Emil Mann (Ramapough Lenape)

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It wasn't supposed to end this way

Friday, April 14, 2006

By LAWRENCE AARON
RECORD COLUMNIST


WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS. That's when you can count on seeing your kinfolks. The last time Emil Mann's brothers and sisters were all together was a wedding in November. His eldest brother's son Jamie got married.

They'll be together again for Emil's funeral. It's scheduled for this morning. The father of three young boys died Monday, nine days after a state park police officer shot him.

This was a senseless shooting in the midst of a confrontation over the use of all-terrain vehicles on park land. If investigators conclude that officer Chad Walder's use of deadly force was improper, criminal charges should be filed against him.

Renowned New York lawyer Barry Scheck and others working for the Mann family are looking into potential civil rights violations. "It's a bias crime," said Glenda Mann, Emil's sister.

Clouded by conflicting information and controversy, the incident pushes the reclusive Ramapough Mountain Indians of Stag Hill into a harsh spotlight they'd much rather have avoided. For ages, Ramapoughs met outright hostility from the surrounding communities. Mutual antagonism lingers.


Stag Hill was thought of as a forbidding place, and its residents so fierce that if you went up the hill, you wouldn't come back. More than a hint of that reputation lingers, long after the concentration of Ramapough homes on the hill has been peppered with expensive new construction by outsiders.

Straight out of the Waltons is Glenda's description of growing up on the mountain in a family of four boys and seven girls.

Not far from the Manns' former Stag Hill homestead is the clearing where the shooting took place. The area -- accessible only by hiking over pitted paths punctuated by puddles deep enough to drown a sedan, but challenging enough to satisfy an off-road vehicle's yearning for road conquest -- was a well-known meeting place to maintain old neighborhood ties. The gatherings have gone on for years.

The state attorney general's staff investigating the incident needs to pin down what provoked the first encounter with police to spin out of control that Saturday. Why didn't park police simply issue summonses?

Walder shouldn't be free to enjoy paid leave along with three other officers awaiting the outcome of the investigation, Emil's family believes.

"I would like to see justice," Morris Mann said. "I would like to see him [Walder] in jail right now. But they won't do that because he wears a badge."

Emil Mann, 45, moved away long ago to raise his own family in Monroe, up Route 17 in Orange County, N.Y., but returned on and off to hang out at the remote clearing, part of an abandoned goat farm.

Although smashed beer cans, refuse, and police Day-Glo crime scene markings mar the scene, it was so peaceful on a recent weekday afternoon that you could almost hear the barren branches straining to push out leaf buds.

One tree with a big wet stain of sap weeping out of a bullet wound is where Emil fell after being shot nearly two weeks ago.

"Once the funeral is over, I want to go back there," says Morris, 58, the take-charge brother with too many difficult decisions to make. "I want to put a cross there." The brothers often hiked back there as kids.

"Will the casket be opened or closed?" asks Deborah, the quiet sister preparing her tribute to Emil. She compares losing Emil to losing "the twinkle of a star fallen from the sky... He's a star in our hearts," she wrote.

Emil was the 10th of his parents' 11 children.

Morris was the firstborn. The hardest thing they had to do was tell their 80-year-old dad that Emil didn't pull through.

Death is no stranger to either Morris III or his father, Morris Jr . Both saw combat -- the father in War II, the son as a teenage soldier in Vietnam.

But no one ever dreamt they'd be burying any of the siblings so soon. No one expected Emil would go first.

"When Morris was drafted to go to Vietnam, I watched my mom and dad turn gray," said Glenda as several of the Manns took a breather from funeral planning Wednesday. "I watched them age because of the way they worried about him."

Morris came back in one piece in 1969, just in time to see his two baby brothers Emil and Jake become teenagers.

They were 11 kids growing up in a crowded house. All survived to adulthood.

Emil's life wasn't supposed to end this way at 45.

Record Columnist Lawrence Aaron can be contacted at [e-mail]. Send comments about this article to The Record at [e-mail].

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Galvanized By Grief (community0



They had stayed relatively subdued throughout the morning, but as they
huddled around the wooden casket, a light drizzle tapping the cemetery's
muddy grass, the 300 mourners clasped their hands and started chanting.

"It is over!" they shouted on Friday. "It is over!"

"This is not justice, this is not fair, this is not right," Anthony Van
Dunk, tribal chief of the Ramapough Mountain Indians, said during a
funeral for a tribe member fatally shot by a New Jersey Park Police
officer. "We will stand up to everything they do. We will not allow them
to harass us or our children. From now on, it is over."

Several hundred people gathered in Suffern, N.Y., on Friday to mourn
Emil Mann, who was shot by Park Police Officer Chad Walder during a
confrontation April 1 in Ringwood State Park in Mahwah. He was 45.

One by one, family members and friends paid their last respects to Mann,
a father of three, during a funeral that celebrated his life but also
highlighted another theme: justice.

Teenagers walked around with baggy, aqua-colored T-shirts emblazoned
with the slogan, "We want justice."

Friends chatted about the unfairness of Mann's death. Some called it
murder. Others said they were desperately trying to grasp something that
seemed beyond their reach.

"All we want is justice for what happened here," said Deke DeFreese, a
tribe member who lives in Ramapo, N.Y.

The Bergen County Prosecutor's Office is still trying to determine
whether Walder was justified when he fired his Glock pistol at Mann
during a melee in the Ramapo Mountains. The officer alleges that Mann
tried to grab his handgun, and that he shot Mann because he feared for
his life.

Mann was shot twice, in the chest and leg. He was in critical condition
at Hackensack University Medical Center for nine days before dying of
complications from his gunshot wounds, investigators said. The Bergen
County medical examiner is conducting a more thorough autopsy.

The shooting has heightened tensions between the insular Ramapoughs and
law enforcement authorities. The Indians say they were targeted because
of their race. Mann's cousin, Otis Mann, also was arrested during the
confrontation with park police on charges of aggravated assault and
possession of a weapon. He is free on bail and attended Friday's
service.

At the funeral home, mourners waited to pay their respects in a line
that snaked around the corner. Outside, some hugged and wept, others
stood in silence and prayed. A large crowd stood on the street and
chatted.

The graveside service lasted less than 10 minutes, as hundreds gathered
in a large circle around the coffin. Only Van Dunk spoke after a pastor
gave the homily.

A tribe member softly stroked the coffin with a foot-long bird feather
-- a native ritual to ward off evil spirits.

"We are not 'those people on the mountain.' We are not people in Mahwah
or Suffern. From this day forward, we are the Ramapough Mountain Indian
Nation," Van Dunk said. "We are Native American people. We were here
before there was a New Jersey. We were here before there was an America.
And we will stay here long after they leave."

After the funeral, tribe members went to the tribe's community center
for a traditional feast.