Marcus Santos
It won't get back the years lost in prison, but it just may buy some piece of mind.
The father of Raymond Santana, one of the exonerated Central Park Five, said the $40 million settlement with the city 'should have been more.'
'There were hard days and people were against them,' the relieved dad, who is also named Raymond Santana, said Friday.
He said his son and the other four were vilified by the city, the NYPD and the media - and so were their families.
'When this s--- blew up, they'd treat me bad at the job,' the elder Santana said. 'In the cafeteria, they wouldn't let me sit. They were negative, they always believed what the news said.'
'I know it was bad for me,' he added. 'It was worse for them. My son lost his youth. He didn't get to be a young man.'
Now, Raymond Santana Sr. said, he's relieved.
'Thank God it's over,' he said. 'Forget about the money. I'm just happy to take it out of my mind. It's the beginning of life again, everything's over, forget about all the pain.'
The elder Santana spoke out a day after word leaked out that the quintet, who were wrongly convicted 24 years ago for raping a jogger in Central Park, had reached an agreement with the city.
Now middle-aged men, they were teenagers when they were arrested in 1989 and convicted two years later for the brutal attack on 28-year-old Trisha Meili - a case that stoked a firestorm of outrage and racism in a city then racked by crime.
So far neither the younger Santana nor the others - Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Kharey Wise and Antron McCray - have said anything about the settlement.
Sarah Burns, who chronicled their ordeal in her book 'The Central Park Five,' said they were laying low.
'I don't know about their plans, but they all talked about wanting closure and that's a good thing,' she said. 'Hopefully now they can move on with their lives.'
Asked which of the five had it hardest, Burns said Wise's 'experience stands out.'
'He was 16 and unlike the others, he was in adult facilities from the beginning,' she said. 'He had a longer sentence than the others. He served almost twice as much time under even more difficult circumstances. He was the most vulnerable. I can't even imagine what he went through.'
Wise served nearly 13 years. The others each served about seven years in prison.
Their convictions were vacated after career criminal Matias Reyes confessed to the brutal rape and his claim was backed up by DNA evidence.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Robert Kurtz and Jane Haher, two doctors who treated Meili, said there was physical evidence like hand prints on the jogger's thighs that suggest Reyes may not have been the only attacker.
Burns, whose book became the basis of the film 'Central Park Five' by her dad, famed documentary maker Ken Burns, said she spoke to Kurtz when she did her research.
'I'm sure he believes that,' Burns said of Kurtz. 'It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't have any reason to disbelieve what Reyes described in detail.'
Meili, who was bashed in the head with a rock during the attack and suffers from amnesia as a result, has said she has no memory of the rape.
Santana and the others sued the city following their exonerations in 2002, claiming they had been railroaded into making incriminating statements.
The Bloomberg administration fought to get the lawsuits dismissed, arguing that the city had acted with probable cause.
Mayor de Blasio, however, campaigned on a promise to settle the case.
csiemaszko@nydailynews.com
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