Hundreds March in Funeral of Child in Riot-Torn Area

Hundreds of mourners, demanding justice and shouting at police officers, marched Monday alongside a hearse carrying the coffin of a 7-year-old black child whose death set off rioting in a mixed black and Jewish neighborhood.

The marchers moved tensely and slowly through Brooklyn for five miles, from a Baptist church at which funeral services were held for Gavin Cato to a cemetery where he was buried.

As mourners marched, they shouted, “We want justice.”

Gavin was killed a week ago when a car driven by a Hasidic Jew jumped a curb and struck him as he was playing with a cousin, who was badly injured. Hours later, a 27-year-old Hasidic scholar from Australia was stabbed to death in what police said appeared to be a revenge killing.

For the next four nights, black youths roamed through the racially mixed area of Crown Heights, throwing stones and bottles, looting shops and overturning cars.

Leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch Hasidic sect said that a Jewish woman in the area committed suicide Monday after becoming distraught over the violence.

Mayor David N. Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor, attended the funeral for Cato. He urged mourners to honor Gavin’s life by building bridges of faith and hope between people, “and, most of all, let us increase the peace.”

But when the Rev. Al Sharpton, a black activist, got up to eulogize the boy, he looked at the mayor and said, “You don’t want peace; you want quiet.”

Sharpton, who was interrupted several times by applause, said in reference to the 22-year-old Hasidic man, Yoseph Lisef, who drove the car that killed Cato: “We will not allow any compromise or sellout of this murderer. We will . . . accept nothing less than the prosecution of this man.”

After the service, the coffin was carried out of the church to the applause of more than 1,000 people who were standing outside.