"We're always put in the position where we have to watch what we do," Cherry said. An exercise physiology major, he said: "I'm in college, but that doesn't mean anything. The stereotype is: You can take the man out of the 'hood, but you can't take the 'hood out of the man."
Wednesday evening, he was getting a ride back to his dorm with a friend when police stopped the car at Allegheny Avenue and Broad Street.
"They saw two black guys in a green Bonneville with dark tints," Cherry said. The officers asked to see identification. His friend pulled out his military ID. "He's in the Army. He's about to ship off to Egypt."
The officers let them go with a warning that the tints on the windows were too dark.
"You've got to do your best to just stay positive," he said.
Across the city, black men say they understand the need for police to search for the man who shot Cassidy. And they get it that with few clues available, a wide net must be cast, one that will catch a lot of innocent people who don't quite fit the description: a limping, 5-foot-11, heavyset black man with a spiderweb tattoo on the left hand.
"I feel bad because he was somebody's father. A provider. And he's gone," Anthony Williams said of the slain officer. "It ain't right."
A thin, 41-year-old carpenter, Williams was hanging out yesterday afternoon on his stoop, a few blocks south of Albert Einstein Medical Center, where Cassidy was taken after being mortally wounded. He was joined by two friends, Robert Jackson and Gregory Tucker. The three men said that none of them had been stopped in the current manhunt, but that they all have felt harassed by police in the past.
"They run up on you for any reason," Williams said.
"I'm targeted everyday, but I don't worry about it," Jackson said.
