’s religion.
According to Fay Rosenbaum, a retired school bursar, the family wanted to stay in the shadows, assuming American authorities would find justice for Yankel. But friends in New York began calling them, telling them to get involved.
“You’ve got to come here,” Fay Rosenbaum remembers them saying. “If you don’t do anything, nothing will be done.”
“We were hicks from Australia. We didn’t know what was going on.”
Wiser this time, the Rosenbaums intend to prove that Yankel should have survived the stabbing attack.
“I may look stupid, I’m not young, but don’t treat me like the village idiot,” Fay said. “[At the hospital] he was alert, he was lucid.
“People don’t understand the feeling inside, that there hasn’t been justice anywhere.”
Jury selection in the case, in which the Rosenbaums are seeking unspecified damages, resumes tomorrow.
