Search About Newsletters Donate
Your chance to fuel great journalism

Your donation during our fall membership drive will help fuel investigative journalism that can drive change in our criminal justice system. Become a member of The Marshall Project today.

News

Kalief’s Mother on Her Torment

“I miss my son. I miss him so much.”

“She died of a broken heart,” reported the New York Daily News, a bit of poetic license that felt just about right. Venida Browder, 63, the mother of a young man whose Dickensian ordeal drew shocked attention to New York’s justice system, died last Friday from complications of a heart attack. Her son Kalief, age 16, was accused of stealing a backpack, arrested and, unable to make $3,000 bail, spent three years confined on Rikers Island, enduring beatings and more than 700 days in solitary. He hanged himself in June, 2015, two years after charges were dropped.

The Marshall Project interviewed Venida Browder last March as part of an upcoming video series called We Are Witnesses — short encounters with Americans whose lives have been entangled with the criminal justice system.

You can read the infuriating New Yorker magazine account of Kalief’s ordeal. And here is The Marshall Project’s previous coverage of the case, including an interview in which Venida Browder recounts her family’s pain and her hope for the future of Rikers Island.

This is not a paywall.

We’ll never put our work behind a paywall, and we’ll never put a limit on the number of articles you can read. No matter what, you can always turn to The Marshall Project as a source of trustworthy journalism about the criminal justice system.

Our ability to take on big, groundbreaking investigations — the kind that can lead to real impact — doesn’t depend on advertisers or corporate owners. It depends on people like you. Our independence is our strength, and your donation makes us stronger.

Donate