The unofficial shrine to Malice Green has been demolished, Neal Rubin reports in The Detroit News. His beating death at the hands of Detroit police became one of the most emotional and divisive chapters in Detroit's recent history.
Rubin writes:
"The city can’t yet say why the storefront at West Warren and 23rd was leveled Monday, or whether it was a sanctioned demolition. The property manager, if you can describe an empty shell as being managed, was surprised to learn the structure no longer exists.
"It’s the circle of life, Detroit style. On Nov. 5, 1992, Green, a 34-year-old habitual crack user, was pulled over by two police officers. When he refused to show them the vial clenched in his hand, they struck him in the head repeatedly with their heavy flashlights. On the way to the hospital, he died."
The building was a typical Detroit storefront attached to the front of a house. Five days after Green's death, an artist calling himself Bennie White Ethiopia Israel, above, at the ruins on Wednesday, began painting Green’s portrait.
The building, on W. Warren at 23rd, just west of the Jeffries Freeway (I-96), had been crumbling for years. On Tuesday and Wednesday, souvenir hunters and scrappers descended on the site for bricks and pieces of stone. Once a block crowded with other homes, the immediate area of the Green shrine is now mostly vacant.
"I don't see why the city doesn't knock down homes in residential neighborhoods," Bennie White said.
