By WAYNE PARRY
Associated Press Writer
MAHWAH, N.J.- The gathering started, as it does each spring, with members of the Ramapough Lenape Indian tribe meeting for a cookout and a day in the woods, celebrating the warm weather and the beauty of the Earth.
It ended with one of the tribe members mortally wounded, shot three times by a state park police officer who had told the Indians they were not allowed to ride their all-terrain vehicles in the area.
The death 10 days later of Emil Mann, 45, of Monroe, N.Y., has tensions running high, with the tribe decrying years of bias, state officials pleading for calm and a grand jury investigating whether the shooting of the unarmed man was justified.
“It’s murder,” said Rodney Van Dunk, a cousin of the tribal chief. “Even a bear doesn’t get shot three times.”
The lawyer for rookie Officer Chad Walder, who killed Mann, said his client used deadly force to protect himself and a fellow officer, fearing Mann was trying to grab the policeman’s gun.
“He feels terrible about what he had to do,” said attorney Robert Galantucci. “He was ambushed and he had to protect himself and his lieutenant.”
The facts of the April 1 shooting on Stag Hill, 27 miles northwest of Manhattan, are in dispute.
Authorities contend that four park police officers were patrolling an area near the Ramapo Mountain State Forest when one of them saw Otis Mann, a cousin of the dead man, riding an ATV and asked him to stop because the vehicles were not permitted on state parkland. Otis Mann rode away from the officer.
About 20 minutes later, officials say, Lt. Kelly Gottheiner saw Otis Mann and said she planned to arrest him, but he resisted and tried to grab her baton. A second officer handcuffed him.
At this point, authorities say, Walder encountered Emil Mann. Prosecutors said in court papers that Emil Mann twice tried to take Walder’s gun.
After being shot, Emil Mann was charged with assault on a police officer, disarming a law enforcement officer, obstruction of justice and hindering apprehension.
The Ramapoughs give a starkly different version, saying that police slapped and used chemical spray on Otis Mann’s 14-year-old daughter during the dispute about the ATV. They also say that Emil Mann approached the officers as a peacemaker, with his hands in the air, when he was shot.
“I think the ranger was trigger-happy,” said Kelly Martucci, the dead man’s niece. Emil Mann “was just trying to calm things down.”
The Ramapoughs and the county prosecutor’s office say the confrontation took place on land owned by Bergen County, not the state, raising questions as to whether the Park Police were out of their jurisdiction.
Gov. Jon S. Corzine and the state attorney general met Wednesday night with the Ramapoughs, with the governor promising a “thorough and effective” investigation.
While tribal leaders said they were satisfied with the state’s willingness to investigate, they said the killing was the culmination of decades of anti-tribe bias from the government and neighbors alike.
“People come up to gawk at us as if we were some type of freak show, which we are not,” said Anthony Van Dunk, chief of the 5,000-member tribe. “We are citizens of Mahwah and we are looking for justice. But we are living in society that does not want us here.”
Melvin Mann, a cousin of the dead man, said his white schoolmates three decades ago would whisper ominously about the dangerous, unpredictable Indians.
“They’d say, `Don’t go up Stag Hill; they’ll shoot you,’” he recalled. “We never bothered anybody in our life.”
Homer Wilkins, whose wife is a Ramapough, said: “If it was us that did the shooting, we’d go to jail for life. Why do you have to shoot a man three times? Why not shoot in the air once to stop him?”