Paterson says goodbye to Naji Seabrooks, activist killed by police

PATERSON — Hundreds of mourners paid tribute to Naji Seabrooks Saturday morning at the funeral of a 31-year-old man who was hailed by activists as a peacekeeper killed by Paterson police after a lengthy standoff.

“Justice for Nadja,” spectators chanted as pallbearers dragged Seabrooks’ black coffin through the open glass door of a horse-drawn wooden hearse for a procession from church to cemetery.

Seabrooks’ death rocked Paterson with protests of anger and outrage for two weeks, but during Saturday worship services, people mostly put aside their sour feelings and focused on the legacy of Seabrooks’ work to end street violence in a shooting-ridden city.

“Naji, he had a community at his heart,” Rakhshon Dixon said during a funeral at the Christian Fellowship Center on Van Houten Street. “He really wanted to make a difference.”

“We’re not going to lose you needlessly,” said another funeral speaker, Quan Hargrove. “We still have work to do. We have a life to change.”

Mike Kelly:The death of Nadja Seabrooks is a tragedy on many levels.

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“Paterson Lost a King”

Dixon and Hargrove are part of the Paterson Healing Collective, an anti-violence organization that supported Seabrooks when he was one of five victims of a non-fatal drive-by shooting in March 2021. Seabrooks became part of the Healing Collective’s community effort and was eventually hired. group.

So Cortea Aken said that she met him less than a year ago.

“He was always in such a pleasant mood when you ran into him,” Akens said as she walked to the funeral.

Akens described Seabrooks as generous and kind, noting that a few months ago he bought Jordan brand sneakers for her grandchildren. “Paterson has lost his king,” she said.

Exclusive: Naji Seabrooks In His Own Words: “Try To Give Some Love Back” To Paterson

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Some of the mourners were wearing Seabrooks shirts, the photos showing a young man with an infectious smile. Others were dressed in all black.

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“This is just a sad day for everyone,” said community leader Roger Grier, a member of the Paterson Cares group. “I don’t think you can handle it.

Greg Farrar of Paterson’s Humble Beginnings and Real Men Stand Up said Seabrooks’ death caused deep pain to the city’s residents.

“Paterson is in pain,” Farrar said. “We need some things.”

Seabrooks, in an interview two years ago, talked about how basketball saved him from trouble when he was a teenager growing up in Paterson. Among those who attended the wake was Juan Grailes, his former head coach from Eastside High School. They teamed up to give the Eastside Ghosts a state championship, and that team’s center, Kyre Jackson, was among Seabrooks’ pallbearers on Saturday.

“It’s not really a feeling, it’s more of an emptiness,” Griles said of his former player’s death.

The coach said he and Seabrooks were part of a contingent of Ghost players who traveled to Georgia last summer for Jackson’s wedding. Griles said their paths often crossed through Seabrooks’ collective healing work and his own teaching work at the Alonzo “Tambua” Moody Academy for Social Change, Paterson’s alternative high school for behaviorally challenged teens. The man the school is named after, Alonzo “Tambua” Moody, was among the mourners at Saturday’s funeral.

“He was like family, that’s who he was,” Griles said of Seabrooks.

Seabrooks’ obituary states that he received an associate’s degree from Ventura College in California and was the father of a young daughter named Sophia. “He loved her more than anything in the world and would do everything possible to have her taken care of,” the obituary reads.

His daughter was one of the topics brought up by negotiators with police during a nearly five-hour standoff on March 3 that ended in his death. The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office on Thursday released seven 911 calls and nearly four hours of police body camera footage.

Paranoid and flustered, Seabrooks called 911, causing the police to arrive at his brother’s Mill Street home, where he was locked in a bathroom with knives. When the police were talking about bringing him to his mother, Seabrooks rushed out of the bathroom with a knife raised and was fatally shot by two officers who are members of Paterson’s equivalent of a SWAT team.

The prosecutor general’s office said the investigation into the shooting remains open. Representatives of the police union say the video proves that the officers did nothing wrong.

But activists argue that the police should never have used deadly force on a person going through a mental crisis. Authorities have not released details of this crisis, but an emergency responder stated at the scene in a conversation recorded by a body camera that he may have ingested illegal drugs that rendered him unconscious.

This article first appeared on NorthJersey.com: Naji Seabrooks, who was killed by police in Paterson, is buried.

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