Brawley Mother Defies Court, Enters Church : Takes Sanctuary in Queens to Avoid Testifying on Daughter’s Claim She Was Raped by Whites

NEW YORK —  After more than six months of protests, legal problems, heated political rhetoric and almost constant official frustration, the case of Tawana Brawley took another bizarre turn Wednesday when the teen-ager’s mother defied a criminal contempt of court order and took up residence in a church to avoid testifying about her daughter’s claim that she was raped by six white men.

Scores of reporters crowded the narrow street in front of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in a working class neighborhood of Queens, while puzzled residents and employees of nearby factories surveyed the traffic-stopping scene.

Police in New York City were equally puzzled, and were initially reluctant to arrest Glenda Brawley, who spent her time in the church’s study watching television and talking with her legal advisers. The advisers have repeatedly insisted that there is a racially motivated cover-up and that the criminal justice system in New York state is unfair to blacks--a charge labeled “absurd” Wednesday by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

Ordered to Jail

On Monday, a judge in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., had ordered Glenda Brawley to serve 30 days in jail and pay a $250 fine for defying the grand jury’s subpoena to tell what she knows about her 16-year-old daughter’s alleged kidnaping and rape by a group of white men.

But on Wednesday, the local sheriff in Dutchess County, where Brawley was found last November with racial epithets written on her body, said he was in no hurry to rush to Manhattan and try to arrest Glenda Brawley in front of a cluster of cameras and a thicket of microphones.

“It’s a low priority,” said the sheriff, Fred Scoralick.

Police said that there was no law barring officers from executing an arrest warrant in a church. But throughout the day, there was no sign of police activity near the church.

New York state Atty. Gen. Robert Abrams, who was appointed a special prosecutor in the Brawley matter by Cuomo, said that Brawley would be arrested but declined to say when.

Found in Contempt

After state Supreme Court Justice Angelo J. Ingrassia found Glenda Brawley in criminal contempt Monday, Abrams asked sheriffs to delay arresting her until Wednesday, when the grand jury was again scheduled to meet. But later, when he learned of her plans to enter a church, he asked the sheriffs to take her into custody.

However, Brawley and her lawyers eluded sheriff’s deputies and traveled to New York City, where they entered a church presided over by a sympathizer, the Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell.

The standoff Wednesday was underscored by statements from the Brawley family’s lawyers and from the family’s adviser, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a New York City preacher without a pulpit.

Standing in front of the modern steel and glass church where Brawley had sought sanctuary, he issued a challenge to Abrams, saying: “There’s nothing legally stopping you from coming in here. So show the nation the moral beast you are and come through these doors and arrest her.”

“She would rather be arrested in a house of God rather than participate in a stacked grand jury. . . . We are here because we feel we have no alternative,” Sharpton said. “The attorney general has conducted an investigation intended to make a liar out of the victim. If they come into the church then we will submit to an arrest and all of us will go. The next move is theirs.”