Camden Lee left the high school football practice in September when he saw photography, dotted with social media accounts of the New York Police Department, which would soon change his life.
In a sharp surveillance image, the 15 -year -old is alone in a hoodie and shorts, with his eyes thrown into a Brooklyn street. “The individual in the photo,” police said in a title that accompanies, had “downloaded a firearm” in the Western Indies Day parade, killing a person and hurting another four.
'I see the New York Police logo. I see myself. I see “suspect searched for murder,” Lee recalled. 'I couldn't believe what was happening. Then everything came out blurred.
In private, the police receded almost immediately. After meeting with Lee and his lawyer, they refused to present charges, then silently withdrew their photograph from their X and Instagram accounts. But they have not publicly recognized the retraction, ignoring the repeated pleas of Lee and his mother, who say that their lives are still threatened by falsehood.
The search for family responses has asked questions about New York Police policies to correct erroneous information at a time when the department already faces scrutiny for other misrepresentations on social networks.
“I used to have a lot of confidence in the New York Police and how things do,” said Lee's mother, Chee Chee Brock, whose eldest son recently joined. 'But I raised my children to admit when they made a mistake. If you can blame an innocent child for murder, what else can you escape?
Camden Lee's life became bad when he was erroneously identified as a suspect of murder
The newly appointed Department spokesman, Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, Delaney Kempner, said he would analyze the matter but did not answer a list of questions or provide more information.
It is not clear why Lee was identified as suspect.
The day of the shooting, Lee said, left the practice of football and stopped in the annual celebration of the Caribbean Culture Labor Day with a teammate around 1 pm minutes later, when shots exploded throughout the route , his friend was grazing on his shoulder. The surveillance image, Lee said, showed his stunned expression after hearing shots for the first time, then watching his bloody friend taken on a stretcher.
When the police published it, on September 19, Lee's mother immediately contacted a lawyer, Kenneth Montgomery, who offered to organize a meeting with homicide detectives that night. But the police told the lawyer to take the teenager to the 77th Brooklyn enclosure station the following week. At the meeting, according to Montgomery, Lee and his mother, the detectives said it was not suspicious.
“They granted that they were wrong,” said Montgomery. 'But these officers were so arrogant about it. It was as if they were playing a game with the life of a child.
New York police admitted their mistake privately, but has not publicly recognized retraction
By then, the New York Police Communications Division had widely distributed Lee's photography to the media and television stations, which urged people to present advice on the unidentified suspect.
In recent weeks, a high -ranking department official has urged some points of sale not to use the image in tracking stories, according to text messages shared with Associated Press. But those conversations with journalists were “out of registration”, preventing the news sites from explaining why photography was eliminated.
In the absence of an official clarification, the photo has continued to circulate online, which caused a flood of death threats against Lee of online detectives that tracked their own social media accounts.
When he prepared for school on a recent morning, Lee lifted an Instagram page with 750,000 followers and moved through the comments under his photograph.
“About to be found quickly,” read. Another simply said: “He ended.” Others tagged friends and family of Denzel Chan, 25, who was killed in the shooting. “They also deserve answers,” Lee said about Chan's loved ones.
At a press conference immediately after the shooting, the Patrol Chief of the New York Police, John Chell, said the violence was related to the gangs. He described the suspect as a thin man of about 20 years who had a brown shirt stained with paint and handkerchief. Lee, who turned 16 in January, did not use even in the photograph released weeks later.
The New York Police publication showed a photo of Lee, claiming that he was wanted by a fatal shooting
Fearing possible gang reprisals, Brock, a single mother who works in the post office, transferred her son and two daughters to the house of a relative outside the city. Lee lost school weeks, hurting her grades, as evidenced by a ralit ballot hanging in the refrigerator. While the family has returned since then to Brooklyn, Lee has forbidden Lee to move alone.
“As a mother, the number 1 of what I am afraid is to lose my children through the streets or the prison system,” Brock said. 'So now he has no freedom. When you go to the corner store, I am raised.
He has not escaped the family's care that the wrong identification came in a unique tumultuous moment for the city police. In the 17 days between the shooting and the launch of the photo, the federal agents seized telephone numbers of the Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who then resigned, telling the officers that the investigation “created a distraction for the department.”
“There is a tremendous pressure on the New York Police to serve results in a high profile shooting like this,” said Wylie Stecklow, a civil rights lawyer who represents the family while weighing a possible demand. “The fact that they could not explain how this error was made and how they will avoid it in the future is deeply worrying.”
As the department seeks to rehabilitate its image, its communication strategy has also been criticized. A recent report from the City Investigation Department criticized certain Executives of the New York Police for the “irresponsible and non -professional” use of social networks and asked the department to encode their policies around the elimination of public positions, as other city agencies have done.
In a previous publication on social networks, Chell, who has since been promoted to Department Head, mistakenly identified a judge who accused of letting a predator return to the community. That publication was also eliminated.
In December, just when the initial wave around Lee began to decrease, the police announced that they were increasing the reward for information on the shooting at $ 10,000. This time Lee's photo did not circulate.
New York police have now eliminated its publication, but has not publicly talked about the error
But without official confirmation that Lee was no longer suspicious, many news stations and newspapers executed the old image of him anyway. It remains on the Internet, including some news.
“For the photo to come out again, he brought everything back to the beginning,” Lee said. “My mother was just thinking of letting me go to the train.”
Lately, he said, he can feel the people looking at him, whispering behind the back, while walking through his neighborhood or the halls of the school. He has considered cutting his hair or buying new clothes with the hope of non -recognized. Some days he prefers not to leave home at all.
“It takes me to a dark place,” Lee said. 'I don't feel like me anymore. I don't have the opportunity to explain my side of the story. Everyone is so fixed in this image of mine: Murderer.