Gunshots rang out between the red-brick apartment buildings at Pilgrim Village, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker ran to the noise. When Wazn Miller — the 19-year-old who was shot and bleeding — fell, Booker was there to catch him.
It was April 19, 2004. Just another day in Newark.
“It seemed like a whirlwind was going on around me, so much was flashing through my mind as I sat there just trying to hold this child as his breathing stopped,” Booker told an audience at Yale three years later. “The ambulance finally came, pushed me out of the way, ripped open his shirt where I now saw three gunshot wounds in his front, one in his side — and he was dead.”
Booker’s breathless retelling of Miller’s tragic end was meant to illustrate one of the “lowest points” in his life in the Brick City. It’s the type of story that has made him famous and wealthy, a national figure who pundits say looks increasingly “presidential” and will be, more than likely, New Jersey’s next US senator.
The only problem is, the story isn’t completely true.
Wazn Miller didn’t die in Booker’s arms — and while the then-34-year-old pol was there, he may have made matters worse.
A woman was cradling the prone Miller when Miller’s friend David Estrada, 14 at the time, arrived.
“He came over and picked him up,” said Estrada, now 23. “A lot of people said, ‘You’re not supposed to move somebody after they get shot.’ The bullets might start moving around.”
Gilez Smith, 27, said he saw Miller struggling to live and described Booker’s heroics as a “ploy.”
“I told him, ‘Just leave him alone!’ ” Smith recalled. “He was like, ‘Breathe, breathe,’ smacking him all in the face . . . It was a big act.”
Miller “was still breathing” when medics put him in the ambulance, Estrada insisted.
The police report confirms Estrada’s account, not Booker’s. According to the document signed by Newark Detective Vincent Vitiello, Miller “expired from his injuries at University Hospital.”
A coroner’s report also shows that while Miller was in cardiac arrest, resuscitation attempts were in progress as he was taken by ambulance to the hospital.
The cause of death: one “gunshot wound to chest.” Not four.
Yet the story of the gunshot victim dying in his arms was added to the list of Cory Booker legends, next to the tales of him saving a woman from a burning building and delivering diapers to a snowed-in mother.
Booker has become the Garden State’s Mother Goose, weaving one dramatic tale of heroism after another. And while all the anecdotes seem to be grounded in some truth, The Post took a closer look at a few of the stories to separate fact from fiction:
THE DRUG DEALER FRIEND
A street hustler named T-Bone has been a mainstay of the Booker mythology.
“I said hello to this guy, and I’ll never forget he leaped off the steps where he was standing and looked at me and threatened my life,” Booker told a rapt audience at The New School in 2007. “I later got to know this guy, and his name was T-Bone.”
Booker described how the drug dealer broke down crying in his car.
“He looks at me hard and begins to tell me about his life story. And some of what shocked me and silenced me is that he told me the exact same life story, up until the age of 12 or 13, as my father.”
But both a Booker confidant and a neighborhood fixture dispute T-Bone’s existence.
“There was never a T-Bone,” said a 32-year-old former resident of Brick Towers, the former housing complex where Booker lived and where “T-Bone” supposedly plied his drug trade.
“There was a T, and there was a Bone from Prince Street,” he recalled. “T was in Brick Towers.”
T was bloodthirsty, his acquaintance recalled. “Booker and T didn’t have no run-in. If they did, Booker wouldn’t be walking around now,” he said.
Booker’s mentor, Rutgers history professor Clement Price, said he learned during a “tough conversation” with Booker in 2008 that T-Bone was a “composite” character, the National Review reported on Aug. 29.
“I disapproved of his inventing such a person,” Price was quoted as saying. “There was no pushback. He agreed that was a mistake.”
But when confronted by The Washington Post the day after the National Review story, Booker was unapologetic, blaming a “cynical” press.
“Yeah, I got my life threatened, and yeah, I met the same guy who when he got in trouble with the law needed some help. And yeah, he did break down in tears,” Booker said.
PAMPERS BUT NO PLOWS
A quintessential Booker story is how he shoveled snow and came to the aid of residents in the days after a 2010 blizzard. The evidence of this is irrefutable. Twitter is littered with people’s personal accounts and photos depicting Booker helping.
Barbara Byers confirmed to The Post that Booker, in one of the more colorful accounts of his heroic, hands-on approach to governing, delivered Pampers to her home. But the press never questioned how she felt about it.
“I always found it weird that no one asked me about what happened,” she said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t have diapers because I didn’t go shopping. It was two days later and nobody cleared our street.
“He’s a very nice man, but he isn’t a good mayor,” she added. “If he would have done his job, I would have been able to do for myself and gone out. It took three days for someone to come by with a plow the first time.”
TASTELESS EULOGY
Judy Diggs, a Newark activist who supported Booker when he first ran for City Council in 1998, died of a heart attack in December 2006. Booker eulogized her at a political event in the wealthy enclave of Summit “as a huge, sort of portly woman without many teeth in her mouth.”
He got key details about her death wrong. “Interestingly . . . she died in a truly poetic way,” Booker said. “She died at school in front of a roomful of kids, giving them a lecture.”
Diggs’ relatives told The Post this is false. Grandson Tyree Diggs said she was in her office at the Mount Vernon Annex, away from any children.
“It makes sense for him to go to Yale and to go to Summit and tell all these stories because he don’t have to answer the questions,” Tyree Diggs said. “If he says it here [in Newark], he has all kinds of questions to answer.”
Booker’s camp defended the lore surrounding the mayor.
Spokesman Kevin Griffis said Booker talked about Miller’s death “in the context of making Newark a safer place,” but couldn’t explain discrepancies between the police and ME reports and Booker’s memory.
Griffis said Booker believes the man’s name was T-Bone.
On critics who say Booker should have foregone diaper delivery and instead managed his administration’s response to the storm, Griffis said, “He wanted to be out on the streets with the people who were being impacted. You can do both.”
He declined immediate comment regarding the eulogy.
Additional reporting by Melissa Klein and Isabel Vincent