Frank Nucera Jr.
By Nida Khan
When
my brother called to tell me about the arrest of former Bordentown
Township police chief Frank Nucera Jr. last week, I burst into tears.
Nearly 13 years ago, my father was hit by a car and killed in Bordentown, NJ. Nucera apparently wasn’t the chief back then, but he was on the force – a police force that assumed things about my dad that weren’t true, neglected my father’s well-being and gave a pass to the person who killed him.
Nucera is now facing a federal hate crime charge and a federal civil rights charge stemming from other alleged incidents, but this didn’t just start and end with him. As I have long maintained for over a decade, that entire police department must be investigated to reveal its culture of prejudice and how it treats certain segments of society as second-class citizens. The sad reality is that this isn’t even confined to just the Bordentown Township Police Department; there are voiceless victims across the country who suffer in silence and never receive a semblance of justice.
In March of 2005, my father, Suleman Ahmed Khan, was exiting an Acme grocery store in Bordentown when a driver failed to yield to pedestrians in this parking lot and struck him. The impact was so severe that when he hit the ground, he sustained massive head trauma and hemorrhaging. When the police and EMTs arrived on the scene, they assumed that because of his name, because of his brown skin, he could not speak English and put a “language barrier” in their EMS report. He was a citizen of this country for decades and here even before I was born. We spoke to my dad in English 95% of the time. After he was hit, they sent him to a non-trauma hospital despite the fact that a trauma center was virtually the same distance away. By the time he was taken to a trauma facility about five hours later, he’d fallen into a coma. He died three days later.
The news hit my family like a wrecking ball. Stunned and devastated, we searched for answers: How fast was this driver going in a parking lot? Why wasn’t this person charged with a crime? Why did the police close the case so quickly? As we struggled to put the pieces together, the Bordentown Township police were not only unhelpful – they treated my family and I in a manner that can only be described as atrocious.
Losing my dad, someone we loved dearly and who sacrificed so much for his family, in a car-vs-pedestrian accident was horrendous enough, but that would turn out to be just the beginning of our ordeal. Soon, this pain was coupled with a search for justice for my father, punishment for the person who carelessly hit him and accountability for a police force whose seemingly deep-rooted, almost casual racism likely contributed to his death. A journalist by education and training, I did what the police didn’t do: I began asking questions.
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Source: The Huffington Post
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