A memorial for stolen lives.

• Author: Ervin, Mike
• Position: Stolen Lives Project for victims of police brutality; publication of 'Stolen Lives' - Brief Article

New York City

Iris Baez was at home in Orlando, Florida, just before Christmas in 1994 when she got a call telling her that her twenty-eight-year-old son, Anthony, was in a hospital in the Bronx. Anthony and his father and brothers were visiting their relatives in New York for the holidays.

Baez immediately headed for New York, unaware that Anthony was already dead. He had died at the hands of a New York police officer who put him in a choke hold.

"I would never think the police could kill my son," she says. "I never believed there was racism. Now I know there is racism, and I know how it feels."

Iris Baez says she also now knows that nearly every day somewhere in America someone is killed or injured while in police custody. That's why she moved back to the Bronx and launched the Anthony Baez Foundation to help victims of police brutality in New York.

The Anthony Baez Foundation is a sponsor of the Stolen Lives Project, which just published Stolen Lives, a 100-page book that lists the names of more than 300 people who have been killed in encounters with police or the border patrol since 1990. It also identifies their ages ethnicities, and the circumstances of their deaths. Most of these stolen lives belonged to black or Latino young men. Anthony Baez was Puerto Rican.

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