08/23/2026
On the night of August 23, 1989, 16-year-old Yusef Kirriem Hawkins and three friends rode the subway from their East New York neighborhood to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. They were going to look at a used car for sale. Yusef had cash in his pocket and a candy bar he'd picked up earlier that evening.
Bensonhurst was a predominantly white, Italian-American neighborhood — and that night, the four Black teenagers walked straight into a mob that had been waiting for someone else entirely.
A local white teenager, Keith Mondello, was angry over rumors that a neighborhood girl was associating with Black and Hispanic men. He had gathered a group of roughly 30 young white men, some carrying baseball bats and at least one carrying a gun, to confront the Black and Hispanic men they expected to show up at her birthday party. Yusef Hawkins had never met the girl. He had no idea any of this was happening. He was simply a Black teenager who happened to arrive in the neighborhood that night.
The mob surrounded and attacked the four boys. Yusef was shot twice in the chest.
A neighbor named Elizabeth Galarza heard the gunshots and ran outside. She found Yusef on the ground, still conscious, still clutching the candy bar. Trained in CPR, she held him and told him to breathe. "The young boy clenched my hand," she remembered. "When his pulse stopped, he clenched tight and let go." Yusef Hawkins was pronounced dead at Maimonides Medical Center. He was sixteen years old.
His murder tore open the racial wounds of New York City. When Reverend Al Sharpton led peaceful marchers through Bensonhurst, they were met by white residents screaming slurs and holding up watermelons to mock them — a scene that was captured on film and became one of the most notorious images of the racial tensions surrounding the case.
David Dinkins, then running to become New York's first Black mayor, condemned the killing and said it reflected a climate in which "any ni**er will do." Two years later, as mayor, Dinkins would explicitly describe Hawkins' killing as a lynching.
Joseph Fama was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 32 years to life. Other defendants received lesser sentences, while some were acquitted of the most serious charges — outcomes that left Yusef's family and much of Black New York feeling that justice had once again fallen short.
Yusef Hawkins went to look at a car. He was killed because a white mob was looking for Black and Hispanic men — and Hawkins happened to be the Black teenager they encountered.
