Two lawyers paused in front of an Applebee’s restaurant on Flatbush Avenue the Friday after George Floyd was killed, and allow a journalist to take a video moments before they throw a Molotov cocktail into a police car.
There isn’t any excuse. Protests aren’t a reason for destruction of government property just as protests aren’t a reasonable excuse for manslaughter. Urooj Rahman emigrated from Pakistan when she was 4 and now lives with her elderly mother in Bay Ridge; she works as an attorney at Legal Services in the Bronx, representing tenants without means in eviction proceedings.
“This shit won’t ever stop unless we fucking take it all down,” she said. “We’re all in so much pain from how fucked up this country is toward black lives. This has got to stop, and the only way they hear us is through violence, through the means that they use. ‘You got to use the master’s tools.’ That’s what my friend always says.”
Later, around 1 a.m.m Rahman allegedly threw a Bud Light bottle, filled with gasoline and a toilet-paper fuse, through the broken window of a parked cop car. What is a Molotov cocktail? A crude incendiary device typically consisting of a bottle filled with flammable liquid and with a means of ignition – basically, a homemade grenade.
There were witnesses of the incident and police surveillance cameras recorded the act. Once the bomb ignited in the NYPD vehicle, the two drove off as the police chased them. Finally, they were caught and another Molotov was found in the passenger seat with the means for making more in the back of the vehicle.
Rahman threw the bomb; Mattis drove. Neither of them believe their act of violence was a punishable act at the time, but as lawyers, you agree to play by the rules (or at least acknowledge the rules exist). Now, the government is perplexed because logical thinking proposes going to law school should be a safeguard for breaking the law.
It doesn’t matter how “unfailingly kind, gentle, and decent” they are outside of their heinous act. It only takes one ‘moment of weakness’ to shoot up a school, blow up a building, or run your car through a crowd of people.
