U.S. to Probe Slaying of Hasidic Scholar During 1991 Riot in New York

The Justice Department will investigate the killing of a rabbinical student during racial violence in the summer of 1991, U.S. Atty. Gen. William P. Barr announced Friday amid protests over the acquittal of a black teen-ager on murder charges.

Mayor David N. Dinkins said police would press their efforts in the death of Yankel Rosenbaum, a Hasidic scholar from Australia. The mayor offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s conviction.

Lemrick Nelson, 17, was accused of stabbing Rosenbaum in August, 1991, during violence that erupted in Crown Heights, a mostly black and Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Nelson was acquitted of all charges Thursday by a state jury.

Barr said that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division would investigate the stabbing.

City Council member Noach Dear, who spoke with Barr on Friday, said the attorney general told him, “the same as we did for Rodney King, we’re going to do in this case.”

A similar investigation, conducted after the trial of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of King, took about six months.

The announcement helped calm the anger among members of the Lubavitch sect, the Orthodox Jewish group based in Crown Heights that clashed with blacks during the rioting. Protesters filled the streets for most of the night after Thursday’s acquittal. Demonstrations continued Friday.

Last year’s rioting began after a car in the motorcade of the Lubavitch leader accidentally struck and killed a 7-year-old black. Blacks, complaining of preferential treatment for Jews, fought with their neighbors for several days.

Rosenbaum, 29, was beaten, kicked and fatally stabbed by a gang of blacks shortly after the Aug. 19, 1991, accident.

The defense said Nelson was a victim of a police frame-up. Prosecutors said Nelson was caught with a bloody knife in his pocket and that he was identified by Rosenbaum before he died.