ILLUMINATING THE RICH AND VARIED LIFE OF NEW YORK CITY

 

 

 

May 2018

Fifty-one-year-old Pemala Sherpa was 16 when she married a man she didn’t know, in a remote region in the mountainous country of Nepal. She gave birth to two children—a boy and a girl. It wasn’t long, she said, before her husband began to beat her. As the years passed, Sherpa says, she realized that she had a choice: either stay and possibly lose her life, or leave her country. So at 26, in 1994, Sherpa boarded a plane to the U.S. on a tourist visa, leaving her two children behind. To afford the fare, she borrowed money from a friend. “They

[gallery columns="1" size="large" ids="20095,20094,20096,20093"] “We want names! We want names!” the small crowd chanted Wednesday evening at the intersection of Montgomery Street and Utica Avenue in Brooklyn. They were gathered at the spot where, four weeks earlier, a bipolar man from the neighborhood, Saheed Vassell, was shot and killed by four New York City police officers. People of all ages turned out to commemorate Vassell and to protest what they see as a lack of transparency from the police. His family and the community are seeking the names of the four officers who shot Vassell and unedited security camera footage of his