End of Summer

In the cool nights that promised autumn after the long heat, city boys searched for new excitements.

In Brooklyn, Kelly Payton, 14, walked out of his tenement home, told his mother he was going to get food for his pet pigeons. On the way, he met friends with a better diversion. By lowering a hook from the roof through the skylight of Benny's Live Poultry Market, they had just stolen four live rabbits, sold them for $2 to a man they met on the street. Kelly and four of his friends, aged eleven to 15, returned to the scene.

Shortly, three police cars converged on the market to search for reported prowlers. Patrolman William J. Farley spotted shadowy figures scampering toward an adjoining roof. "Stop or I'll shoot!" he shouted. There was no answer. Farley fired a warning shot into the air. A scream, then moans ricocheted back. After climbing up on the roof, Farley and two fellow policemen found Kelly tearfully clutching his abdomen, his four companions huddled in terror near by. Ten minutes before his mother got to the hospital, Kelly died.

As he prayed with a priest who gave the boy last rites, Patrolman Farley wept. "This is the first time in 29 years that I ever used my gun in the line of duty," he cried. "Why did this have to happen to me?"

The next night, two girls, aged 15 and 16, were riding in a prowl car with Detectives John Creamer and Philip Dennehy. They had told the police that one night in the previous week they had been raped by six boys on a tenement roof in East Harlem. The cops and the girls were looking for the gang of boys. The girls pointed at half a dozen boys hacking around on the sidewalk. "There they are!" they shouted. The boys raced away, the prowl car hurtling after them--around corner after corner, into a one-way street. In the midst of oncoming traffic the car suddenly stalled. The detectives leaped out of the prowl car, sprinted two more blocks on foot, roaring at the boys to halt. The boys ran on, scattering. Both cops fired warning shots in the air. Two of the boys flitted down a dark alley. Creamer and Dennehy fired again, this time aiming at the fugitives.

George Martinez, 16, ran a few more steps, then slumped against the rear wall of a firehouse, a bullet in his back. As the other boys vanished, he died on the firehouse floor.

George's sister said that he had been at home the night of the rape. Sickened after seeing a five-year-old child killed that day by an auto in the street, she said, George had gone to bed early. "If he was sleeping, how could he have been in that group?"

But the girls identified George as one of their assaulters. In his shoe, police found a packet of heroin.

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