Troubled Life in Malcolm X’s Shadow Comes to a Violent End
By KIA GREGORY and DAMIEN CAVE
Published: May 10, 2013
New York Times

[img]http://harlemworldblog.files./2013/05/malcolm-shabazz-facebook.jpg[/img]
Mr. Shabazz died after being assaulted outside a bar
in a tourist area of Mexico City early Thursday morning

Last week, Malcolm Shabazz, the grandson of Malcolm X, was talking to his friend Daniel Stevens when he learned that Mr. Stevens was worried that his fledgling rap career was going nowhere. Mr. Shabazz vowed to help, saying that he could get Mr. Stevens’s music into the right hands.

“I know a lot of people,” Mr. Shabazz said, Mr. Stevens recalled.

Mr. Shabazz, who earned notoriety as a 12-year-old when he set a fire that killed his grandmother, Malcolm X’s widow, pulled out his phone and made some calls. Twenty minutes later, Mr. Stevens said, Mr. Shabazz told him he had a plane ticket to Los Angeles for the next day, and an appointment to see a Hollywood producer in Beverly Hills on Mr. Stevens’s behalf.

Mr. Stevens, 34, drove Mr. Shabazz to the airport.

But Mr. Shabazz soon ended up in Mexico City, where he died early Thursday morning in a popular tourist area after being assaulted outside a bar, the authorities said. It was a violent end to a young and tumultuous life.

Mr. Shabazz had apparently decided to detour to Mexico to meet with a labor activist and a friend who had been deported in April. They were hoping to use Mr. Shabazz’s name to attract attention from the local press, apparently about the deportation, the friend said in a Facebook post.

Mr. Shabazz, 28, spent much of his life seeking to make peace with his past. After pleading guilty to the juvenile equivalent of manslaughter and arson in his grandmother’s death in 1997, he was sentenced to institutions for many of his teenage years, followed by later stints in prison for other crimes.

He lived in the shadow of his grandfather, whom he never knew, and whose legacy he tried to understand. He embraced his famous heritage and, at times, recoiled from the expectations that came with it.

On his personal Web site, he called himself “the first male heir to Malcolm X,” who had overcome “obstacle after obstacle in his life,” and since his release from prison had “been traveling throughout the U.S. and around the world speaking to different audiences about the struggles that confront this generation.”

In a prison interview with The New York Times in 2003, when he was serving time for attempted robbery, he acknowledged the power of his name.

“People know Malcolm Shabazz, whether you like me or not,” he said.

Kinte Burrell, 34, one of Mr. Shabazz’s friends from Middletown, N.Y., north of New York City in the Hudson Valley, where he had a home, said in an interview on Friday that he first met Mr. Shabazz when he was about 18.

“People would ask for his autograph and take pictures with him,” he said. “Other times, they would be like, you should have gotten more time, just because who you are, you shouldn’t get away with this.”

Such tension, Mr. Burrell said, sometimes led to fistfights. “I can see him just wanting to get away,” he said.

Friends said that in recent years, he had often ventured abroad, mostly to the Middle East. The trips, for conferences or Muslim pilgrimages, allowed him to escape his tabloid youth and to step into a role that Malcolm X also played later in life — that of an activist, shedding light on injustice and rallying for black causes worldwide.

“He wanted to be himself, but in connection with what his grandfather had been,” said Randy Short, an activist in Washington who works with groups like the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities.

Mr. Short said he had been helping Mr. Shabazz complete an autobiography.

Because he had no relationship with his father, “he saw his grandfather as his dad, and in many conversations he would say, ‘People need to understand I have a lot of him in me,’ ” Mr. Short said.

He never seemed short of patrons who were eager to help.

David N. Dinkins, the former mayor of New York, and Percy E. Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president who had been Malcolm X’s lawyer, stepped in to represent him after the fire. Most recently, Cynthia McKinney, the former Democratic congresswoman from Georgia, said she “had taken him under my wings,” in an attempt “to help and look out for him.”

In 2011, he joined Ms. McKinney on a trip to Libya, shortly before the country erupted in civil war. In one photo, he can be seen smiling in dark sunglasses in front of a large portrait of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, who was later deposed and killed. In a blog post on March 9, he wrote that he had met Mr. Qaddafi.

He also wrote on Facebook that he had studied in Damascus for more than a year, and that he had been making plans to go to Iran for a film festival and to give a lecture on violence in cinema.

The trip never happened.

Mr. Shabazz wrote on his blog that soon after he began appearing on Press TV, a news outlet based in Iran, the police in and around Middletown began to harass him.

He claimed that he was being investigated by a counterterrorism team with the F.B.I.

“I was picked up by authorities after I filed for a visa to Iran, and two days before my departure,” he wrote.

In Middletown, he was known to come and go, his friends said.

Mr. Stevens met him about two years ago when Mr. Shabazz came into the barbershop where he worked. Mr. Shabazz saw the tattoo of Malcolm X on Mr. Stevens’s forearm.

“He told me who he was, and we started talking, and we had a lot of things in common,” Mr. Stevens said.

Last week, he recalled, Mr. Shabazz had pressured him about why he was not “doing anything with your music.”

“It’s the kind of business where you got to know somebody,” Mr. Stevens told him.

After going to Los Angeles, Mr. Shabazz texted Mr. Stevens, joking that the people he was with in California did not like New Yorkers.

Within days, he was in Mexico City.

He was taken to a hospital early Thursday morning after a night out near Plaza Garibaldi, a tourist area in the historical center of Mexico City, filled with bars and restaurants, where foreign tourists are known to often be taken advantage of.

Officials said they were investigating the case.

On Friday, his family released a statement. “He now rests in peace in the arms of his grandparents and the safety of God,” the family said.

[img]http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4527721208743075&pid=15.1[/img]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/nyregion/troubled-life-in-malcolm-xs-shadow-comes-to-a-violent-end.html?hp&_r=0

2 Are Arrested in Killing of Malcolm X’s Grandson
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: May 13, 2013
New York Times


Manuel Alejandro Pérez de Jesús

David Hernández Cruz

MEXICO CITY — The police here arrested two men on murder and robbery charges on Monday in the beating death last week of Malcolm Shabazz, the grandson of Malcolm X, though many questions about the case remained unresolved.

The men taken into custody, David Hernández Cruz and Manuel Alejandro Pérez de Jesús, worked as waiters at the Palace Club, a downtown bar where Mr. Shabazz, 28, was beaten, in what the city prosecutor called a dispute over an excessive bill.

Two other bar employees who the authorities said participated in the beating, which left Mr. Shabazz with fatal skull, jaw and rib fractures, were being sought.

The body of Mr. Shabazz, who for years had wrestled with living in the shadow of his grandfather’s fame, was still at a city morgue on Monday while American consular officials worked to have it returned to the United States. A family spokeswoman said they would have no comment, and no funeral plans have been announced.

Mr. Shabazz arrived in Mexico City from Tijuana, the prosecutor, Rodolfo Fernando Rios Garza, said at a news conference. He went to the bar on Thursday with a man whom friends identified as Miguel Suárez, a Mexican labor activist whom Mr. Shabazz had befriended in the United States and who had been recently deported.

When the argument over the tab broke out around 3 a.m. as they prepared to leave, the two were separated by bar employees, but, for reasons the prosecutor said had not yet been determined, only Mr. Shabazz was beaten. A blunt object was used but no other details were given.

Mr. Shabazz’s companion was taken to another part of the bar and robbed but said he managed to escape and call for help.

The pair disputed a tab that came to around $1,200, Mr. Rios Garza said. Two young women had approached them on the street and invited them to the bar, but although Mexican newspapers have identified the bar as a known brothel, Mr. Rios Garza waved off questions regarding prostitution. Many of the bars in that rundown area charge customers for even a conversation with their female employees, according to Mexican news reports.

Mr. Shabazz consumed several drinks; a prosecutor’s office statement said that he had a blood alcohol concentration more than three times the legal limit for driving in most American jurisdictions. But the prosecutor, while not offering details on how much liquor was consumed, said the bill was excessive and was part of the effort to rob Mr. Shabazz and his companion.

He said he found no evidence that race or any motive other than robbery was in play, and there was no indication that the attackers knew Mr. Shabazz came from a famous family.

The investigation, however, has had its stumbles.

There were security cameras in the bar, but after a search of the property two days after the attack, video recording equipment was missing and the cameras were turned toward the walls, the prosecutor’s statement said. It was unclear why the search was delayed, but justice reform advocates have long complained that Mexican investigators do not always move with the speed and forensic acumen of the police in the United States.

The police have interviewed Mr. Suárez, who could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Shabazz was 12 when he set a fire in Yonkers that killed his grandmother, Betty Shabazz. After serving prison time, he walked an erratic path away from his troubled youth.

He had gone to Mexico City with Mr. Suárez with plans to draw media attention to his deportation, Mr. Suárez said on Facebook.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/world/americas/2-are-arrested-in-killing-of-malcolm-xs-grandson.html?ref=malcolmshabazz


More on Malcolm Shabazz
Troubled Life in Malcolm X’s Shadow Comes to a Violent End
By KIA GREGORY and DAMIEN CAVE
Malcolm Shabazz, the grandson of Malcolm X, died in Mexico City on Thursday night after spending much of his life seeking to make peace with his own past and that of his famous family.
May 11, 2013, Saturday

Grandson of Malcolm X Said to Have Died in Mexico
The circumstances of Malcolm Shabazz’s death were not immediately clear, said a friend, Terrie M. Williams, who had worked with Mr. Shabazz, who was in his late 20s.
May 10, 2013, Friday

Metro Briefing | New York: Yonkers: Malcolm X's Grandson Arrested
Malcolm X's grandson, Malcolm Shabazz, was arrested about 1 a.m. yesterday in Mount Vernon, after punching a hole in a doughnut shop's window, sending shattered glass onto two patrons, the Yonkers police said. Mr. Shabazz, 21, was charged with reckless endangerment, assault and criminal mischief. The two patrons, a 19-year-old man and a 23-year-old woman, suffered cuts from the glass shards and were taken to a hospital, the police said. Mr. Shabazz was released from prison this year after servi...
August 04, 2006, Friday

For Malcolm X's Grandson, a Clouded Path
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The grandson is back in prison. His name does not follow him around as much as it runs ahead, shouting down the cellblocks each time he is transferred to a new place, until soon enough, the other inmates come around, asking if it is true. ''I say, 'Yeah,' '' Malcolm Shabazz said. ''Then they ask me questions: 'Do you need anything? If so, let me know.' They hang around a lot. I just kind of distance myself a little bit, because that gets annoying sometimes. They come with cartons of cigarett...
September 06, 2003, Saturday

3 1/2-Year Sentence for Malcolm X Grandson
Malcolm Shabazz, the 17-year-old grandson of Malcolm X, was sentenced Thursday to three and a half years in prison for his role in the beating and robbery of another teenager in Middletown, N.Y., in January. The sentence is 18 months longer than the term a judge had planned for Mr. Shabazz before he missed his original sentencing hearing earlier this month. In a plea arrangement last month, Mr. Shabazz pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in the case, in which the victim was robbed of $100, a...
August 31, 2002, Saturday

Malcolm X Heir Faces Charges
Malcolm Shabazz, the grandson of Malcolm X who set a fire in 1997 that killed his grandmother, has been arrested on robbery and burglary charges. Mr. Shabazz, 17, of Middletown, was arrested early Friday while riding in a car that had been reported stolen, the police said. He and Thomas Carter-Love, 17, were charged with robbery and burglary.
January 27, 2002, Sunday

FOLLOWING UP
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Delays in Release Of Shabazz Grandson It was another tragedy in a family whose first tragedy resounded around the world. In June 1997, Malcolm Shabazz, the 12-year-old grandson of Malcolm X, set a fire that killed his grandmother, Dr. Betty Shabazz, in her Yonkers apartment. The police said the boy, who had psychiatric problems, had apparently been angry because he did not want to live with his grandmother after having had problems living with his mother, Qubilah Shabazz. Ms. Shabazz, ...
June 24, 2001, Sunday

Longer Term Ordered for Malcolm Shabazz
Malcolm Shabazz, the grandson of Malcolm X who set the 1997 fire that killed his grandmother, will spend at least another year in detention -- at a more secure institution -- because of his recent escapes, a Family Court judge ruled today. ''Malcolm's got a long way to go to convincing all of us that no restrictions at all is appropriate,'' said the Westchester County Attorney, Alan D. Scheinkman, whose office prosecutes youthful offenders.
August 04, 1999, Wednesday

Malcolm Shabazz Flees Detention
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Malcolm Shabazz, who set a fire two years ago that killed his grandmother, the widow of Malcolm X, escaped yesterday from a juvenile detention center in Valhalla, N.Y., further complicating efforts by Westchester County officials to find an institution to treat the troubled 14-year-old. He had been sent to the detention center after fleeing several times from a low-security juvenile institution in Yonkers, and will be charged in Family Court for the latest escape, said Alan D. Scheinkman, th...
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