MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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South Carolina

Living ‘Black’ in the United States of America

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And living to tell the tales.

Traffic was heavy on Route 17 in Hasbrouck Heights on my way home to Ridgewood, NJ, after work on Wednesday, which wasn’t exactly news. But, as I approached a stretch where Route 46 and Interstate 80 go over Route 17, traffic eased and I saw the reason why. Rubbernecking motorists.

What were they looking at?

A black man with both hands on top of his head standing in front of a white police officer on the grassy area next to the shoulder. The cop’s car, lights flashing, and another car in front of it were parked on the shoulder. Unlike Alton Sterling on Tuesday or Philando Castile on Wednesday, this black man stopped by a white cop was still alive.

James Eagan Holmes, heavily armed, killed 12 and injured 70 people in a Colorado theater and was captured alive. Dylann Roof killed nine churchgoers in South Carolina and was captured alive. Jason Dalton killed six and injured two in Kalamazoo. His life was preserved as he was being arrested.

Cedric Chatman. Tamir Rice. Laquan McDonald. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Black men make up 6% of U.S. population; are 40% of people killed by police.

He’s lucky to be alive, I thought as I drove on. Was that too sanguine a response to the situation?

Jesse Williams Speaking out

I am not taking the situation lightly. I’ve lived long enough to be a middle-aged black male despite too many tangles with cops, both in the United States of America and elsewhere, to do that. But, as these killings pile up, becoming more and more common each day, I’ve long realized that I’ve been lucky to still be alive to tell tales of encounters with cops.

My narrow escape from racist Afrikaners in 1994, while on assignment for the New York Daily News in South Africa, is an entirely different story that will be told a different day. Not today. Also, it’s available on the Internet for anyone curious enough to want to find out.

St. Louis, MO in the ’80’s

A police car pulled up behind my car as I eased into traffic after a college friend and I left a bar late one night many years ago. He pulled me over. The cop came up to the car, peered in, then instructed me to step out. I did. He said that he had stopped me for suspected drunk driving because he had observed me weaving in and out of traffic. I protested that I did no such thing and that, in any case, I couldn’t be drunk driving since I had not been drinking.

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Non-union shop*

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Let’s see. BMWs have never been my favorite. I’m all for innovation and cutting-edge engineering but there’s something to be said for beauty, too. While BMWs have always had a reputation for the former and, as to the latter, beauty has always been in the eye of the beholder.

This writer from the Telegraph in London is not overly impressed with the new BMW X6, which the carmaker claims is the first “Sports Action Coupe” ever made.

What speaks more to me is that BMW built it in a non-union plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that chock full of robots, at least 300 of them. Unions made this nation great, created the middle class, and allowed generations to live the American dream.

I know BMW built this monster for the overfed and overcompensated crowd, not for people who would appreciate my sentiments. I have two words: Don’t buy!

“A.B.M.”

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The Clintons and the national media covering the Democratic Party race for the presidential nomination have broken out a new story line regarding Barack Obama: That he’s “angry” and “frustrated.” Hillary Clinton practically taunts him with this. It does not help that the media has not only totally bought into this, they’re mischaracterizing their news coverage to turn normal or innocuous exchange with the candidate into “tense” encounters. ABC News breathlessly reported on its website that it had filmed a “testy” exchange between Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times and Obama. Their tape, however, does not match their description of the encounter.

A measured Obama was trying to both sign autographs for voters and talk to the reporters as he campaigned in South Carolina. His voice was not raised. A bemused smile played on his face, as if he recognized the trap he was in. The reporters were trying to manufacture a story where there was none and he was not about to give them one. He even tried to go off the record at one point.

It’s a singular achievement of the Clintons that and the media in this campaign that they’ve managed to turn Barack Obama into the “Angry Black Man” without any evidence of him being one.

THEIR FEAR OF FLYING OVERCOME BY WRECK

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By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Thursday, August 1, 1991

The Record (New Jersey) | One Star | NEWS | Page A10

Richard Umbrino Jr. and Arthur Colombino took the train back from a Florida vacation because they were afraid to fly.
But after their experiences aboard the ill-fated Amtrak Silver Star, which they boarded in Winter Haven, Fla., early Wednesday, the Point Pleasant men said they won’t be getting on a train again anytime soon.
Umbrino, 20, and Colombino, 19, described several minutes of terror and mayhem aboard the train that crashed in Camden, S.C., killing at least seven aboard and injuring dozens more.
After landing Wednesday evening at Newark International Airport with four other survivors, Umbrino said one of the men killed was just ahead of him on the train.
“His leg was twisted around, he was bleeding from his head and chest, and I think his lungs were punctured,” said the junior at Kean College in Union.
The survivors also questioned claims by authorities that the train was going below the 79 mph speed limit before it crashed, saying that few aboard could sleep because it was moving so fast.
The train’s lights were knocked out almost immediately after the crash, Colombino said, and people were flung about the car as it skidded for a long distance on its side. Glass from shattered windows flew in all directions.
The two men, neither of whom was hurt, said a woman immediately behind them was traveling with two children.
“Everybody was screaming,” Umbrino said. “She was screaming, `Hold my hand. . . . You have to take care of my baby.”
Martin and Diana Santos of the Bronx and their two children also arrived in Newark on Wednesday. They said a local minister gave them a ride from the crash site to the airport in Columbia, S.C.
“At the point of impact, I only thought of running to my children and then off the train,” said Mrs. Santos, 31, a social worker. “It was terrifying.
“You know how you get scared when a car suddenly brakes?” she continued. “This was a hundred times worse.”
Reaching for luggage when the crash occurred, Martin Santos was tossed inside the car and suffered a sprained right ankle. He was on crutches Wednesday evening.
The Santoses had been at Disney World for a long-planned vacation and caught the train in Orlando. They said the train was running late and appeared to be moving at high speeds.
“The train was just flying,” Santos said. “I’m not sure what somebody was doing back there. I couldn’t sleep, it was going so fast.”
Umbrino described the same feeling.
“The train was bouncing so much that’s why I woke up,” he said.
Never on an airplane before Wednesday, Umbrino said flying would probably be his mode of long-distance travel from now on.
“I’m not going to be traveling on trains anymore,” he said. “Today was my first flight, and I liked it.”
Record Staff Writer John Mooney contributed to this article.

Keywords: NEWARK; FLORIDA; RAILROAD; ACCIDENT; SOUTH CAROLINA; DEATH; DISASTER; VICTIM

Caption: PHOTO – RIC FRANCIS / THE RECORD – Richard Umbrino Jr., 20, left, and Arthur Colombino, 19, were among six survivors to arrive at Newark Airport on Wednesday.

Notes: 1 of 2 versions

ID: 17351240 | Copyright © 1991, The Record (New Jersey)

ANGRY N.J. SURVIVOR CITES DELAY IN RESCUE

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By Elizabeth Auster and Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writers | Thursday, August 1, 1991

The Record (New Jersey) | Four Star B | NEWS | Page A10

“You have no idea how horrifying this has been.”
It was 9 p.m., 16 hours after the disaster. But Peter Cepeda, pacing agitatedly in Washington’s Union Station amid busloads of passengers who had just arrived from South Carolina, still could barely control his rage.
Yes, he was alive and bound for his home in Newark. But he makes his living in New Jersey as a doctor, and he had lost a patient Wednesday a man he didn’t know until Amtrak’s Silver Star derailed, and Cepeda, who had been in the third car from the rear, went looking for casualties in the next car.
The man’s arm and leg had been severed, Cepeda said, and he was bleeding profusely from multiple lacerations. Cepeda and another passenger, Robert Moore of Miami, said they tried tourniquets to stanch the blood. They tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when the man periodically lost consciousness.
But at least an hour passed, Cepeda said, before he saw an ambulance. By the time help arrived, the man was gone, Cepeda and Moore said.
“There was nothing we could do,” said Cepeda. “It was a real traumatic experience.”
Cepeda was among several New Jersey residents on the Amtrak line who described the terror and mayhem that erupted when the train bound for New York derailed, killing at least seven passengers and injuring dozens of others.
Richard Umbrino Jr. and Arthur Colombino, both of Point Pleasant, took the train back from a Florida vacation because they were afraid to fly.
After landing Wednesday evening at Newark International Airport with four other survivors, the two men described bodies and glass flying about the train as it crashed. Umbrino said one of the men killed was seated just ahead of him.
“His leg was twisted around, he was bleeding from his head and chest, and I think his lungs were punctured,” said Umbrino, a 20-year-old junior at Kean College in Union.
Umbrino and other survivors contested claims that the train was below the 79 mph speed limit, saying that few on board could sleep because the train was moving so fast.
“The train was bouncing so much that’s why I woke up,” he said.
Cepeda, an obstetrician-gynecologist who is planning to move to Florida shortly, was not in the mood to be passive Wednesday night. While other weary survivors boarded trains in Washington to head north, he flatly refused, insisting that Amtrak find him another way of getting home.
“If they don’t put me on a plane I’ll find my own,” he insisted.
Cepeda was not the only survivor frightened of getting back on a train.
Thirteen-year-old Kim Williams of Brigantine, who was returning from a visit to relatives in Florida and traveling with her aunt, was flushed and clearly nervous as she followed directions from Amtrak personnel guiding her to a train headed north.
“It was very scary and I don’t know if it’s going to happen again,” she said. “I haven’t been able to eat all day because I’m afraid it’s going to happen again.”
Never on an airplane before Wednesday, Umbrino said flying would probably be his mode of long-distance travel from now on.
“I’m not going to be traveling on trains anymore,” he said. “Today was my first flight, and I liked it.”
Record Staff Writer John Mooney contributed to this article.

Keywords: NEW JERSEY; RAILROAD; SOUTH CAROLINA; ACCIDENT; DEATH; DISASTER; NEWARK; VICTIM; FLORIDA

Caption: PHOTO – RIC FRANCIS / THE RECORD – Richard Umbrino Jr., 20, left, and Arthur Colombino, 19, were among six survivors to arrive at Newark Airport on Wednesday.

ID: 17351241 | Copyright © 1991, The Record (New Jersey)