Death of an Angel
Did a White Cop Kill a Black Guardian Angel?
The Guardian Angels were on a night-time patrol among the brown-brick projects of the Dayton neighborhood in the south ward of Newark, New Jersey. The volunteer crime fighters had stopped at 100 Ludlow Street, a 15-story apartment building a few blocks from the airport, to fix a leak for an elderly resident. But their primary focus, in a community riddled with drugs and violence, was crime prevention. When they heard a loud crash from the street below, the ten-man patrol rushed outside to investigate.
Wearing distinctive red berets, red windbreakers, and white Guardian Angels emblem T-shirts, they rounded the apartment block and hurried through the dark into Van Vechten Street. Ahead of them, the Angels saw a police presence outside the flat-roofed People’s Tavern. It was 11 PM on a cold and clear night, December 30, 1981.
The Angels patrol leader Frank Melvin approached the cops to offer his assistance. In the uneasy stir of the night, the approach was mistaken for a confrontation. Melvin opened his jacket to display his Angels T-shirt and said, “There’s no need to shoot.” A crack rang out above the rumble and hum of the slumbering city. Melvin fell to the ground. He had been shot in the chest.
Melvin’s fellow Angels rushed to help, but the police told them to stay back. More cops arrived, guns drawn. Residents came out onto the street. There was confusion and clamor. The cops attempted to plug the hole in Melvin’s chest under the illumination of their patrol cars’ rotating red and blue lights. Eventually, they picked Melvin up off the bloody ground and took him to College Hospital. The bullet had pierced his heart. At 4 AM, a hospital spokesperson confirmed Melvin was dead.
Frank Melvin was 26 years old. He lived in the Dayton Street projects with his partner Sandra Moss, 24, and their two young sons, Frank Jr. and Michael. Although Melvin and Sandra weren’t officially married, the couple were close enough that Sandra was often referred to as Melvin’s wife. Melvin worked as a security guard at the Evergreen Cemetery, just a few blocks from where he was shot. His dream was to become a police officer, like his brother Fred, who patrolled Newark’s North Ward.
Melvin was a black belt in Kung-Fu, and he taught martial arts to the community’s kids in the basement of the local St. Thomas Aquinas church. His students knew him as Wu-Chi. He aimed to keep kids off the streets, give them something to focus their minds, and keep them away from the drugs that were becoming increasingly prevalent in the neighborhood. Those who did begin to stray would be rounded up and encouraged back to Wu-Chi’s classes. Melvin’s desire to improve and protect his community led him to set up his Guardian Angels patrol in the same church basement and with many of the same members as his Young Kung-Fu Association.
“Frank was like a father [to local kids],” neighbor Linda Evans told reporters. “His dream was to get everyone together. His dream was to become a cop. Look what happened.”
What happened, according to the Newark Police Department, was that two patrol officers — Milton E Medina and Angel Ramos — were called to a suspected burglary at the People’s Tavern. After checking the surrounding area, the partners were alerted by nearby residents to activity on the tavern’s roof. Officer Medina hailed a passing truck and used it to climb up onto the roof, where he found a hole in the asphalt and several “burglar tools.” Suddenly Medina heard a whistle and shouting. He stepped to the edge of the roof and saw a young man running toward Ramos “in a very threatening manner.” Medina said he shouted twice for the man to stop, then, believing his partner was in danger, he fired one shot. He had no idea Frank Melvin was a Guardian Angel. According to the cops, Melvin’s death was a case of mistaken identity and a tragic accident.
According to the Guardian Angels, that was a lie. Melvin had approached the cops to offer help and clearly identified himself as a Guardian Angel. He was shot, the Angels said, “for no apparent reason.” The Angels, trained in emergency first aid, were prevented from giving Melvin CPR. Crucially, the Angels said, Melvin was not shot by Milton Medina from the tavern roof. He was shot by another officer from the ground, an officer who carried badge number 891 and was later identified as Donald J Karas.
Frank Melvin was Black, and Donald Karas was white. According to the Angels, Milton Medina, who was Hispanic, was being made to take the rap to deflect anger over the killing in a predominantly Black city that was familiar with racial turmoil. According to the Angels, the shooting of Frank Melvin was racially motivated, and the police response was a “cover-up” and a “sham.” The shooting brought nationwide attention to the Guardian Angels and its young leader Curtis Sliwa — then 27 years old but more recently a 67-year-old candidate for New York City Mayor. According to Sliwa, Melvin had been “gunned down in cold-blooded murder.”
Curtis Sliwa founded the Guardian Angels in New York in 1979. From Canarsie in Brooklyn, Sliwa was a night manager at a McDonald’s in the Bronx that was plagued by violence and gang activity. He and his co-workers often needed to use street smarts and martial arts to defend themselves and their restaurant. While commuting between Brooklyn and the Bronx on the graffiti-covered Number 4 train, known as the Muggers’ Express, Sliwa thought up his concept — turning tough and sometimes wayward youngsters into crime fighters to protect the public and to give those youngsters a worthwhile role in society.
He recruited twelve other members (“Blacks, Hispanics, whites, and yeah, even two Chinese brothers,” said Sliwa in the 2018 documentary Vigilante) and began to patrol the subway with his then-named Magnificent 13. After a few months, as its diverse membership expanded and the distinctive red berets were introduced, the organization became the Guardian Angels.
Although generally welcomed by the public — after being seen rescuing mugging victims, apprehending troublemakers, and bringing calm to New York’s most uproarious trains and stations — the Angels were soon vilified by the authorities and the police. New York City Mayor Ed Koch referred to them as “paramilitaries” who were likely to encourage vigilante behavior.
Pushback intensified following the release of The Warriors, the 1979 Walter Hill movie about New York street gangs who move through the city’s subways. The Angels said they were hassled, threatened, and arrested by the police. (Sliwa claimed to have been abducted and assaulted by three cops in 1980.) One cop told a TV reporter: “They’re inexperienced and don’t really know nothing about what they’re doing. Someone’s gonna get hurt. I think it’ll all come to a head, maybe when one of these kids gets killed.”
On Christmas Eve 1981, Sliwa married his Angels second-in-command Lisa Evers, a former art gallery manager who was also a model and a black belt in karate. By then, the Angels claimed to have almost 1,400 members and 22 regional chapters, many of them set up by Evers. (The Newark chapter had 45 members.) Four hundred Angels attended the wedding and threw their red berets in the air when the couple kissed.
On the following day, Frank Melvin visited the newlyweds at their New York headquarters and presented them with a pair of Newark Guardian Angels chapter jackets as a wedding present. Four days later, Melvin was shot dead — while wearing exactly the same kind of jacket. Evers stayed in New York to run the organization, and Sliwa headed to Newark to demand justice for the man he and his wife called Frankie.
When the Angels had launched its Newark chapter, the city’s police director Hubert Williams warned that they should not interfere with his work. “I just hope they don’t get in the way of cops or create problems to force us to come out and protect them,” he had said. Now, at a press conference following the shooting, Williams labeled Melvin’s death “unfortunate.” Williams said a ballistic test proved the bullet that killed Melvin had come from the gun of the Hispanic officer Milton Medina. He refuted the Angels’ claims that another white officer had shot Melvin and that the killing was in any way racially motivated. But Williams — a Black director of a predominantly-white police department — announced he would hand over the investigation to the Essex County Prosecutor in the interests of impartiality.
In response, Sliwa said the prosecutor worked hand in hand with the police, so could not be impartial. He called the press conference a “Mickey Mouse performance” by a “Mickey Mouse police department.”
Two days later, around a hundred uniformed Guardian Angels set off from Van Vechten Street on a 60-mile protest march to state capital Trenton. The marchers wore red ribbons over their hearts “signifying the blood of Frank Melvin.” They intended to meet with New Jersey Attorney General James R Zazzali and, in Sliwa’s words, “beg him to intercede.”
Melvin’s partner Sandra Moss led the march, in perishing cold and rain, to the Newark border. “There are so many different stories,” she said. “It’s important for the state to step in. The truth would come out.”
But, when the protesters arrived at the Statehouse, Zazzali refused their demands and said he had full confidence in the Essex County investigation. Standing on the statehouse steps in front of a mock coffin, Sliwa said this was unacceptable. The county prosecutors were affiliated with the Newark political machine, he said, and could not conduct an impartial investigation. Sliwa called the Newark police department a “bozo operation” and said the Angels would march on to the Justice Department in Washington — after two days of mourning: “We will devote two days to laying Frank Melvin to rest with dignity.”
More than 500 people packed into the St. Thomas Aquinas church for the funeral — many wearing Angels uniforms — and another 500 stood outside to pay their respects. Angels and members of Melvin’s Kung Fu school carried the casket. Relatives and the Angels’ Lisa Evers helped the distraught Sandra into the church, where she cried out in anguish and hugged her two children. One of the boys wore his father’s red beret.
Pastor Luis Tesei reminded those present that it had been in the basement of this church that Melvin had begun to teach his community “not only how to defend themselves but especially how to become better persons and better citizens.” And Tesei described how Melvin’s Guardian Angels patrol had benefited the community: “The streets became safer, the citizens were more protected, our senior citizens began to smile again, and we all regained hope for a better tomorrow.”
Speaking from the pulpit at the funeral, Curtis Sliwa called Melvin a role model for youngsters and “a real American hero.” Sliwa vowed that the Angels would not stop until they found truth and justice for Melvin, who was buried two blocks from the church, at Evergreen Cemetery, where he had worked as a security guard.
The loss of Melvin was felt keenly by his community, and hostility against the police grew. Neighbors Anna Moore and her son Robert told reporters they could not believe the police account of the shooting and in particular the explanation of how Medina got onto the roof of the Tavern after hailing a passing truck.
“How could he jump from the truck to the roof?” asked Anna. “What is he? Superman?”
“Trucks don’t come around here,” Robert added. “Cars don’t even come through here. And he leaps up on a truck?”
“The cops lied in so many ways,” said Anna. “It was just murder.”
Meanwhile, details of the Essex County autopsy had leaked. Although county medical examiner Dr Thomas A Santoro refused to speak directly to the press, his wife told reporters he believed the bullet had been fired from street level, as the Angels had claimed, and not from the roof, as the police had claimed. “He does not believe the bullet was fired from a roof because of the angle of the entry of the bullet in the body,” said Mrs Ann Santoro. She said two other examiners present at the autopsy had agreed that the bullet had entered at an angle nearly parallel to the ground.
The New York Times subsequently reported that Dr Santoro’s autopsy found that the “path of the wound was from front to back, slightly to the left, in and about the same horizontal plane as the wound of entrance.” If this was true, it supported the Angels’ claims of a police cover-up.
Sliwa was bleary-eyed, unshaven, and extremely cold. Around 125 Guardian Angels had set off to march from Trenton to Washington in freezing conditions via Philadelphia and Baltimore. The marchers suffered frostbite, blisters, and twisted ankles. Two were hospitalized. More than a hundred dropped out along the way. Sliwa said cops harassed the marchers. They refused them an escort and diverted them along circuitous routes. They arrested an Angel for using emergency flashers while driving ahead of the marchers in a van. The bond payment to free the driver from jail wiped out almost all of the marchers’ funds.
As they approached Washington, only eighteen of the original marchers remained, bundled in multiple layers of clothing with their hands and feet wrapped in towels as the wind chill factor drove temperatures down to minus-thirty degrees. New supporters joined the march and boosted the numbers to around fifty, but the group was a sorry sight. “No doubt about it, the cold is the worst part,” said Sliwa. “This weather is a killer.”
When the Angels and their supporters finally arrived at the Department of Justice building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, the sun came out. Sliwa met with William Bradford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division. Reynolds told Sliwa that the Department of Justice had asked the FBI to start a preliminary investigation. But when FBI agents requested the case files, Essex County Prosecutor George L Schneider refused, stating it was not his office’s policy to turn over files relating to ongoing investigations to any other law enforcement agency.
Sliwa was not satisfied. He reiterated his belief that Melvin had been shot from ground level by Karas. Sliwa said he was set to reveal new evidence, and that two eyewitnesses who the police had not questioned had been placed under 24-hour guard by the Angels following threats against them. Sliwa also said Melvin’s partner Sandra Moss was taking legal action to obtain material evidence that investigators had not made public.
However, according to prosecutor George Schneider, a new ballistics test and a “more thorough” autopsy supported the police account that Melvin had been shot from the roof by Medina. The new autopsy, conducted by the state’s Chief Medical Examiner Dr Robert Goode, conflicted with the previous autopsy by Thomas Santoro. It found that the path of the wound exhibited a “downward angle of almost two inches” and that the bullet had “nicked the spine and deflected it at a slightly upward angle.”
Prosecutor Schneider would later call for 73-year-old Santoro to be removed from his post as County Medical Examiner due to his “ineptness in determining the cause of death” on several criminal cases following the “bungled” autopsy of Melvin. In one example, according to Schneider, the body of a 28-year-old named Thomas Acevedo, whose death had been attributed to pneumonia by Santoro, was exhumed and found to have died from four gunshot wounds to the head. “It is irrational and inexcusable neglect to confuse pneumonia with four slugs in the head,” said Schneider.
The new evidence apparently confirmed that Milton Medina had shot Melvin in what his attorney Anthony Fusco described as a case of mistaken identity. Fusco said Medina had been placed on telephone duties pending the investigation and was “heartbroken and in a state of shock.” He said the Angels who had given conflicting witness accounts had been confused by the arrival on the scene of Donald Karas, who had his gun drawn “because he didn’t know what the hell was going on.” Ballistics tests showed that Karas’s revolver had not been fired. Fusco said Medina was one of the last officers to reach Melvin because he was stuck on the roof. This led the Angels mistakenly to believe he had not been present during the shooting.
Police representatives also suggested that Frank Melvin was not as angelic as had been suggested. Detective Tom Possumato, president of the Newark Fraternal Order of Police, announced that Melvin had an arrest record on charges of breaking and entering and assault. Possumato could not say anything about the circumstances of the arrests or the results of the charges.
In early February, a little over a month after the shooting, both Milton Medina and Donald Karas were cleared by an Essex County Grand Jury. According to George Schneider, the Grand Jury found that Medina fired the shot that resulted in the death of Melvin. Karas was wholly exonerated, and there was no possibility of criminal liability for Medina. As far as the Essex County Prosecutor’s office was concerned, said Schneider, the case was closed, and claims of a cover-up had been proven to be unfounded.
Milton Medina was 29 years old, married with kids, and had been a Newark police officer for three years. He had shot Melvin because he believed he was a burglar who was threatening his partner’s life. He did not recognize Melvin at the time, but he did know him. Medina’s son attended Melvin’s Kung Fu classes in the basement of the St. Thomas Aquinas church. Speaking to reporters for the first time since the shooting, Medina said the tragedy was “an experience I will carry in my heart for the rest of my life.”
Medina and Karas filed a federal lawsuit against Sliwa and the Guardian Angels organization following the Grand Jury verdict. The suit charged Sliwa with making forty libelous statements against the two officers, using terms such as “cold-blooded murder,” “cover-up,” “whitewash,” and “conspiracy.” The suit was backed financially by the Newark Police Officers’ Union.
Lieutenant Armando Fontoura, the assistant to Hubert Williams, said it was an individual action on behalf of the two officers and had nothing to do with the Newark Police Department. However, Fontoura said, the suit was predictable, “based on the fact that both Sliwa and his wife suffer from diarrhea of the mouth and have no respect for the facts or truth whatsoever.”
“Can you imagine trying to profit off the killing of a Guardian Angel?” fumed Sliwa. “I do not one centimeter retract one thing I said. Officer Karas, without a doubt, fired the fatal shot.” Sliwa said he would await his day in court. In any case, he said, he had no assets should the court award against him, and an insurance policy for the Guardian Angels organization had been canceled by the insurance company “some time ago.” He said he would present the evidence of eyewitnesses who were not called to tell their stories to the Grand Jury. “Not one of the Guardian Angels was asked: Did you see Officer Karas fire that shot?” said Sliwa. “Quite frankly, if I was on that Grand Jury and saw the same evidence they saw, I would have come to the same conclusion.”
The case dragged on for a year until Sliwa agreed to publicly read a court-approved apology to the two officers in exchange for the dismissal of the suit. After reading the statement alongside Medina and Karas at a news conference, Sliwa ripped it up and flung the pieces in the air, saying, “And if you think I mean any of that, you’ve got another thing coming.” He pointed at Medina and Karas and told them, “You murdered Frank Melvin, and we’ll have our day in court.”
Sliwa said he had been coerced into making the statement to fulfill his part of the settlement. “I would have been a hypocrite to go back on what we know is the truth,” he said, adding that he was prepared to go to jail if necessary. But a Federal Magistrate decided that, while Sliwa might have broken the “spirit of the agreement,” he had not violated the court order and had fulfilled his obligations, so he could not be held in contempt of court.
In October 1982, Milton Medina was shot and critically injured during a robbery. Medina was off-duty and moonlighting as a courier for a check-cashing service. He was shot in the abdomen by a lone gunman and robbed of $40,000 in cash. Medina recovered, and a month later, while on sick leave, he was arrested for stealing a 1971 Cadillac from a parking lot. Medina drove the car out of the lot pursued by parking attendants and security guards, and sideswiped a pickup truck before being stopped by a police patrol car. He was suspended without pay.
Medina went back on duty and worked as a cop until 1998, when he and four other officers were suspended for using the department’s gun buy-back scheme to mishandle money and steal valuable weapons. By then, Medina was 46 years old and had been a cop for 21 years. Conspiracy charges were dismissed, but Medina was found guilty of obstruction and theft and was booted out of the department. Newark Police Director Joe Santiago said the five officers’ badges would be melted down, just like the 648 guns turned into the buy-back program: “These will never be used again.”
Donald Karas also made headlines, in March 1982, following the murder of his sister-in-law in Long Branch, New Jersey. Anne Karas was stabbed 22 times with a fish-filleting knife while walking to a movie theater. Police had few leads but did pursue a possible connection between the stabbing of Anne Karas and the shooting of Frank Melvin. Anne’s brother, Vito Gaeta Jr., said the Guardian Angels might have killed his sister in retaliation against the Karas family. A spokesperson for the Angels said the link was “absurd” and “ridiculous.” Donald Karas said he had no bad feelings with the Angels, and any connection between the two killings was unlikely, “but we don’t know.”
Donald Karas’s brother — Anne’s husband — was Walter A Karas Jr., a Newark transit cop. Walter was with Anne on the day of her murder. He said he left his wife alone in the parking lot while he went to retrieve his keys from his car. Police said Walter was definitely not a suspect in his wife’s killing. A year later, in March 1983, they arrested Walter and his young lover Mary Williams and charged them with the murder. Walter denied the charge, but — after Walter took up with another woman — Williams became a state witness and revealed how Walter had persuaded her to murder his wife so they could be together. Secretly taped conversations revealed how Karas provided the fish knife, instructed Williams how to use it, drew a diagram of the parking lot, and pretended to have left his keys in his car in a ruse to leave his wife alone. Both were found guilty of murder. Walter Karas was sentenced to 70 years in prison and Mary Williams to 30.
Meanwhile, Frank Melvin’s partner Sandra Moss had filed a wrongful death suit against the Newark police union and officers Medina and Karas. In August 1984, Newark City Council approved a $175,000 settlement payout. The settlement was sealed, and “because of the nature of the case,” those involved were instructed not to discuss it. As for the evidence that Curtis Sliwa said had not been made public, he and his fellow Guardian Angels buried it in a box in a hole on an empty lot near the Newark courthouse. Said Sliwa: “Symbolically, we bury the truth just like we buried Frank Melvin.”
Back in the South Ward, the Dayton Street Projects were overrun with crack. Dealers hustled on street corners and in stairwells, and robberies and violent crime increased. Automatic weapons arrived in the neighborhood, and there were shootouts in the streets and in playgrounds. Many of the dealers and shooters were young men who might once have been taken under the wing of Frank Melvin. This was despite the efforts of good people like Reggie Brown, a former Kung Fu student of Frank Melvin, who took over Melvin’s security job at the Evergreen Cemetery and his Kung Fu Association classes.
The loss of Melvin was felt across his community, but chiefly in his home. The settlement payment could not bring him back. According to an acquaintance of Melvin’s sons, the family fell apart. Dr Sampson Davis is an ER physician and television correspondent. He grew up across the street from the Dayton Street Projects during the 1980s alongside Melvin’s sons, Frank Jr. (known as Tank-Tank) and Michael (Mike-Mike). Davis regarded Frank Melvin as “a legend” and “the strongest leader we’d ever seen.” He said Melvin’s death was “a blow for our whole neighborhood.” Writing in his book The Bond, Davis said that after Frank’s death, his family’s home life fell into ruins, and his sons were pulled into violence, robbery, and drugs.
During the Thanksgiving holiday in 2004, four bodies were found in a vacant lot next to St. Thomas Aquinas. The three men and one woman, Camilo Reyes, Kyhron Ward, Jermeil Ward, and Carmen Estronza, had died from gunshot wounds to the head. More than a year later, in December 2005, 25-year-old Michael “Mike-Mike” Melvin, Frank Melvin’s youngest son, was arrested and charged with quadruple murder. Police determined he had killed Estronza to prevent her from testifying against a friend of his in a gang-related murder trial. The three men were killed because they were with Estronza as she left a bar. Mike-Mike was also charged with the killing of Lamar McMillan, who was thought to have been his accomplice in the quadruple killing — and a witness to that crime. Another witness, Howard Roberts, was shot dead after Mike-Mike’s arrest. Mike-Mike was never convicted of the quadruple murder but, in 2007, he pleaded guilty to the aggravated manslaughter of McMillan. He was sentenced to 16 years in Newark State Prison and was released in 2019.
In August 2021, Curtis Sliwa stood outside Penn Station in New York at a podium labeled “Curtis Sliwa for NYC Mayor.” He wore a blue suit, a red tie, and his red Guardian Angels beret. During a speech about a lack of outreach programs in the area, he was interrupted by a homeless man, shirtless and with a surgical mask under his chin, who stood in front of the podium and broke down in tears. Captured in a video that went viral on social media, Sliwa stepped out from behind the podium and comforted the man, putting his arm around him and telling him, “It’s OK, we’ll take care of you. I’m running for mayor. I’m gonna make sure that you and your other friends out here are taken care of.”
For many observers, the video showed Sliwa’s common touch and willingness to tackle street-level problems, alongside his ability to use publicity to his advantage. Sliwa did not win the mayoral election, but he did gain new admirers — and detractors. After conceding the election to the new mayor Eric Adams, the New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Curtis Sliwa Has New York’s Attention Again. Was That Always the Point?” Reminding that Sliwa had been a regular tabloid fixture since his founding of the Guardian Angels, the newspaper asked if the mayoral campaign had been “just another publicity stunt.”
Back in November 1980 — more than a year before Frank Melvin was killed — a New York magazine cover story asked whether the Guardian Angels were “A Help — or a Hype?” “There is no disputing the fact that Sliwa’s Guardian Angels are a deterrent to muggers,” wrote the acclaimed crime writer Nicholas “Goodfellas” Pileggi, “but some city officials insist that his extraordinary success is due more to his masterly manipulation of the press than to fighting crime.” Officials claimed Sliwa was more interested in announcing and exaggerating the Angels’ deeds than helping to fix the city’s problems.
The article quoted New York Mayor Ed Koch as saying, “Look, I don’t know anything about the Guardian Angels, but I do know they love publicity and that one has sold his life story to television.” (Sliwa had sold the rights for a TV movie titled We’re Fighting Back, but he ended up suing the producers, claiming the movie was “materially false, fabricated, and misleading.”)
But, in the following week, New York printed several readers’ letters in support of the Angels. “If the Mayor had to ride the trains every day, he too would be happy to see the Angels aboard,” wrote one. “So what if Curtis Sliwa seeks publicity?” said another. And another correspondent wrote: “I wish our elected officials would earn their press coverage in such an admirable fashion as Curtis Sliwa earns his.”
Back in 1983, the prosecutor George Schneider had accused Sliwa of lying to law enforcement and the media about several incidents — including the shooting of Frank Melvin — to gain publicity for the Guardian Angels. “I don’t have a high opinion of Curtis Sliwa,” he said. Schneider said Sliwa and Lisa Evers had falsely reported being attacked to drum up media coverage. “The membership probably has pure motives, but I question the motives of the leadership,” said Schneider. He said Sliwa and Evers were motivated by “self-perpetuation” and were “media hounds” and “glory seekers.”
Almost a decade later, in 1992, Sliwa admitted to the New York Post that he had lied about or faked several early incidents, including bogus muggings and his 1980 abduction by cops, to get media attention and help the Guardian Angels survive its early years. The newspaper’s headline was “WE FAKED SHOOTINGS AND BEATINGS.” But Sliwa said the 1980 abduction was his last lie. The implication was that he had not lied about the shooting of Frank Melvin and that he believed that Melvin had been shot by Donald Karas. Certainly, in the aftermath of Melvin’s shooting, the Angels received more publicity than they had ever previously had. However, that publicity might have been damaging. According to one report, membership declined, with potential recruits seemingly reluctant to get in the way of a cop’s bullet.
Frank Melvin was not the only Guardian Angel killed while on duty. In July 1983, a 16-year-old Guardian Angel named Juan Oliva was shot in the head during a confrontation with three youths while searching for a missing girl in the Bronx. Oliva was in a coma for five months and died that December. Two other Guardian Angels were killed while on patrol — Sherman Geiger in Yonkers in 1987 and Glenn Paul Doser in Los Angeles in 1993. Two former Guardian Angels have also been killed. Malcolm Brown was shot and killed while attempting to prevent a mugging in Brooklyn in July 1980. And James Richards, who helped found a Guardian Angels chapter in Los Angeles, was shot and killed in front of his home in the Oakwood neighborhood of Venice, California, in 2000.
A lasting tribute of sorts to Frank Melvin can be found on the 1982 album Combat Rock by the celebrated British band The Clash. While recording the album at New York’s Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, the band’s bass player Paul Simonon saw lying on the mixing desk a newspaper front page reporting the shooting of the Guardian Angel. Then he wrote the song Red Angel Dragnet, featuring the lyrics: “Talking about the Red Angels of NY City, Who shot the shot? Who got shot tonight? Who shot the shot? Who got shot tonight?” (The original “Rat Patrol” version of the song (an unreleased bootleg) features a more explicit reference to the Melvin shooting (albeit transposed from Newark to New York): “Who shot the shot that copped an Angel?”)
Was Frank Melvin shot by a white cop? Officially he was not, but it’s easy to see why Sliwa and many others refused to believe the official line. The shooting of Black civilians by white police officers is a common occurrence, and the general perception is that those white police officers often get away with it. In 2020, there were 1,021 fatal police shootings in the United States, and the rate of fatal shootings was much higher among Black Americans than any other ethnicity. According to a 2020 survey, 69 percent of Black Americans do not believe the police are usually held accountable for misconduct in the US.
Curtis Sliwa did not win the election as Mayor of New York, but he continues to run the Guardian Angels and speak out about crime and social issues. A recent agitation, initiated during his mayoral campaign, is his push to introduce a no-kill policy at animal shelters. Sliwa is no longer married to Lisa Evers, who is now a TV reporter for New York’s Fox 5 News. The couple split in 1993.
Today, the Angels claim to have 45 US chapters (but no longer a chapter in Newark) and 50 international chapters (including 24 chapters in Japan). They are a less visible presence but still patrol the streets and subways in their red jackets, white logo T-shirts, and trademark red berets. Their effectiveness might be disputed, but their aims remain admirable. In the spirit of Frank Melvin’s eulogy, they aim to make the streets safer, to make citizens more protected, and to help us all regain hope for a better tomorrow.♦
© Paul Brown. All rights reserved.
Agent: Richard Pike @ C&W
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