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This Issue 11/03/2005

Also in this issue

• UoP cribs
• Television killed the indie-radio stars
• Arbitrary Reasons to Hate Princeton
• Paradise is not lost

On a rainy morning in late October, an unassuming man walks around Penn's campus marveling at how much it has changed. Seeing the campus for the first time in 15 years, he only recognizes bits and pieces of it, and it takes him some time to reorient himself. His memories take him back to his student days. Walking down Locust Walk, he says he feels young, like he is 19 again. He approaches his old dorm and sees what used to be called Van Pelt College House is now Gregory. "I still have property here, I don't know if they just destroyed it," he says looking at the entrance. "I left all my stuff ... I went home for Christmas and then went to trial and I've never been back."

This stocky black man with a carefully-trimmed beard, small glasses and a quiet demeanor could easily pass for an alumnus returning to campus. But Christopher Clemente never got his degree from Wharton. Instead, he has spent the better part of the last 15 years in prison, most of it in maximum security in upstate New York.

Christopher Clemente's saga has a starting date -- the night of January 9, 1990, when he found himself waiting for his older brother, who had just gotten out of the hospital from a gunshot wound. Clemente had spent many weekends that semester going back to Harlem. That's where he grew up, and, he says, the place in those years had an almost magnetic pull on him. Now, after spending his winter break there, he found himself in his brother's apartment on 112th Street near St. Nicholas Avenue, planning to catch the late-night Amtrak train back to Philadelphia for his spring semester at Penn.

He was sitting on the bed, talking to his brother's then-girlfriend, Leah Bundy, and suddenly heard a hard knock on the door and then an exchange:

Who is it?

It's the police, open the fucking door.

Is there a problem?

Yeah, there's a problem. Open the fucking door.

"And that's when everything went haywire," he remembers. After entering the apartment, the police found 214 vials of crack and a loaded MAC-11 machine gun, with an additional 2,000 vials and a loaded 9mm pistol reportedly thrown out of the window.

Why the police were at the apartment is disputed to this day. At the trial, the police officers claimed they were responding to a 911 call that reported gunshots in the building, though Clemente suspects it was really a set-up aimed at his brother, a heavy drug dealer at the time. That night, after the police raid, he found himself in New York's notorious Riker's Island prison complex, which sits on the East River between Queens and the Bronx, charged with 12 counts of drug and gun possession.

He would spend the next 11 weeks behind bars waiting for his $75,000 bail to be posted. During that time, he would be stabbed 16 times and wind up in critical condition, only to return to jail.