The eighth anniversary of Darryl Mount Jr.’s altercation with police that led to his death drew about 100 people to Congress Park in Saratoga Springs Tuesday evening Aug. 31. Mount, a black man, died after a police chase left him in a coma for months. The police at the time maintained that he had fallen from scaffolding during the chase. Mount’s family has been in a civil case with the city since a doctor they asked to look at the evidence said the injuries were not consistent with a fall and the police chief at the time admitted under oath that the department had not conducted the full investigation that he said they had.
Lexis Figuereo, the leader of the Black Lives Matter Saratoga movement, said Tuesday that for six years the black community had been too quiet on the issue. He said the time has come to keep the pressure on the city to conduct a full investigation into Mount’s death.
“We are here to reinvigorate that noise,” he said to cheers.
Sean Young of the social justice group All of Us in the Capital Region rhetorically asked the crowd who would have realized that the city would become the center of the BLM movement in the Capital Region.
Figuereo is the face of that movement.
He often curses about and at people in his sometimes fiery speeches.
He can be offensive to "polite society," Pastor Michael Bell of the Dyer Phelps AME Zion Church in Saratoga said of Figuereo. Bell was in the crowd.
He knows that “polite society” might not hear Figuereo’s message when Figuereo uses the language he does.
However, Bell called the lack of the investigation into Mount’s death a “glitch” in the system that must be corrected. When a polite society is unresponsive to the questions surrounding this death they become co-conspirators in the problem, he said. The language that points this out should not be the focus, he said.
“We want better, we can do better, and we will get better,” he said.
Pastor Joe Cleveland of the Saratoga Springs Unitarian Universalist Church told the crowd that he believes what happened at the time of Mount’s death was a lie, referring to the police chief, at the time, Greg Veitch, who told newspapers they did conduct an investigation and then under oath said they did not.
“I want my city to admit that they made mistakes. This should not sound like a radical demand,” Cleveland said.
A clarification was made to this story after publication to indicate that Bell was saying the offensive speech was to "polite society." He spoke during a latter part of the remembrance, after this reporter had to leave.