Hollywood,CA–Protesters and news outlets littered the small lawn in front of Ed Buck’s apartment complex in Hollywood, demanding that he be arrested. Protesters also wanted neighbors to warn any Black male they see going into the building.
“If a Black man had white boys dead in his house, you wouldn’t be O.K with it,” Jerome Moore tells the group of residents standing in front of Buck’s apartment complex.
In July 2017, Jerome’s brother, Gemmel, was found naked in Buck’s home after he overdosed on methamphetamine. Soon after, his mother was horrified by what she found written inside Gemmel’s journal. In it, he details that Buck gave him his first injection of Crystal Meth.
After Gemmel’s death, a number of Black men have come forward detailing their experiences with Buck, who they say preys on vulnerable men of color who are struggling financially.
They also claim that Buck would pay them to inject drugs, and that he gets aroused sexually seeing how their body reacts.
“Ed Buck wants to inject young Black men and see how they can get sexually aroused. How much of the drug can I put into you, before you have a reaction, or death?” Jerome Moore tells me yesterday at the rally in front of Ed Buck’s House.
Buck’s neighbors have also started a petition to evict him from the apartment complex. The building manager said that his boss tried to get Buck evicted after Gemmel’s death, but legally he was unable to because Buck had not been charged with a crime.
“It has been known in the history of this country that white men don’t want to neccesarily work with us, or live besides us, but they are ok with using us as sexual beings, as sexual products. As property.”
Jerome says that he was on his way to work when he heard the news that another Black man had been found dead inside Buck’s apartment.
The news made him so sick, that he pulled over and threw up. He said that he felt like it was happening all over again. He called his mother Latisha in Texas, whom he said had to leave work because she could not keep herself together.
“As a brother and community member I felt like what didn’t I say loud enough, or what didn’t I bring attention to, that could have prevented this person from dying?”
