Broken Mosaic

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For eight straight years, New York City had been pounded with one act of racial violence after another. 1982: Willie Turks, a black transit worker, is beaten to death by a mob of whites shouting racial slurs. 1984: Bernhard Goetz wounds four young blacks he said were menacing him on the subway. 1986: a white mob in the Howard Beach section of Queens attacks several blacks, one of whom fled in panic onto a highway and was killed by a passing car. 1989: a 28- year-old white executive is beaten and raped in Central Park by a pack of black teenagers out on a hell-raising spree that added the word wilding to the lexicon of urban fear.

And then in the midst of a bitter mayoral campaign pitting three-term incumbent Edward I. Koch against a black challenger, Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, came the murder of Yusuf Hawkins. He was a 16-year- old black who with a group of friends ventured into the tightly knit, mostly Italian Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn to inspect a used car. They were set upon by a gang of whites armed with baseball bats and a gun. When the melee was over, Hawkins lay dead with two bullet wounds in his chest.

The murder stunned a city already beset by spiraling racial tensions. To many New Yorkers it symbolized a breakdown in racial civility that had no quick explanation or readily available cure. Some of the youths accused of killing Hawkins were jobless school dropouts with histories of drug abuse -- mirror images in whiteface of underclass young black males. The whites had armed themselves on the night of Aug. 23 because the former girlfriend of their alleged leader, Keith Mondello, had invited black and Hispanic guests to her birthday party. They mistook Yusuf and his comrades for those guests.

Whatever the motive for the killing, tension mounted after a series of protest marches through Bensonhurt led by one of the city's most flamboyant rabble-rousers, the Rev. Al Sharpton. Inflammatory press coverage added to the heat. When the first two Bensonhurst youths charged with the killing went on trial separately in state supreme court on April 16, apprehension gripped the city. Not-guilty verdicts, blustered Sharpton, would be "telling us to burn the town down."

So it was that, with the exception of some outraged whites in Bensonhurst, New Yorkers heaved an almost palpable sigh of relief last week when a jury consisting of six whites, three blacks, two Hispanics and an Asian convicted the accused gunman of second-degree murder. But only one day later, the relief was replaced by dismay. A second jury acquitted Mondello, 19, of murder and manslaughter but found him guilty of several lesser charges.

At the verdict, Mondello's father Michael yelled, "Thank God! Jesus has risen!" The Hawkins family, seated across the aisle, shrieked in dismay and, pointing at the jurors, shouted, "He did it! He did it!" As night fell on Friday, crowds of angry blacks milled about in Brooklyn, disrupting traffic and throwing rocks and bottles. Fires, possibly ignited by arsonists, erupted in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York sections of the borough, and a few whites, including several newsmen, were attacked but suffered only minor injuries.