Shabazz, Malcolm

Malcolm Shabazz (1984-2013, age 28). A grandson of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, son of Qubilah. He was born in Paris, France and murdered in Mexico City, Mexico. He is buried in Ferncliff Cemetery, New York near his grandparents.

Malcolm Shabazz made headlines for multiple arrests during his life, including setting a fire that killed his grandmother, Betty. He was murdered in Mexico on May 9, 2013, at the age of 28.

Malcolm’s father, L.A. Bouasba, was an Algerian Muslim married to his mother Qubilah Shabazz, an African American Quaker and former Muslim. His parents met while she was studying.

Wikipedia states: “When Malcolm was a few months old, he and his mother moved to Los Angeles. A little while later, they moved to New York City and then Philadelphia. One landlord there remembered frequently having to let young Malcolm into the apartment because his mother was not at home. Malcolm showed some evidence of disturbance as a child. As a three-year-old, he reportedly set fire to his shoes. He brought a knife to school in the third grade. About the same time, he suffered from delusions and was hospitalized for a short time.”

In 1994, Malcolm moved with his mother to Minneapolis. But she was being drawn into a plot to assassinate Louis Farrakhan by an FBI informant, so he ended up returning to his grandmother.

Under the terms of the agreement, Qubilah was required to undergo psychological counseling and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse for a two-year period to avoid a prison sentence. For the duration of her treatment, ten-year-old Malcolm was sent to live with grandmother Betty at her apartment in Yonkers, New York.

Former New York City Mayor David Dinkins and former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton represented Malcolm Shabazz in his Westchester County Family Court trial. At the end of each hearing, Dinkins and Sutton would make a “motion to hug” Shabazz before he was handcuffed, shackled, and led back to detention. The two lawyers accepted that he started the fire, but argued he intended no real harm to his grandmother; throughout the trial, Dinkins and Sutton tried to arrange an alternative to youth detention that would satisfy their security, therapeutic, and academic standards by visiting locations from North Carolina to Upstate New York.

Shabazz pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months of juvenile detention at an Education Center in Pittsfield, MA for manslaughter and arson, with possible annual extensions until his 18th birthday.

After his 18-month sentence elapsed, Shabazz was transferred to another treatment center, in Yonkers, N.Y. Following two attempted escapes from the Yonkers facility, officials transferred him to yet another institution, this time in Valhalla, N.Y. He and another resident escaped the facility within a month. Though the teenager only escaped for a single afternoon and did not commit any additional crimes, the Westchester County Attorney decided to prosecute him due to the “alarm” the search caused in the local community. Shabazz was eventually released after four years.

In a 2003 interview with the New York Times, Shabazz, then aged 18, gave his version of the fire and the events leading up to it. He explained that he had been unhappy living in New York with his grandmother and had stated: “Being bad, doing anything to get them to send me back to my mother. Then I got the idea to set the fire.” Expressing remorse for the event, Shabazz continued:

“I set a fire in the hallway, and I didn’t think the whole thing through thoroughly, but she didn’t have to run through that fire … There was another way out of the house from her room. I guess what she thought was, I was stuck, and she had to run and get me because it was in front of my room as well. She ran through the fire. I did not picture that happening, that she would do that.”

In the same interview, Shabazz also dismissed the child psychiatrist’s diagnosis of him at his trial that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, saying that he had only “made up” a story about hearing voices in his childhood “to get attention.”

Following his release, Shabazz lived for a time with his aunt. He was arrested in 2002 for stealing $100. He pleaded guilty to attempted robbery and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Shabazz was arrested again in 2006, for punching a hole in a store’s glass window.

In 2010, Shabazz made the Hajj to Mecca. He later converted to Shia Islam. In February 2013, Iranian state-controlled Press TV reported that Shabazz had been arrested by the FBI while en route to Iran. The story was widely reported, but the Shabazz family disputed that account.

Shabazz died in Mexico City on May 9, 2013, at the age of 28. He was said to be on a tour to demand more rights for Mexican construction workers relocated to the U.S. His body, which according to prosecutors had been badly beaten with a rod of some kind, was found in the street in Plaza Garibaldi, a busy tourist spot. According to New York magazine, a friend who was with Shabazz the night of his death said the beating was related to a dispute over a $1,200 bar tab for drinks and female companionship.

Approximately 200 people attended his funeral in California. Shabazz was survived by his mother, his two daughters, and five aunts. He was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, near the graves of his grandparents, Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz.