week2

In Brooklyn, Spotlight Recedes From Site of Fatal Ambush of 2 Officers

By VIVIAN YEEJAN

For years, the stretch of curb outside the back door of Mike’s Pizza, on the corner of Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Brooklyn, belonged, unofficially, to a man known to neighbors as Mr. Wallace. They knew he always parked his Cadillac there to keep his walk home to the Tompkins Houses across the street short.

For a few weeks in December, the gray curb became known beyond New York. It was where a man fatally shot two police officers as they sat in their patrol car on the Saturday before Christmas. It was where a field of bouquets, police patches, teddy bears, candles, holiday wreaths, signs, flags, bunting, menorahs and T-shirts with defiant slogans had flowered. It was an ordinary city corner that found itself the epicenter of an urban tragedy.

About two weeks ago, the Police Department carted the memorial away. It gave some of the tributes to the families of the slain officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and added others to the memorial at the officers’ station house in Downtown Brooklyn.

The intervening days have sanded down the reminders of what happened at that concrete and metal corner in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the better for the business of living to resume.

The investigators and the out-of-town mourners, the mayor and the grieving families are no longer outside, spilling into the Myrt 99-cent store for fresh candles. They have receded to images on the TV playing Channel 12 in Mike’s Pizza. In recent days, the TV has shown memorials for a more recent tragedy, for the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

Those who live and work in the area prefer it that way, the city’s troubles kept at a remove. They are tired of being asked to make sense of a senseless act.

“Whatever happened out there, happened out there,” said Bernadette Cruz, 35, behind the counter at Mike’s one recent afternoon. “It didn’t happen in here.”

And so the traffic light changes. The B54 bus wheezes. People pass, with phones pressed to their ears, with children in tow, with groceries, smoking cigarettes. The doors of the bodega and the Chinese takeout place and the pizza joint swing close, behind successive waves of customers looking for sustenance, or maybe just for a chance to loiter in the warmth: the breakfast crowd, the lunch crowd, the families with little children and the teenagers who come by after school.

Above the bustle, a little, green sign clings to the traffic signal pole: Fallen Officers Way, it read.

Drips of blue, red and yellow wax from spilled candles blacken under a steady march of soles. The brick wall of Mike’s is bare except for a small American flag, taped above the cellar doors.

Just as well, a few of those who live around here say. They do not need a memorial to remember.

“I’ve seen it go from where Mr. Wallace used to park to where two police officers lost their lives for frivolous — I don’t know. This had no meaning,” said Kyson Hawkes, 27, who saw the gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, shoot the officers and run away on Dec. 20. “There was no reason.”

Mr. Wallace, once Mr. Hawkes’s neighbor in the Tompkins Houses across the street, is long gone. Now the most regular visitor to the curb is Richard Clifford, 44, of Freeport, N.Y., who delivers mozzarella and flour to Mike’s. He is parking his truck there again, instead of across the street like he had to when police officers blocked off a large swath of sidewalk for the memorial. Part of the street was closed too, until early January, prompting complaints from some residents.

Mr. Clifford’s grandfather was one of two black men killed by a police officer at the Freeport bus terminal in 1946, he said, as he taped a box of flour he had cut open by mistake. “It’s still the same,” he said, “from the ’40s to now.”

But inside the bodegas and the 99-cent store and the pizza joint, the proprietors mostly look away when you ask them about the shots that rang out that Saturday before Christmas, setting aflame tensions between Mayor Bill de Blasio and rank-and-file police officers.

 Structure of the Lead：

   WHO-people

   WHEN-. 23, 2015

   WHAT-Racial discrimination

   WHY-shot

   WHERE-not given

   HOW-protesters gathered in Midtown Manhattan 

Keywords：

   1.  tributes：物資

   2. concrete：混凝土的

   3. bodega ：酒店

   4. loiter：閒逛

   5. linger：徘迴；縈繞