rikers island

While he was in jail, a gang leader spit on him. The video shows Browder's response. In a room full of kids all bigger than him, Browder walks up to the leader and punches him in the face. He delivers a few more blows before he is mobbed. On the ground, he curls himself into a ball until the kicking stops, and then he finds his way into another cell.

The gang is relentless; members threaten him through the glass square in the door of the cell. Browder doesn't back down. He checks his fists. Pats his hair down a bit and paces the small space, surely hopped up on adrenaline. One kid kicks the door in and the gang mobs him again.

When asked about the fight once on the outside, Browder stated only that if he had allowed the kid to spit on him, he would have been spit on every day.

I mention this only to illustrate that the pain Browder chose to endure that day was because for him, right was right. It was all black and white. He didn't steal the book bag, so he wasn't copping to it. He wouldn't tolerate being spit on, so he fought back.

The system is also black and white, and that is the reason it couldn't see Browder as a kid, or the book bag as a book bag. The book bag became right and Browder wrong, so without a trial, without a conviction, he was given the death penalty of three years in jail without even knowing it would be three years; just unending time in the box at the crux of manhood, too innocent to accept the gray parts that started taking shape.

No one looked at the boy in the cell or the years that had gone by and saw that he was changing, that his face had lost the fullness of his youth. In time, Browder was becoming something even he couldn't recognize anymore. No one saw the kid in pain, and in turn, by the time they let him go free, he was on the edge of manhood and the kid was off in the wind like a kite with no string, never to return home.

And I feel like I need to say this here because I have heard it mentioned too many times by some folks in the black community, and I can't let it rest: Suicide doesn't make you a punk. It isn't a testament to an absence of bravery. It is a final act of control when one is walking inside that dark place, a place that followed Browder like the mice in his cell, not allowing him rest.

He would tell the New Yorker how he felt once he was released.

"People tell me, because I have this case against the city, I'm all right," he told the magazine. "But I'm not all right. I'm messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that's not going to help me mentally. I'm mentally scarred right now. That's how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back."

Kalief Browder's dreams were stolen, his youth taken one night on a New York street. His life turned into a room, barely bigger than his outstretched arms, and like a plant without sunshine, his innocence began to wither away, and there's nothing redeeming in this story. There is no silver lining. If you need something to take from this story, take this: The world can be a miserable place filled with sadness, and for some young black men, money, Rosie O'Donnell and even Jay Z can't make it right (and I'm not using their names as metaphors for mythical figures; they actually tried to make Browder's story right).

If you need a happy ending, look someplace else.