INCIDENT AT HOWARD BEACH
A CASE FOR MURDER
BY
CHARLES J. HYNES and
Bob Drury

THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
The murder that shocked a city and nation and how our justice system works at its best.

Late on the night of December 19, 1986, four black men were driving through the all-white community of Howard Beach, in the New York City borough of Queens, when their car broke down. By the early hours of the next morning, one of them lay dead on the Belt Parkway and one had been beaten nearly to death with a tree limb and a baseball bat by a dozen local teenagers. In the...