------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the June 10, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
OPPONENT OF POLICE BRUTALITY DIES IN JAIL: PROTESTERS SAY COP KILLED MAY MOLINA
By Lou Paulsen Chicago
The movement against police brutality and abuse in Chicago has swung into action demanding justice in the death of one of its own leaders. May Molina Ortiz, who had organized and participated in countless protests against police brutality, torture and murders, died in the Belmont and Western lockup around 5 a.m. on May 26--about 31 hours after her arrest for heroin possession in a suspicious raid.
Friends and family insist Molina did not use heroin and would not have possessed it. "If you knew my aunt, you know these things [the police are] saying don't make sense," said her niece, Maritza Perez.
Molina was a disabled grandmother in her 50s who suffered from diabetes, asthma and other ailments. She could not travel without a wheelchair and often an oxygen tank. After her arrest around 10 p.m. on May 24, family members tried repeatedly to bring Molina her prescription medications. The police refused. The next afternoon, Molina's lawyer, Jerry Bischoff, visited her and found her almost comatose.
He warned the desk sergeant to take her to a hospital. The police refused. The next morning, she was found dead in her holding cell.
"They denied her her medicine," said nephew Alexander Hauad. "They murdered her."
The medical examiner's office claims to have found six tinfoil packets of heroin in Molina's esophagus, stomach and small intestine. If true, persons close to the case say, this is most consistent with her having been fed the packets shortly before death.
Witnesses to the raid say police, with suspicious speed, "found" quantities of heroin in two apartments in Molina's building, then ransacked the apartments to make it look as if they had searched.
Molina co-founded the group Comite Exigimos Justicia (We Demand Justice) while trying to free her son, Salvador Ortiz, from a frame-up murder charge. She was also a leader of Families of the Wrongfully Convicted.
"She had a very big heart," wrote Rose Sifuentes of the Comite. "Whenever we were planning to organize a rally or bring ing in supplies for our fundraisers, no ques tions asked, she was ready to volunteer."
Five days before her death, she got a major law firm to take her son's case.
The evening of Molina's death, over 100 attended a candlelight vigil in front of the police station where she died. Family members of all ages wept as they remembered a woman who was always ready to feed the hungry and the homeless, who would "stuff you with rice and red beans" if you went to her house for a meeting, and who was never deterred from protesting by bad weather or anything else.
People were outraged that she had died "under torture." They compared her to the U.S. occupiers' victims at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The next night, nearly 200 people packed a meeting of the Police Board to demand justice. When they rose from their seats and approached board members, the board hastily adjourned. Family and supporters were promised a meeting with Lori Lightfoot, head of the Office of Professional Standards.
But that promise was broken on May 28, when Lightfoot announced she would meet only with family members. "People who supported May Molina are family," retorted her nephew.
Further actions are scheduled for the first week in June. Said one speaker at the vigil, "We will make her name a banner in the struggle."
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