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In plot MPLWN-80A-3, an unmarked grave in Linden, N.J., two young black men are buried. Khiel Coppin and Na’im Owens died seven years apart. They are half brothers. And both were killed by New York City police officers.
The story of their short lives and violent deaths was published on Friday.
I first heard about the two men in late 2017, while reporting out an unrelated article. As a police reporter on the Metro desk, I wanted to know more. Who had they been? How had this happened twice to a single family? What had gone wrong?
So one afternoon, I went to their family’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, hoping to speak with their mother, Denise Elliott-Owens. She answered the door right away, a small dog at her feet. I explained who I was and that I wanted to learn more.
She invited me in, and without hesitation began telling me about her sons and her own life, too. She told me of how the death of Khiel, after a standoff with the police in which he claimed to have a gun but had only a hairbrush, had paralyzed her family and in particular how it had devastated Na’im, her youngest son. As she spoke, I was struck by Na’im’s transformation, following his older brother’s death. This seemed to be at the heart of the story.
Na’im had been a strong student, an upbeat and cheerful child who avoided conflict and trouble. He was 15 when his older brother was killed in late 2007. Around the same time, the police began to repeatedly stop — and often arrest — Na’im, as part of a broader escalation of aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics across black neighborhoods. (Years later, a federal judge would rule that the New York Police Department’s use of such tactics had violated the constitutional rights of minorities on a broad scale.)
Traumatized by his brother’s death, Na’im was facing pressure on every front: within his family, in the neighborhood, and at a societal and generational level. And Na’im was experiencing this just as he was trying to figure out who he was and who he would become — a momentous undertaking in any life, but one that can involve higher stakes for black teenagers living in crime-ridden neighborhoods.
Just one year after his brother’s death, Na’im landed on Rikers Island, facing gun charges and serious prison time. About a year after his release from prison, he would die following a shootout with the police.
I spoke with as many people as I could find who could help me understand this transformation: his father, his sisters, his friends, people who knew him in jail. They told vivid stories: How even from his jail cell, he would call his best friend, who was struggling in school, and urge him to study harder and not be afraid to ask for help.
Every few months I would call or text Ms. Elliott-Owens to see if she would speak with me once more. She always said yes. The article that I ultimately wrote is very much about her two sons, Khiel and Na’im. But her own life story is powerful, full not only of grief, but of success.
She is the mother of eight children, most of whom are settled in life. Two are lawyers. She herself has worked enough jobs to fill a Dos Passos novel. Approaching 60, she works today as a nurse.
By nature, she is optimistic and trusting, but losing two sons has made her deeply pessimistic about policing and race relations.
During our interviews, we would sit in her living room, which looks out over Gates Avenue, the street on which both her sons were shot. A decade ago, at the height of stop-and-frisk, she sometimes saw officers outside ordering young black men around. That has mostly stopped. It seemed to have stopped, she noted, around the time white people began moving nearby to her corner of Brooklyn, which had long been predominately black.
“They’re here and it’s a change,” she said in one of our last conversations. Their arrival seemed to make the police less aggressive.
In the room where Khiel and Na’im once slept, she is now helping raise a grandson, still a toddler. She said she hopes her new neighbors stay put until he is grown.
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