Everyone remembers the story of Francisco Acevedo, the Conard High Senior who led a mass exodus supporting immigration rights from the steps of the high school to West Hartford city hall. Well, the problem was, so did the administration of Conard High. Weeks from graduation, Acevedo was arrested at the high school following a senior prank where hundreds of crickets (pay no attention to the Courant and their claim of thousands) were released in front of the cafeteria at the school. As Francisco filmed a police officer escorting a student out, a Conard vice principal yelled at him to put away the phone. Apparently some animals are more equal than others at Conard High.
After months of back and forth in the court systems, Francisco was finally acquitted, largely due to the admittance of this video:
Last Day at Conard High School 06′
Fellow jailbird Ken Kreyeske admits that if he were a colored man, his case would not get as much press and attention as it has had. This is an example of that…Francisco has been virtually alone in his fight to clear his name. He’ll have the last laugh as he and his lawyer prepare for a civil suit against the City of West Hartford.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Peter G // Feb 24, 2007 at 10:50 am
The ability of the West Hartford authorities (the police but also the school board) and of the state prosecutor to arrest Frankie and keep the criminal charges against him alive for eight months should tell us two things.
On the one hand, it demonstrates that politically motivated retaliation against activists and especially against youth of color is alive and well here in Connecticut. Frankie’s case should give us pause and make us consider how much hotter these people will make it for young radicals as the movement grows stronger and more threatening.
On the other, it is an object lesson about how truly weak, divided and ideologically confused the progressive movement is. We should have been able to mobilize a significant number of people to pressurize the West Hartford town government until they dropped the thoroughly bogus charges. The presence of a supposedly strong liberal community in West Hartford itself was not enough to bring it about. All that the authorities had to do was toss out some trash about how Frankie’s actions caused a disruption at school and many people who said that they supported him ran for cover. As if a day of “law and order” in Conard High automatically trumps the First Amendment to the Constitution!
One of the most cowardly and repulsive defenses that I heard for failing to mobilize to support Frankie was that people thought he should drop his civil suit for a violation of his rights and *then* maybe the criminal charges would be dropped. In other words, if you surrender your rights willingly, maybe the authorities will be nice and not prosecute you. I don’t even want to talk about how I think this rotten view relates to both Frankie’s youth and his race.
Even those of us who supported Frankie in a moral sense totally failed him in any material sense. We didn’t raise money for his legal defense, we didn’t write letters and make phone calls (much less picket or march), we didn’t even take up a petition. Fact is, there are going to be a lot more cases like this in the future. Radical youth are on the rise again and old farts like us had better either help out or get out of the way!
2 kerri // Feb 26, 2007 at 9:30 am
Peter writes: “On the other, it is an object lesson about how truly weak, divided and ideologically confused the progressive movement is. We should have been able to mobilize a significant number of people to pressurize the West Hartford town government until they dropped the thoroughly bogus charges.”
I agree 100%. As much as the Krayeske arrest is offensive, I am truly infuriated that Acevedo seemed ignored by the left through all this. He’s young (and because of this, doesn’t have nearly the experience to allow for an income that would make his situation any easier. Even if his parents are paying, that doesn’t help because then he’s in debt to them. Compare his situation to someone who is much older and economically self-sufficient), he’s not self-promotional, he’s Hispanic, and he’s been written about by the corporate media in such a way that obfuscates *why* he was arrested at all.
I’ve seen letters to the editor in which people have shunned Acevedo because he was involved in a senior prank. Thanks to such bad reporting, people can’t separate the dumb-ass cricket-liberators from Acevedo, who was arrested for filming an officer who appeared to be getting too rough with another student.
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