FADE TO BLACK

Miami Herald, The (FL)
September 18, 1988
AUTHOR: TOM SHRODER Herald Tropic Editor

"It's Joel. I've been arrested. So has Kral."

It was 3:45 a.m. Saturday morning. Tropic staff writer Joel Achenbach and photographer Jon Kral had gone to Coconut Grove to check rumors that there was going to be a major gang rumble. The two had been interviewing and photographing gang members since the beginning of summer. Now things had come to a head on the last weekend before school resumed. Somehow, I thought, Achenbach and Kral must have got caught up in it.

I had two questions: Are you all right? And: Did they get Kral's film?

I had seen the best of Kral's work up to that point, stunningly intimate portraits of kids lost in a world of threat and swagger, the photographs you see in today's magazine. And I knew from his and Achenbach's reporting that the threat often turned to senseless violence--violence, as Achenbach puts it, "for no purpose save its own intoxicating performance."

That was why Kral had gone to the Grove that night, to capture that random violence on film. Let Kral tell you what happened:

I could almost feel the tension of these guys after all summer, I saw guys with hair up on back of their necks, like snarling dogs. I held myself in the shadows and then it started to happen. The fight exploded into the street. Chairs were flying. One guy was down on the asphalt in a fetal position holding his head, three or four guys surrounded him, kicking. There was nothing I could do to help him, so I did my job. I had time to take a shot of them putting their whole bodies into it. Down the street these big muscular guys were smashing each other with chairs from the yogurt place. Click. Through the window I could see the store owner freaking out in the background as three guys pummeled a kid just outside. Click. Then the cops came and I thought, "Thank God they're here." They had a kid down on the ground handcuffing his hands behind him. They yanked him up by the cuffs and I saw the terror and pain in the kid's face. Click. I looked down to make sure the camera was set right and boom, a hand comes down and grabs my camera. I wouldn't let go. A cop said, "I'm going to arrest you." I said, "Look, I'm just doing my job, just like you. Please just let me do my job." He bends me over a cruiser and I hear the cameras crash down in the street. He gets me in a wrist lock. "Move," he said, "and I'll break your f---ing wrists."

When Achenbach protested, he was arrested too. Later, while Achenbach and Kral were both handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser, another Herald reporter, Angelo Figueroa, watched as police officers systematically went through Kral's camera bag. One of them exposed the film. Fade to black, every last frame.

Ironically, the previous project Kral had worked was the Arab rioting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. There he was arrested by Israeli soldiers.

"Getting arrested in Coconut Grove was scarier," Kral told me. When I asked him why, he didn't have an immediate answer. He scratched his head for a minute, and then said, "Because this is America."

Below, courtesy of a certain police officer who exercised his own kind of violence with no purpose save its own intoxicating performance, are all that is left of the frames that would have ended and summed up today's remarkable photo story.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1988 The Miami Herald