WPCNR STARS AND STRIPES. By John F. Bailey. November 11, 2007. Reprinted from November, 2003: Each Veterans Day or Armistice Day I reprint this column I wrote in 2003 to commemorate a young man who died in a perhaps bizarre effort to focus attention on how politics really works. He took his own life in hopes it would lead to reform. Sadly his death, his contributions, and his memory were erased by the powerful and the profane of Westchester County and covered up.

This was a young man not much older than the young Americans you will read about today who died in Iraq, fighting in a valiant endeavor because they believe in America. Their sacrifices have been taken advantage of by those who would seek and keep power. This column remembers them and the young man who died this weekend five years ago.

His name is David Meyers.

The wreath-layers and speakers had long left, and two circular wreaths on tripods stood on either side of the black cannon in the White Plains Rural Cemetary. For moments, sometime this morning, those that gathered stood and paid respect to the faded names on the tombstones of war dead of two-and-a-half centuries ago, while fresh little Stars and Stripes honored each grave of the fallen.

John Parker, William Haight, Donald Henry Grant, are some of the names of the White Plains war dead you can still read, and when they died who had not been erased by the tears of decades. On many of the square pockmarked stones, the letters of the names of mothers’ sons have been long erased, swept gently away by the healing rains of eternity. The names that have disappeared have become unknown soldiers, only knowable now by the records in cemetery archives. But at least they have stones and once a year, people come to remember them.

But there is one “veteran” who died 5 years ago who was not remembered publicly  today. In a way, he symbolizes what fighting for the American way is about.

He instead, was a veteran of the political wars in Westchester County, and its first unknown casualty.

Unknown, because his death was never mentioned in a newspaper or an obituary, until two weeks after his death.

Unknown because his friends and political associates never once spoke out to remember him or to protest his death and the causes of it. No one spoke. They forgot him. People he trusted did not speak out for him.

No one perhaps but his family will came to his grave today.

Yet, he  gave his life willingly to fight for those freedoms these soldiers of the past died for The American Revolution, the Civil War, the World War, World War II, Korea and Vietnam:  Democracy, and the right to hold dissenting beliefs, and not be prosecuted for them.

Since no one else will remember him today. I will.

His name is David Meyers.

I don't have a picture of him. Because none appeared at his death.

But I shall tell you of what he did.

 Over six hundred persons turned out at his funeral at Riverside Memorial Chapel, yet The New York Times chose not to cover the funeral or write a story about his taking his own life.

The Journal News, with full knowledge of who he was, chose not to report his death at the request of the Westchester County government, because it was an embarrassment to them its leaders the paper apparently supported. The television media usually eager to pounce on the lurid, ignored his death and did not report it either.

Westchester County’s Department of Communications did not even put out a expression of regret over David’s suicide, and said it was a very sad story and that we should not report it. They did not issue a news release announcing his death and his contributions. They asked the CitizeNetReporter not to do a story on him. 

David Meyers was an attorney working in the County Executive’s office in 2001 who had long admired Jay Hashmall, Deputy County Executive with whom he worked in County Executive Andy Spano’s office. David was a very committed and conscientious young man, a clerk to a justice on the  Second Circuit Court of Appeals of the Uniteds States, at one time, his family was well-connected in Democratic Party circles.

Over Armistice Day weekend in 2002, he took his own life by leaping from his mother’s apartment on the Upper East Side.  His impassioned suicide note read by his mother at his funeral revealed that he felt he had to take his life to expose the extent to which he felt the democratic process he loved had been corrupted and abused by the pursuit of power he had seen. 

It all began when the Board of Acquisitions and Department of Public Works determined that some emergency repairs were needed after Hurricane Floyd, and had to be done immediately, or the county would be negligent. The Board of Acquisitions and DPW agreed it had to be done soon and a no-bid contract could be awarded. Jay Hashmall, Deputy County Exectuive and, a  member of the County Board of Legislators signed the contract with Ralph Arrad a contractor on the approved list of county contractors to do the work, whom Hashmall knew. Andy Spano was not in the office the day the contract had to be signed.

In 2001, when District Attorney Jeanine Pirro was running for reelection against Tony Castro, Mr. Hashmall supported Mr. Castro, and so did David Meyers.

Hashmall and Meyers were told  to stop working for the Castro campaign, because the county powers were quietly supporting Ms. Pirro for the position, even though she was a Republican candidate. Meyers stopped working on the campaign.

During the campaign, Ms. Pirro, out of the blue, subpoenaed Mr. Hashmall’s records, raising the Arrad contract as a possible impropriety, but  she never convened a grand jury.  Mr. Hashmall was fired because of the public fallout from the unbid contract, and the unfavorable suggestion of impropriety.

 In the spring of 2002, David Meyers became increasingly unhappy working in the county executive’s office because he was being treated coldly.  He resigned to take a job in Maryland with Fannie Mae, which got off to a rocky start because he did not get a good reference from the County Executive’s office. The Fannie Mae job did not work out in August of 2002.

David returned to Westchester County, hoping to get any job really, but was told there was nothing available from the county.

He worked for the Noam Bramson’s unsuccessful campaign against Ron Tocci for State Senator in September-October, 2002. Bramson lost, and with it the possibility for employment for David, or so he must have thought.

David took one last shot at reconnecting with the county, just before Veteran’s Day, 2002.

He contacted the Spano administration on the Saturday of Veteran’s Day weekend and was personally told  he would never work in Westchester again.

He had been blackballed from Westchester County government when he desperately needed a position to support his wife and two kids.

David, in his suicide note, heard read by 600 persons at his funeral, explained he felt he had to expose the nature of political power in Westchester County, by drawing attention to it by giving his own life.

But he underestimated the commitment of hundreds of people he respected and knew, to his own ideals.

Hundreds heard of his plight and his concern. To this day, no one spoke out against the treatment he received. Only one news media reported his death, this one.

When David was starting down into the street many stories below that night, he believed, probably as many of the war dead in the cemeteries across America today did when facing death in the service of America, that he was giving his life for an ideal, to focus attention on wrongdoing, unfairness, to strike a blow for what is right.

But no one else believed in his fight.

Was he depressed? Perhaps. Was he desparate? Was he irrational? Perhaps, but no more so than the soldier who would give his life to achieve what they believed in for this country.

If you read the letters of soldiers recently killed in Iraq, as they appeared in The Times today, these young men and women quoted spoke of American ideals, freedoms, that they believed in what they were doing.

David Meyers believed in the power of government to help and make lives better for persons. He believed that government did not exist to perpetuate its own power. What he saw done to Jay Hashmall and himself sickened him, and he reasoned that if he did not take a stand against the pettiness of power in the only way he could, no one would.

To this date, no one has.

He thought others had to be shown what was happening. He showed them.

But so far they have failed to speak out, or to even remember David’s supreme sacrifice of himself.

Where are the David Meyers Foundations? Where are the Remember David Meyers Walks? Where is the David Meyers Memorial Plaza? Where is the Westchester County monument to a fallen public servant?

There are none.

Everyone wants to forget about David Meyers.

Just this column will remember him today.

David Meyers stands for those who have principles, who will not be bought. Persons who will speak out when a wrong has been done.

He stands for those who believed in the American ideal who had the courage to face the guns, or in David’s case, the remorselessness of concrete.

He stands with Karen Silkwood, David Pearl, Erin Brokovitch, Nathan Hale,

I hope a member of his family plants a American flag on David’s grave today.