In 1868, the Federal Government deeded millions of acres in the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Great Sioux Nation. Nine years later, when gold was discovered in the area, Congress broke the treaty and took the land back. In the 1920s, the State of South Dakota, eager to attract tourists, commissioned a sculptor to carve colossal monuments into Mount Rushmore. The Sioux still considered the Black Hills to be their sacred land. In 1980, the Supreme Court awarded the Sioux $17 million plus interest accrued since 1877 as compensation. The award is now valued at nearly $300 million, but the Sioux continue to both refuse the money and seek title to the land.

One hundred ten thousand Japanese Americans were imprisoned in twenty-four internment camps located in remote areas of the American West during the Second World War. At the time of the February 19, 1942, Executive Order initiating the forced relocation, there had not been a single act of disloyalty by a Japanese American. In 1988, Congress awarded surviving internees or their descendants $20,000 and an apology as retribution for the violation of their constitutional rights.

In the December 1953 issue of Cancer Research, Dr. Ernst Wynder presented the first definitive proof that cigarette smoke causes cancer in laboratory animals. A few weeks later, the president of the major American tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel and agreed to begin an aggressive advertising campaign to counter Wynder’s findings.

In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi. Anxious to show new friends that he knew how to talk to white women, Till said, ‘Bye, baby” to Carolyn Bryant as he left this store. Three days later, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W, Milam, kidnapped, tortured, and killed Till. Milam and Bryant were found not guilty by an all-white jury. The deliberations lasted a little over an hour.

Lee Harvey Oswald was sitting in this seat when he was arrested by Dallas police at 1:50 P.M., November 22, 1963. The double feature playing that day was Cry of Battle and War Is Hell.

Kitty Genovese was repeatedly stabbed outside her apartment in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964. Thirty-eight people heard her cries for help. Although the attack lasted over half an hour, not a single person called the police until after she had died.

Speaking at a rally on April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. The next day, he was assassinated on this balcony outside room 306.

The Cuyahoga River burned for more than an hour on June, 22, 1969, after molten slag from a steel mill was dumped into the river and ignited other pollutants.

Patrons of this gay bar were arrested and beaten in a routine early morning police raid on June 28, 1969. In the nights that followed, hundreds of men and women demonstrated in the streets of Greenwich Village, despite the continued threat of police violence. These events came to be known as the Stonewall Rebellion.

President Nixon’s decision on April 30, 1970, to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia incited protests throughout the nation. At Kent State University, demonstrators took over the campus and burned the ROTC building. On May 4, at 12:24 p.m., twenty-eight Ohio National Guardsmen opened fired on students for thirteen seconds, killing Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, William Schroeder, and Sandra Scheuer in this parking lot. Nine years later, without acknowledging wrongdoing, the State of Ohio paid the parents of each dead student $15,000.

Karen Silkwood, a worker at the Cimarron River Plutonium Plant, had gathered potentially incriminating evidence about the falsification of quality-control documents. On November 13, 1974, on her way to a meeting with a New York Times reporter, Silkwood’s car skidded off Highway 74 killing her instantly. When friends arrived at the scene shortly after the crash, the manila folder she had intended to give the Times reporter was missing. The Oklahoma State Police determined that Silkwood, under the influence of barbiturates, had fallen asleep at the wheel. Independent investigators concluded that Silkwood had been forced off the road by another vehicle.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the city of Niagara Falls, the United States Army, and the Hooker Chemical Corporation dumped over two hundred different toxic chemicals into Love Canal. Many of them contained dioxin, one of the most lethal chemicals known. In 1953, Hooker Chemical covered the then-dry Love Canal with a thin layer of dirt, and sold it to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for one dollar. The terms of the sale stipulated that if anyone incurred physical harm or death because of the buried waste, Hooker could not be held liable. A school was constructed on the site of the waste dump and private homes were built nearby. In the late 1970s, an unusually high number of birth defects, miscarriages, cancers, and other illnesses were reported in the Love Canal neighborhood by the Niagara Falls Gazette. Lois Gibbs, whose two children developed rare blood disorders, led a successful grassroots campaign to have the state of New York purchase the homes of five hundred families, enabling them to relocate.

A year before he died, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States, made a tape recording to be played in the event of his assassination. He said: “ I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes the target or potential target for a person who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbed with themselves.” On November 27, 1978, Dan White shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and then came down the hall and shot Supervisor Milk in this office. White had been denied re-appointment to the Board of Supervisors after a previous resignation, due in part to his disagreements with Milk. Dan White was convicted of manslaughter and served five years, one month, and thirteen days in prison before his release in 1984. An expert at his trial testified that excessive consumption of junk food and sugar contributed to White’s behavior. Dan White Committed suicide in 1985.

Thirteen-year-old Cari Lightner was walking home with a friend on May 3, 1980, when she was hit and killed by a car driven by a drunk driver. The driver had been released on bail two days earlier, following a previous drunk-driving accident. After her daughter’s death, Candy Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), a national organization that fights for stricter laws against drunk driving.

In the early morning hours of September 5, 1982, Johnny Gosch, a twelve-year-old paperboy, set out with his red wagon and his dog to deliver the Des Moines Sunday Register. He was last seen on this street at approximately 6 a.m., talking to a man a dark blue car. Despite a nationwide search, he is still missing.

At hearings held in this room in August 1983, the American Association of Blood Banks and the Food and Drug Administration rejected evidence that AIDS might be transmitted by blood transfusions. Before mandatory testing of donated blood was instituted in 1985, more than 8,000 hemophiliacs and over 12,000 other transfusion recipients were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

At this facility the space shuttle’s booster rockets were tested. The elastic O-rings in the booster rockets were found to malfunction in cold conditions. Unusually low temperatures were predicted for the launch of the space shuttle Challenger at Cape Kennedy on January 28, 1986. NASA and Morton Thiokol managers, under pressure to perform on schedule, approved the Challenger’s launch. Seven astronauts, including the first civilian crew member, high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, died when the main booster rocket exploded.

On August 20, 1986, Patrick Henry Sherrill killed fourteen coworkers in a shooting spree that began in this post office parking lot and ended in the mail-sorting room. Sherrill had been reprimanded for poor work perfromance and threatened with dismissal the day before. The Massacre ended when he took his own life.

Jennifer Levin and Robert Chambers were seen leaving Dorrian’s Red Hand, an Upper East Side bar, at 4:30 A.M. on August 26, 1986. Her body was found beneath this crab apple tree in Central Park at 6:15 A.M. that same morning. An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled. She was eighteen years old when she died. Chambers, who was nineteen at the same time of the crime, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

In 1942, the United States Army, searching for a place to manufacture plutonium for the atomic bomb, selected Hanford, a remote farming community in the central Washington. Fewer than two thousand people occupied the half-million acres around the town.The Army took over the land and built the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor. Throughout the Cold War, Hanford produced much of the raw material for America’s nuclear arsenal. More than 440 billion gallons of chemical and radioactive waste were poured into the ground at Hanford, including enough plutonium to build two dozen nuclear bombs. Airborne radiation was deliberately released to test the effects of iodine 131 on the surrounding area and its residents, who were not warned of the danger to their health. Hanford’s plutonium production facility was shut down in 1988. A massive clean-up effort is underway.

Charles Keating, Jr., began developing this planned community in the desert near Estrella Mountain, while he was Chief Executive Officer of Lincoln Savings and Loan. In 1989 the bank collapsed due to mismanagement. Estrella was never completed. Keating was convicted of multiple fraud and racketeering chargers and was sentenced to twelve and a half years in prison. Twenty-two thousand of the bank’s uninsured depositors, many of them elderly, lost their life savings.

Four hundred children were playing in this schoolyard on January 17, 1989, when a twenty-four-year-old man dressed in combat fatigues entered the grounds through a hole in the fence. Patrick Purdy, who attended this school as a child, opened fired with two handguns and an AK-47 assault rifle. In a two-minute shooting spree, purdy killed five children and wounded thirty, before killing himself. In Purdy’s motel room, police found over a hundred small plastic soldiers, tanks and weapons.

Carol Stuart, seven months pregnant, was returning home from a birthing class with her husband, Charles, on the night of October 23, 1989. At 8:35 p. m., Charles Stuart called the police from his car phone to report that a black man had forced the white couple at gunpoint to drive to the predominantly black neighborhood of Mission Hill. In his desperate call for help, Stuart claimed that the man robbed them, shot and killed his wife, and shot him in the abdomen. During an intensive three-month investigation, police detained and interrogated numerous black men from the Mission Hill area. A suspect was about to be arrested when Matthew Stuart, Charles’s brother and an accessory to the crime, confessed that the entire story had been mad up to collect insurance money and that Charles Stuart had shot his wife and then wounded himself in an effort to conceal his crime. After learning of his brother’s confession, Charles Stuart leapt to his death from this bridge.

The Happy Land Social Club was a popular, unlicensed Honduran social club. On March 25, 1990, Julio Gonzales was thrown out of the club for quarreling with his former girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano, who was a Happy Land employee. He bought a dollar’s worth of gasoline, poured a trail from the street through the club’s single doorway, ignited it, and left. The fire killed eighty-seven people. Lydia Feliciano was one of five survivors.

For years Wanda Holloway had been eager to further her daughter Shanna’s ambitions to become a cheerleader. Believing that Shanna’s chances were being impeded by Amber Heath, a rival, she plotted to have Amber’s mother killed. She hoped that the loss would be so overwhelming to Amber that she would be unable to compete. Wanda Holloway made a payment for the contract killing of Verna Heath in the parking lot of this Grandy’s, but it was never carried out. She was convicted of soliciting capital murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Rodney King, a black motorist, was beaten by four white Los Angeles police officers in the early morning hours of March 3, 1991. King was pulled over after leading police on an eight-mile high-speed chase; he was drunk and resisted arrest. Some twenty officers looked on as extreme force was used to restrain him. George Holiday, one of many local residents who witnessed the incident, recorded seven minutes of the beating with his new camcorder. King’s injuries included eleven skull fractures, a shattered eye socket, a broken leg, and nerve damage that left his face partially paralyzed. Sergeant Stacey Koon, one of the four officers accused of using unnecessary force, wrote in his report that King’s injuries were of a “minor nature.” The four officers were acquitted of all criminal charges by an all-white jury.

On the night of June 7, 1991, nine-year-old Christopher Harris was playing on these steps. Felton Granger, a crack dealer trying to protect himself from a rival dealer, Marvel Jones, grabbed Harris and used him as a human shield. In the gunfire that ensued, Harris was shot in the back. He was carried to a relative’s home nearby; he died in the emergency room of a local hospital within an hour. Granger and Jones are serving life sentences for Harris’ death.

On June 22, 1991, Roderick Fisher, a sixteen-year-old Little League umpire, made a call that angered Curtis Fair, a thirty-one year-old coach. After being thrown out of the game, Fair returned with a revolver. He fired four shots at Fisher but did not hit him. Curtis Fair was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to twelve years in prison.

Twenty-five employees died and fifty-six were injured in a fire that swept through this chicken processing plant on September 3, 1991. Nearly all of the victims died of smoke inhalation while trying to escape through exits that were illegally blocked or padlocked. The plant had no fire alarm, no automatic sprinklers, and one fire extinguisher. Emmett J. Roe, owner of Imperial Food Products, Pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to almost twenty years in prison. Loretta Goodwin, a worker who survived the fire, claimed that the company kept the doors locked to prevent employees from stealing chickens.

On April 29, 1992, four white police officers on trial for the beating of motorist Rodney King were acquitted. A videotape of King’s beating had been extensively televised. The not guilty verdicts became a catalyst for widespread civil unrest. Riots began with several mob assaults at this intersection. Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, was pulled from his truck and severely beaten as a camera crew broadcast the event live from a news helicopter. The Los Angeles Riots caused more than fifty deaths and an estimated one billion dollars worth of damage.

Anna Lopez’s body was found in these woods on May 25, 1993. Lopez was one of seventeen women murder by confessed serial killer Joel Rifkin. Speaking about her daughter Anna, a prostitute addicted to drugs, Maria Alonso said, “her problems made me love her even more, because girls like here are... so full of pain.”

Yoshihiro Hattori, a sixteen-year-old Japanese exchange student, was on his way to a Halloween party when he was shot and killed in this carport at 8:30 P.M. on October 17, 1992. Confused about the address of the party and attracted by Hallloween decorations, Hattori and his American host student knocked on the front door. Bonnie Peairs, startled by the two boys in costume, called for her husband to get his gun. When Rodney Peairs opened the carport door, Hattori, thinking he had found the party, ran towards him. Frightend, Pearis ordered him to freeze. Hattori barely understood English and didn't stop. He was shot and killed. Peairs was acquitted of manslaughter under a Louisiana law that allows citizens to use deadly force when protecting themselves or their homes from intruders.

Malice Green dropped off a friend in front of this suspected crack house right before he was stopped by two police officers. After Green was asked to produce his driver’s license and registration, a struggle ensued and the officers beat him to death with three-pound flashlights. The beating continued even after Green had been handcuffed and an ambulance had been flagged down. Larry Nevers was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to twelve to twenty five years in prison. Walter Budzyn, convicted of the same crime, was given eight to eighteen years.

On February 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in a rented yellow van parked beneath the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and over one thousand were injured. The bombing was alleged to be part of a larger plot intended to force the United States Government to cease its support of Israel and Egypt; other targets included the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the main Federal Office Building in Manhattan. A serial number from a truck axle found in the wreckage led investigators to followers of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist urban terrorism, including Rahman. Chemicals used to build the bomb were stored at this facility.

For fifty-one days, FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents surrounded the property of the Branch Davidians, a small religious order based near Waco. The siege began after a raid by ATF agents on February 28, 1993, in which four agents and six Davidians were killed. The agency conducted the raid in the belief that the ect’s leader, David Koresh, was keeping a large arsenal of illegal weapons. The FBI, citing the abuse of children in the compund, received permission from Attorney General Janet Reno to end the siege by tear-gassing the buildings. Within minutes of this attack, the compound was ablaze. it has never been determined whether the fire was a result of the assault or was set by the Branch Davidians themselves. Koresh, a self-proclaimed messia, and eighty of his followers died in the fire.

Dr. David Gunn, a doctor who performed abortions, was shot in the back three times as he walked to the rear entrance of the clinic during an anti-abortion demonstration on March 10, 1993. He fell beneath this small tree and died two hours later during surgery. His assailant, Michael Griffin, immediately surrendered to police. He was found guilty of first-degree murder in March 1994 and sentenced to life in prison. Four months later, at another Pensacola clinic, Paul Hill, the leader of an anti-abortion group called Defensive Action, shot and killed another doctor and his escort.

Almost 300 illegal Chinese immigrants struggled against the pounding surf to reach the shore of the United States on the night of June 6, 1993. Ten died of drowning or hypothermia; the rest escaped or were taken into custody. The immigrants had endured four and a half months of brutal conditions in transit before their vessel, the Golden Venture, hit a sandbar 200 yeards off this beach. They were crammed into a twenty-by-forty-foot hold; food and water were scarce; sanitation conditions were subhuman. Of those arrested, forty-seven were deported to China, thirty were granted asylum, and forty-six were released. At the end of 1995, 147 were still in federal custody. Lee Peng Fei, the suspected mastermind of the failed voyage, had demanded $30,000 from each would-be immigrant. He was arrested in Bangkok in November 1995.

Katherine Ann Power, an anti-Vietnam War radical, was a fugitive from justice for twenty-three years. She was wanted for her role as a getaway driver in a 1970 band robbery in Brighton, Massachusetts, during which police officer Walter Schroeder was shot and killed. He left a widow and nine children. Under an assumed name, Power settled down in Eugene, and co-founded and worked at this restaurant for several years. No longer able to bear her guilt, Power, through her attorney, negotiated with authorities before voluntarily surrendering in 1993. She was sentenced to eight to twenty years in prison.

Polly Klaas was abducted from her home in Petaluma during a slumber party in October 1, 1993. Within hours, a massive volunteer effort was organized to find the twelve-year-old girl. Millions of flyers bearing Polly’s photograph and a police composite sketch of her abductor were distributed nationally. Large banners were affixed to billboards across Northern California. Two months later, Richard Allen Davis, an ex-convict with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, led police to a wooded area fifty miles north of Petaluma where he had buried Polly Klaas’ body.

David Gelernter, Director of Computer Studies at Yale University and an advocate of the joining of computer sciences with the humanities, was maimed when a packaged bomb exploded in his fifth floor office in Watson Hall on June 24, 1993. Since 1978, at least three people associated with advanced technology have been killed and twenty-three others injured by bombs sent and placed by a person known as the Unabomber, whose writings express a hatred of technology and fear of its global effects. In April 1996, the FBI arrested Theodore Kaczynski at his isolated cabin in the mountains of Montana with the belief that he was responsible for these crimes.

On July 23, 1993, James Jordan, father of basketball superstar Michael Jordan, was driving home from the funeral of a friend when he pulled onto this shoulder of the road to take a nap. Ten days later, his body was found in a creek in South Carolina. Two teenagers were charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery. They were sentenced to life in prison.

Yetta M. Adams froze to death while sitting upright in this bus shelter across the street from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C., on November 29, 1993. The forty-three-year-old mother of three grown children had reportedly been turned away from a homeless shelter the night before.

Lewis B. Puller, Jr., winner of the 1992 Pulitzer prize for his autobiography, Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet, fought depression and alcoholism after losing his legs in a mine explosion. He died here, at home, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on the afternoon of May 11, 1994. Lina Puller, his former wife, said, “To the list of names of victims of the Vietnam War, add the name of Lewis Puller. He suffered terrible wounds that never really healed.”

In the years prior to her death on June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson’s emergency calls for help were received at this desk. These 911 phone calls, expressing fear for her life, were made during her marriage to O.J. Simpson and after their divorce. In 1995, Simpson was acquitted of murder charges in the stabbing deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

After attending a memorial for Kurt Cobain at the Seattle Center in April 1994, Daniel Kaspar, a twenty-eight-year-old chemical plant worker, returned home to this apartment complex and committed suicide. Like Cobain, Kaspar killed himself with a shot to the head, and like Cobain, he left a note expressing concern for the young child he was leaving behind.

Megan Kanka was raped and strangled in a house that once stood on the site of this park. Jesse Timmendequas, who had been previously convicted of sex crimes involving young girls, told the police that on July 29, 1994, he lured the seven-year-old into his home, across the street from Kanka family residence, by offering to show her a puppy. The Megan Nicole Kanka Foundation, established by Megan’s family, has fought for legislation requiring sex offenders to register with local police who must then inform communities of their presence. The Hamilton Township Rotary Club tore down the house and built this park as a memorial to the slain child.

In 1994, Robert Sandifer, an eleven-year-old gang member, fired a semi-automatic pistol into a group of teenagers playing football. Shavon Dean, a bystander, was killed by the shots. Three days after he killed Dean, Robert Sandifer was found dead under this railroad viaduct. He had been shot twice in the back of the head by members of his own gang, who feared he would reveal information if arrested.

The most lethal act of terrorism in U.S. history occurred here on April 19, 1995. The nine-story Alfred Murrah Federal Building housed seventeen government agencies and a day-care center. At 9:02 a.m., a truck containing more the two tons of fertilizer and a fuel oil exploded next to the building killing 168 people, 15 of them small children. At least 600 others were injured in the blast. The FBI arrested Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for the bombing. McVeigh, a former Army sergeant, and Nichols, a former member of a paramilitary group know as the Michigan Militia, had spoken about their desire to seek revenge for the attack by the United State Government on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, which had occurred two years earlier. Both men pleaded not guilty.

On August 19, 1995, Deletha Word and Martell Welch had a minor traffic accident. Welch chased word, pulled her from her car, and beat her for nearly half an hour. More than forty people, some of whom had cellular phones, watched as Welch struck her repeatedly with a tire iron, but no one called the police. Word leapt from this bridge to escape her attacker. Two young men jumped in the river to save her, but Word feared they would harm her as well and kept swimming; she eventually drowned. Martell Welch has been charged with murder.

The day after Elisa Izquierdo was born, New York’s Child Welfare Agency took her from her crack-addicted mother, Awilda Lopez, and placed her in the custody of her devoted father, Gustavo Izquierdo. Her father died of cancer when Elisa was four years old, and Awilda Lopez, seemingly recovered from drug addiction, gained full custody. Serious signs of abuse were reported at least eight times to the Child Welfare Agency by teachers and social workers after her mother gain custody. On November 22, 1995, Elisa, then six year old, was beaten to death by her mother. At her funeral the Reverend Gianni Agosinelli told mourners that “Elisa was not killed by the hand of a sick individual but the impotence and silence of many, by the neglect of child welfare institutions and by the moral mediocrity that has intoxicated our neighborhoods.”

In this mosque, members of the Bloods and the Crips, rival gangs, negotiated and signed a truce on April 26, 1992.