It was cold in the tiny, windowless interview room at the Wood Street Police Station. I looked across the wooden table at the large-boned woman with a short Afro who was shaking and sobbing. . . . “Fred never really woke up,” she said. “He was lying there when they pulled me out of the bedroom.” She paused. “And then?” I asked. “Two pigs went back into the bedroom. One of them said, ‘He’s barely alive, he’ll barely make it.’ I heard two shots. Then I heard, ‘He’s good and dead now!'” Fred’s fiancé looked at me with sad, swollen eyes. “What can you do?” — Jeff Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton
Jeff Haas, a veteran civil rights attorney, is the author of The Assassination of Fred Hampton. Geraldine Hines is a Superior Court judge in Massachusetts. Soffiyah Elijah is Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School. King Downing, an attorney, is a member of the National Police Accountability Project and the Human Rights Racial Justice Center in New York. This panel discussion, held at Northeastern University School of Law on 18 November 2010, was moderated by Michael Avery, Professor at Suffolk Law School and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. Video by Michael Richardson. See, also, “The Assassination of Fred Hampton by the FBI and Chicago Police: Forty Years Later: An Interview with Jeffrey Haas” (Monthly Review, December 2009).
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