Nightmare In New York

Thirty years on, a netflix drama revisits the notorious case of the central Park Five

- Richard McClure

On the night of 19 April 1989, New York City police were called to a horrific scene in Central Park. A young female jogger had been raped and beaten so brutally that she had lost three-quarters of her blood.

The ‘Central Park Jogger’ case made headlines around the world as the victim, investment banker Trisha Meili, lay in a coma for 12 days in a desperate fight for her life.

The NYPD were quick to find five suspects. Antron McCray, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana were young men from Harlem, aged between 14 and 16. After reports that they had been involved in other assaults in Central Park that night, the police took them into custody.

After hours of questioning, four of them confessed on video to the attack on Meili. Because the suspects were black and Hispanic, and the victim was white, the case sparked a media and political uproar.

New York mayor Ed Koch branded the teenagers ‘monsters’, while a pre-presidential Donald Trump took out full-page advertisements in all the city’s newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty.