Teen gangs in NYC brutally murdered a 15-year-old boy, two months before ‘West Side Story’ came out
Authorities blamed bad parenting over racial tensions
At 10:30 p.m. Manhattan was still sweltering that summer night in 1957. Michael Farmer and Roger McShane had plans to cool off. They slipped through a hole in the fence of the public swimming pool on Amsterdam and West 173rd Street. The facility had closed hours earlier but that didn’t stop kids from routinely breaking in for late-night dips. Only this time, the pair never made it to the water.
A group of teenage boys erupted from the bushes surrounding the pool. McShane, 16, screamed to his friend, “Run!” But Farmer, with a leg crippled from childhood polio, couldn’t escape fast enough. The gang surrounded him and beat him to the ground with kicks and punches. They sliced him with knives and struck him with a dog chain. One assailant even brandished a machete.
Though a few boys managed to catch and assault McShane, their prey escaped. He hailed a taxi. On the way the hospital, he urged, “Get my friend!” before losing consciousness.
Police arrived at the pool around 11 p.m. Farmer was barely alive. “The Egyptian Kings got me,” he said. He died in the ambulance, just 15 years old.
It was the twelfth gang-related murder in the neighborhood that year. And after the arrests of 20 young men, 11 of whom were 14 years old or younger, and the longest murder trial the city had ever seen, New York was no closer to addressing racial unrest. In fact, the judge was convinced the violence came down to poor parenting.
The Egyptian Kings and the Dragons were two of roughly 120 teen gangs, totaling some 8,000 members in New York City. In this case, the Kings and the Dragons were comprised of mostly Puerto Ricans and African Americans, respectively, but several Caucasian gangs also roamed the streets. And they were all clashing. Since the mid-1940s, middle-class and wealthy white residents had been fleeing Manhattan to the suburbs, driven in part by fears that minorities were taking over. White flight occurred so suddenly that neighborhoods seemed to transform overnight. Poor and working-class residents who were left behind scrambled to claim new territories as their own.
Police reports from 1,220 American cities showed that youth arrests rose 10 percent in 1957, compared with a four percent increase in arrests for persons of all ages. In New York and around the country, anxiety about teen violence ballooned. For years, the word “teen” was synonymous with “juvenile delinquent.”
Washington Heights, where Farmer was murdered, had historically been an Irish and Jewish neighborhood. But as more Hispanics and African Americans moved to the southern part of the area, whites turned territorial. Despite laws banning segregation, white gang members routinely guarded and prevented people of color from using the public pool. So, on July 30, the Egyptian Kings and Dragons attacked two white boys headed for a swim. They presumed the boys were members of a local Irish gang called the Jesters, but neither victim was.
After the death of Michael Farmer, 10 boys younger than 15 were sent to reform school, including one 14-year-old nicknamed “The Little King,” who admitted he stabbed Farmer in the back to feel the thrill of “knife going through bone.” An additional seven young men, aged 16 to 18, stood trial for first-degree murder. Twenty-seven court-appointed attorneys defended their case.
On March 5, 1958, six boys produced signed confessions. One 17-year-old named Lencio DeLeon (nicknamed “Jello”) admitted he used a large stick to strike Farmer three times. Then he left the scene, had “gone home, watched television, and gone to bed.” Charles “Big Man” Horton, 18, had the machete, which he claimed he swung once “to show the others I was doing something.” George Melendez, 16, who carried a pipe but maintained he never used it, said he hadn’t wanted to pick any fights but felt he “had no other choice but to go.” The president of the Egyptian Kings was present, too; he said he had steeled his nerves with wine…then used a knife.
Over 93 days, the prosecution presented its case to an all-male jury. The proceedings logged 6,000 pages of transcripts. Then on April 15, after 24 hours of deliberation, the jury convicted four boys — two of second-degree murder with sentences of 20 years to life, two of second-degree manslaughter with a maximum sentence of 15 years. The remaining three were cleared of charges.
During sentencing, the presiding Judge Irwin Davidson attributed the crime to a failing of upbringing. The trial, he proclaimed, “laid bare the fact that with blind and callous disregard we have permitted many of our young people to be reared without decent home influence, supervision, or care.”
By that time, West Side Story — the classic tale of rival gangs in a battle of races — had been on Broadway for roughly seven months, a smash hit.
