Cropsey

"What if your Urban Legends were real?"






We all have heard them as kids. The stories you tell about the crazy man down the street. The man who killed the family while camping. The man who took those kids and was never seen again. What if there was a reality behind your tales. Well on Staten Island it was.

Copsey is a documentary about the missing children from Staten Island. In the 80's there were a bunch of handicapped kids who disappeared. The film is made by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman. They grew up there and are familiar with the tales. A man named Andre Rand was the main suspect. Rand was a custodian at a large mental hospital called Willowbrook. It was a very large place that was severely understaffed, almost 50 kids to one staff member, and seemed more like Hell than a hospital. We see videos of naked kids running around, balled up in a corners in terrible, unimaginigable conditions. After a expose by Geraldo the state shut it down. Some of the kids were transferred to other places and some were left to fend for themselves. They made their home there and in the tunnels below the hospital. A city of it's own below that very large hospital.

This seems to be where the problems begin. The place became a place where kids would on a dare to scare others kids. The place kids go to on the weekends to graffiti and break stuff or more unmentionable deeds.
The urban legends began to pop up about a man named Cropsey who lived in the abandoned hospital and in it's tunnels below. It was all good fun until the first little girl, Jennifer, disappeared.

A very large manhunt began and it seemed that everyone began to look. Later a body was found in a shallow grave and the hunt for the killer really began. It the film you find out that the main suspect was Andre Rand who was around all the kids shortly before they went missing, but there was never really a lot of evidence to fully convict him.

The documentary is full of videos, interviews of Police officers, lawyers, locals and family members. Some of the videos are pretty amazing and it makes you wonder why they have found so little with so much. After watching this I feel that this film could have easily gone on for another hour or two. The scenes where they go into the tunnels below the hospital and the old photos of the original search party's were great. They gave me the creeps. I was very young when this took place so I was not to familiar with it, but I was glad that I was able to learn about it and will be interested to see if anymore evidence/bodies turn up in the next 20 years before Rand is up for parole in 2036.

6.5 out of 10