BY PATRICK DONACHIE | Timothy Caughman was remembered at his funeral by well-wishers and elected officials as a generous and warm individual who loved conversing with fellow New Yorkers.
Caughman, 66, was fatally stabbed near the corner of W. 36th St. and Ninth Ave. on the evening of Mon., March 20, in what was quickly determined to be a race-based attack.
Mayor Bill de Blasio was on hand to speak to parishioners at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Jamaica, Queens, at 10660 Union Hall St., on Sat., April 1.
Caughman was born in Jamaica and grew up in the South Jamaica Houses. He was living in Manhattan when he was killed.
“He was attacked because of who he was, plain and simple. And don’t think for a moment it was an attack on one stray man, because it was an attack on all of us,” de Blasio said during his remarks. “It was a racist attack. It was an act of domestic terrorism; we have to call it what it is. But it was also an attack on all of us, because this city stands for something. So, it’s no surprise that evil came calling here.”
According to Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, James Harris Jackson traveled to New York City and walked the streets of New York for three days, seeking a black person to murder. Jackson allegedly found his victim in front of 462 Ninth Ave. in Manhattan (at W. 36th St.), repeatedly stabbing Caughman before fleeing, said Vance, who also noted that Jackson had traveled to New York to murder because he thought the act would get more publicity.
In the early morning of Wed., March 22, after video of the incident surfaced, Baltimore resident James Harris Jackson turned himself in to police at the Times Square subway station, confessing to the killing. The next day, he was arraigned for murder as a hate crime, and was later charged with murder as an act or terror, in addition to assorted weapons-related charges.
De Blasio referred to previous speakers, who had mentioned Caughman as living in “a state of joy,” which the mayor said could be difficult to maintain in a city as frenzied as New York.
“We all have to work hard to try and find the joy, sometimes even when it’s staring us in the face,” he said. “Timothy understood something that maybe a lot of us don’t understand well enough. He understood what was good around us and he obviously had a love for his fellow human beings.”
De Blasio did not explicitly refer to President Donald Trump, though he did allude to a need to “understand the forces of hate that have been unleashed in recent months,” and also chastised reporters who had focused on mistakes Caughman made rather than the fact that he had been killed in a racist attack.
“He was a black man killed by a white man whose goal was to find black people and kill them. Period,” the mayor said. “And it was noted, and then quickly the media, and our society in general, moved onto other topics. Let me be straightforward: What if it had been a black man who traveled to another city with the sole purpose of killing white people?”
—Additional reporting by Sean Egan
