The Crown Heights Riot

On the evening of August 19, 1991, a car in the motorcade of the Lubavitcher grand rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, ran a red light at Utica Avenue and President Street in Crown Heights, jumped the curb, and struck seven-year-old Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela, children of Guyanese immigrants working on a bicycle chain on the sidewalk. Gavin died at the scene. Word spread fast and wrong through the neighborhood that a private Hasidic ambulance service had tended to the driver before the children, and within hours a crowd had gathered. Early the next morning, a group of young Black men surrounded Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Australian rabbinical student, and stabbed him; he died later that night. Three days of unrest between Black and Hasidic Jewish residents followed, one of the ugliest stretches in the city's modern history.