Main image: the baseball field at 71st Street in Riverside Park. Inset: Coach Youman Wilder
Last summer, a youth baseball coach spent half an hour on the phone with us describing what he said happened when six armed men in tactical gear walked up to his players near the batting cages in Riverside Park and started asking them where they were from and where their parents were from. He was blunt, funny, and completely unbothered about putting his name to the whole thing.
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Youman Wilder died on July 20 at his home in Harlem. He was 63. His brother, Derrick Wilder, said the cause was a heart attack, according to an obituary the New York Times published on Aug. 14.Wilder became a national story last July after Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal emailed constituents about an ICE sighting on the Upper West Side, which is how we first learned about the encounter. A week later, Wilder walked us through his account himself.
He’d just wrapped a hitting practice near West 71st Street and was shooting baskets at the courts nearby, he told us, when he noticed six people approaching his players, four of them masked. “The suit, the camouflage, the ICE, the gun, the taser,” is how he described what they were wearing. He moved the boys to the back of a batting cage, planted himself at the entrance, and told the agents his players would be invoking their Fifth and Fourth Amendment rights. He said he was accused of obstruction and threatened with handcuffs before the agents walked off. He didn’t think they’d come to arrest anyone. He thought they’d come to be seen.
Wilder told us the encounter happened on June 26, while the Times reported the date as July 3. No video of it ever surfaced, and ICE told news outlets at the time that his account was false and that the agency had not carried out any recent enforcement activity near Riverside Park. When he tried to file a report, he said the 30th Precinct told him to take it up with Homeland Security instead.
Speaking to the Times after his death, Rosenthal said she believed him, and that residents of Lincoln Towers and a group of alarmed nannies had reported seeing what looked like ICE agents in the area around the same stretch of days. Representative Adriano Espaillat, who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said he believed the account too, calling Wilder “somewhat of a father figure” to the players and saying the episode left some kids from immigrant families reluctant to sign up for youth leagues at all.
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The cost was visible almost immediately. When we spoke with Wilder on July 14, 2025, he told us exactly one player had come back to practice in Riverside Park since the encounter. He said the kids weren’t frightened for themselves. They were frightened for their parents, their grandparents, their cousins.Wilder grew up in Brooklyn, born there in June 1963, and played baseball at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York alongside Shawon Dunston, the shortstop the Cubs took first overall in the 1982 draft. He also sang, professionally, in gospel, jazz and R&B, with a run at the Apollo Theater and tours through North America and Europe. He earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from New England College in 2023 and a master’s in the same field from Grand Canyon University in early 2025, which is where the constitutional argument he made in the park came from.
In 2004 he founded the Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy, a nonprofit aimed at helping Black and Latino players land college scholarships and build careers in and around the game. He never charged families for it. Nearly 100 alumni are profiled on its website. His brother Derrick is his only immediate survivor.
The last thing he said to us, near the end of that call, has held up well.
“I’ve been very fortunate in my life to get educated and know about the law. People like me will be fine,” Wilder said. “It’s the others I’m worried about.”
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