(available at https://web.archive.org/web/20021027115742/http://www.pghcitypaper.com/nz61902.html)
NEWS FEATURE
Bus-ted
Post-Sept. 11 paranoia may be what landed Getu Tewolde in jail for six weeks over a bus-station fracas
Getu Tewolde is able to laugh -- a little -- today about his six weeks in the Allegheny County Jail this past winter, where he says his mistreatment included being medicated against his will. On June 19, he will finally learn his trial date on charges of making terroristic threats, aggravated assault and resisting arrest, all for a February incident that was, he says, a simple misunderstanding -- one that, in post-Sept. 11 America, can get a legal Ethiopian immigrant with heavily accented, uncertain English imprisoned.
On the early morning of Feb. 1, Tewolde was traveling from his home in Washington, D.C., to surprise his uncle in Denver with a visit. His carry-on luggage was four pieces of pita bread and a pen. But during a 12-minute layover he bumped into the night manager at the Greyhound station Downtown and hasn’t been able to leave the city since.
Today, Tewolde has difficulty understanding some questions and answering others. He looks American, in a jean jacket, dress pants, brown shoes and a button-down shirt with two pens in the breast pocket -- much the same as he looked on the Greyhound bus. But listening to him, it is hard to imagine how well he was able to communicate during an incident that eventually drew a crowd, the police, the bomb squad and the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Tewolde’s shoulder and chest struck Greyhound employee Angela Street as he re-entered the bus during a layover, he explains. He is a small man -- 5’2”, about 130 pounds -- but the bus aisle was crowded. “I just asked her right away to forgive me,” Tewolde says. “She left the bus and right away the driver told me to get off the bus. I was very shocked why he said it.”
Asked to sit down inside the station, Tewolde refused; he felt he had done nothing to warrant ejection or suspicion. Confronted by a crowd, he protested and tried to explain himself. Witnesses told police Tewolde mentioned religious topics or threats against America. “I actually say something to calm them down,” he counters. He is not certain of his exact words. He might have spoken about religion, he allows; born to an Orthodox Christian family, Tewolde now believes in a Creator although not in a particular faith, but the subject interests him. He was trying, he says, to allude to the atmosphere of suspicion in America today.
Attempting to duplicate what he said at just past 7 a.m. that February morning in the bus station, he stumbles over words in English, though he is perfectly calm: “Why we are hating each other since there is life?” he says he told the crowd. “Why are we choosing the way of [these] days?” But there is still one phrase he says he told the crowd that is unmistakable: “Why are you hitting?”
When the first police officer, Brian Sellers, arrived, he had already received two calls about Tewolde -- the first, according to his police report, about a “disorderly male,” the second that “the male was getting more violent.” Street, he says, claimed Tewolde had pushed her “several times.” Sellers found Tewolde “irritated and yelling,” saying “that people were going to die.” The officer hip-tossed Tewolde to the ground after he refused to put his hands behind his back. Then, Sellers says, Tewolde pulled a pen from his jacket pocket and attempted to stab him. Sellers punched Tewolde several times in the head and face, handcuffed him and placed him in the police car.
Tewolde, for his part, says he did not recognize that Sellers was a police officer -- saw no badge, no belt with gun and handcuffs, and no hat; he never heard Sellers identify himself. “I was unconcentrating,” Tewolde says. “I[t] was a very short time” for an officer to have arrived, and Tewolde was surprised. He was trying to protect his pen, he adds, not wield it as a weapon. “That’s when I knew he was police,” he says, “when I was handcuffed.”
Even though the bomb squad determined the bus wasn’t in danger and the FBI’s terrorism task force ruled the threat from Tewolde “negligible,” he was on his way to jail.
ANOTHER THREAT” read the caption under the Fox 53 news video of a small, dark man being led into a police van on Feb. 1. Carnegie Mellon University engineering researcher Saleh Waziruddin was watching the news that night and remembers the image. Waziruddin, 24, of Shadyside, is a member of the CMU activist group Zi, which has tried to assist in several other local post-Sept. 11 arrests involving terrorism accusations. He contacted Tewolde in jail and formed the Free Getu Coalition of local groups working for his release (www.freegetu.org).
The coalition is also led by Peter Shell, 38, of Squirrel Hill, a self-employed computer musician and former CMU employee who describes himself as “a campus troublemaker from way back.” Shell met Waziruddin in 1995 while working on a campus campaign seeking justice for Jonny Gammage, the black motorist who had died during a traffic-stop encounter with white Brentwood Borough police.
Seated beside Tewolde in an empty CMU classroom, Shell and Waziruddin still seem amazed at what happened to Tewolde.
“All he had was four pieces of pita,” Waziruddin marvels.
“And a very dangerous pen,” Shell adds. The Coalition is hoping the pen is mightier than the sword: They posted his bail and are holding pickets and gathering letters urging District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. to drop or at least explain the charges. Waziruddin says the DA’s office is considering a meeting; Mike Manko, Zappala’s spokesperson, says he has never heard of the coalition’s request.
“When I was in prison I was waiting [for] just a kind of help that came from anywhere,” says Tewolde. Without money even for stamps and without a single relative realizing he had set out on a journey (or knowing which state Pittsburgh might be in, Waziruddin says), Tewolde nearly missed learning about the coalition, too. It took weeks for him to connect with the group formed to help him, especially since he claims that he was placed in isolation in the jail’s mental health ward, given several kinds of drugs and let out for only two random hours each week to shower and attempt a phone call -- when the coalition’s contact person may or may not have been home.
Waziruddin finally got on Tewolde’s official visitors list and saw him at the end of February. Even then, Tewolde wasn’t able to communicate very well. His memory of jail is still not clear, thanks to the medications he says were given to him involuntarily.
“They force me to inject” once, Tewolde says, “four or five polices were over there and they force.” He was later given pills for about two weeks -- antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, according to the misspelled drug names he was given by a prison worker -- but he says he never knew what they were, or why he had to take them, and they made him feel dizzy and sick to his stomach. “I was afraid to refuse because of my experiences with the injection,” he says. He was able to stop taking the pills only when a magistrate ordered him to be seen by the jail’s behavioral clinic, in time for him to plead not guilty at his March 15 hearing.
Bruce Dixon, head of the county Health Department, which oversees mental health care at the jail, is unfamiliar with the case but says, “Nobody has a legal authority to force anyone to take medications” in county prison. “In all honesty [prison workers] may have been dogmatic in what they said to [Tewolde]. There may have been a communication problem.” It is unusual but not unheard of for someone to have been evaluated by the jail’s behavioral clinic, Dixon adds; usually the unit, an arm of the courts, evaluates prisoners’ competence to stand trial.
Tewolde’s pro bono lawyer, Mike Healey of the Downtown firm Healey, Davidson and Hornack, is “concerned that [the case] is a reflection of some post-Sept. 11 hysteria or overreaction. Does it reflect a tendency to target immigrants or persons of color for arrest and suspicion of detention?” Tewolde is hoping the charges can be dismissed, if not at his June 19 hearing then sometime before the trial, but he realizes one factor may have caused his arrest in the first place and may be driving the process still: He may have been mistaken for an Arab or a Muslim.
His native country, Ethiopia, across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, is neither. It is a place whose military government he tried hard to escape, efforts that landed him in jail several times, where he says he was interrogated and beaten and forced to join the military before escaping to a Yemen refugee camp for nearly eight years.
“It’s about the same experience here,” he says, turning away to smile.
At least a dozen local social justice groups form the Free Getu Coalition. A recent coalition press conference in front of the Greyhound bus station finds Tewolde standing anonymously in the circle of supporters as speaker after speaker calls for justice. He seems delighted at the speeches, and can hardly repress a smile at the mention of his name, or when a sign calling for his freedom is lifted. If he notices the disappointing lack of television coverage, he doesn’t mention it.
“At every court date we’ve had a picket,” Waziruddin tells the group defiantly, “and at every court date we’ve had a charge dropped.”
“What happened to Getu has made none of us safer,” adds a fellow member of the CMU activist group Zi, Mary Zimmerle. Molly Rush, head of the Thomas Merton Center, notes that when Tewolde visited her East Liberty organization she left him alone in the building’s kitchen and returned to find him sweeping the floor.
As Tim Stevens, head of the local NAACP chapter, moves forward to speak, a police wagon pulls up behind him. Three officers get out. The crowd eyes them warily as they shoo protestors off concrete planters owned by the office building next door and ostensibly make certain the sidewalk is passable.
“I didn’t know if we were being intimidated,” Stevens says as the police leave. “It is troubling when somebody comes to our city, their first 12-minute experience is [being] handcuffed.” Stevens hopes, he says, “we don’t have to feel intimidated when we assemble to talk about intimidation, because a couple of folks are sitting on some cement -- please!”
Then Stevens realizes that Tewolde has been standing silently in the crowd for the past 45 minutes. “I didn’t know it was him!” Stevens says. “He looks threatening as hell to me. I thought I was a small guy.”
Finally, Tewolde himself gets a chance to speak. His voice is entirely drowned out by buses and another police motorcycle passing. But he continues speaking. He doesn’t seem to notice the irony. And he has yet another pen in his shirt pocket the entire time.
writer: MARTY LEVINE
Comments:
1. Receptionists at DA Zappala's office acknowledged on Monday, June 10, that the DA's office did receive the Coalition's letter requesting a meeting, and that the DA would have seen it by the next morning.
2. Getu was given pills for five weeks, from sometime during or after his first week in prison until his release on bail, even after Getu had successfully passed the Behavior Clinic exam. The Behavior Clinic exam was ordered on February 11, and is supposed to be administered within 72 hours. As of a month later, at the Coalition's formation on March 11, there was no sign that Getu would be getting the exam or be allowed to see a lawyer. The Coalition's intervention through the ACLU lead to an exam on March 13 (two days before his March 15 preliminary hearing) which he passed. Getu was still given drugs after the evaluation, but he was successfully able to refuse them at that time. At other times he felt pressured to take the drugs because of the force used with his initial injection, because of guards accompanying the nurses, and because he was ordered to swallow the pills by staff. From the beginning of the administration of the pills Getu doubted that the pills were justified, felt sick from taking them, and did not want them.
3. What Getu told the crowd was “Why are you hating?”(the last sentence on paragraph #6) not “hitting”.
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